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Proximity and Performing Arts Attendance
What Leads Audiences to go the Extra Mile?
This brief looks at whether someone's distance from a performing arts venue has an impact on whether they will attend live events.
October 2025
Table of Contents
Document
- Author(s)
- Francie Ostrower, Ph.D. and C. Nathan Marti, Ph.D.
- Publisher(s)
- The University of Texas at Austin
Page Count
6 pages
Summary
How we did this
The research team conducted three major data collection efforts between 2015 and 2022 from 25 performing arts organizations. These efforts included: 1) Conducting 301 interviews with arts leaders and staff; 2) Compiling data from organizational ticket-bases for a subset of 15 organizations; and 3) Collecting and analyzing data for those 15 organizations from online audience surveys in 2015 and 2019.
Does an audience’s distance from a performing arts venue affect whether or not they will attend a live event? And if distance is a factor, can organizations do anything to entice audiences from further away?
This brief dives into those questions. It finds that yes, attendance is lower for audiences further from a venue. But factors like the size of an organization and popularity of a given production can break the distance barrier and attract audiences from further away.
Traditionally, studies focused on arts attendance have concentrated on individuals’ social demographics. This brief, by Francie Ostrower, Ph.D. and C. Nathan Marti, Ph.D., seeks to counterbalance that work by better understanding if an audience’s distance from a performing arts venue has an impact on whether or not they will attend live events, and offers insights on what might encourage potential attendees to travel from further away.
“[This organization] is not interested in being a theater for a small subset of people who live in a 20-mile geographic, or...five-mile geographic zone...To remain relevant and continue to exist as an art form, it needs to speak to the population.”
— Organization leader
Key Takeaways
- Audience members were more willing to travel to see productions by larger organizations than smaller ones.
- Programming matters. Audience members will travel longer distances to an arts venue depending on how appealing the programming is.
- While an organization's size and production popularity matters, an organization’s discipline and the demographics of the surrounding neighborhood population didn’t impact how far people were willing to travel to attend.
Visualizations
What We Don't Know
- All the organizations in this study had over $1 million in operating expenses and were located in cities. There may be important differences to examine among organizations in urban, rural, and suburban areas, and findings in this brief may not apply to smaller-sized organizations.
- Things such as an organization’s marketing budget and diversity of programming may have additional implications on how far audiences are willing to travel to attend performances.
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