As regular readers of this blog know, I’ve been posting a lot about the age of the classical music audience. The current myth is that this audience has always been as old as it is now, but all the data I’ve found says the opposite — the classical audience has been getting older at least since 1937, when the earliest data I’ve found was collected. See my post on audience age for more details.
And now — thanks to a tip from a marketing director I know — I’ve found more data, giving even more support from my view. It’s in a very good book on audience development, Waiting in the Wings: A Larger Audience for the Arts and How to Develop It, published in 1992 by Bradley G. Morison, Julie Gordon Dalgleish:
In 1955, in one of the earliest such projects on record, the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (now the Minnesota Orchestra) retained a market research firm to conduct a survey of audiences. Among other findings, the research showed that the median age of the audience was about 33 years.
A comparable study was done in 1985, and the median age had increased to about 48 years.
Four years later, a 1989 survey showed the median age at nearly 51 years.
In 34 years, the median age of the audience had increased by nearly 18 years while the median age of the total population inn the United States rose only about 3 years. It appears very likely that many in the current audience are the same people, grown up.
Note that last sentence. I’m saying the same thing now. Morison and Dalgleish said it in 1992. And note their tentative conclusion:
If [everything I’ve just quoted is true], those “retiring” from the audience are not being replaced by an equivalent number from the younger generations, and it would appear that the proportion of Yeses [people ready to say “yes” when an orchestra asks them to buy concert tickets] among the young is substantially smaller than it was several decades back. Could it be that the Yeses are a vanishing breed?
Again, they said that in 1992! But their book also has data, from the American Symphony Orchestra League, showing attendance at orchestra concerts peaking in the mid-1980s, and declining after that. The League’s current data shows a decline that began in the mid-’90s. And I’ve seen private figures showing a decline — for the largest orchestras — beginning in 1990. But did it start even earlier?
And about the proportion of Yeses among the young: The National Endowment for the Arts found that the percentage of people under 30 at classical concerts dropped in half between 1982 and 1997. So Morison and Dalgleish seem to be on track with this data, too.
Aaah… but life expectancy was not the same in 1937 or 1955 as it is now. Isn’t fifty the “new thirty” etc. etc.? People aged and matured much faster then. We need to put these things in context.
You might want to look at the work of Dr. Paul DiMaggio at Princeton University (social scientist)who has been collecting such data. In fact he has a data base which he has been accumulating since the 1970’s.
In the research I’ve done — mostly for the Indianapolis Symphony, where I was marketing director 1990-94 — the “hinge age” for participation appeared to be ages 38-42. It was at that age that, our research suggested, people began increasing their participation (which we defined as attending 3 or more times per year). 1987 was the year that the peak of the large Baby Boomer cohort reached that age. The Boomers were much larger in total numbers than any previous generation, and had a much higher percentage of the college educated, managerial/professional classes that comprise the majority of concert attenders (with a huge increase in college educated working women). That the TOTAL numbers only began to show decline in the mid-90s appears to be a result of the enormous size of this population. The rising total audience numbers masked the large decline in penetration.
The real measure will be in the mid-2010 decade, when the children of these people begin reaching that 38-to-42 age.
Still, and as always, the greatest predictor of symphony attendance is prior musical education/exposure (where, oh where, is THAT mailing list?). So that would place the real crisis back in the early-to-mid 1960s, when schools began cutting arts education programs (despite the boom in building PACs, and the emergence of the NEA and state arts agencies).
Interesting that we would look to the average age of the total population rather than the average age of the profiled arts attendee, since we know that the more affluent you are the longer you live. It would also be fascinating to look at the average age of retirement in this country to see what impact that would have on the average age of an audience member. Finally, what is the average age at which an “empty-nester” actually has an empty nest these days? With upper class and affluent women waiting longer to have children does this impact the age at which their nest actually empties? The question really becomes: has the age of the traditional arts-attendee increased due to endogenous or exogenous factors? Do I smell some tasty regression analysis?
And you’ve taken into account the “Baby Boom” factor? That is, isn’t it still true that there are lots more of us than any other group? Doesn’t it seem logical that there would be more anywhere? Not just in classical music audiences? Have you checked the stats for, say, pro sports?
Thanks for all this, Greg,
It appears we’ve finally moved from “Is the audience aging?” to “Why is the audience aging?” I’d call that progress.