What and how is our cultural participation?

     This first post about the section that has been called “Audiences, Marketing and Communication” can be a bit hard to understand at first,especially its intention, but I’ll try my best to make it easy. In order to focus on what we, as artists and cultural managers, want to know about our audiences, a perused research about how people participate in culture needs to be done. 

    Culture has obviously a quite big social and informal dimension, so some of its aspects are hard to measure. Nevertheless, the UNESCO Framework for Cultural Statistics includes both formal activities, such as performances or paid attendance, and informal ones, which are not linked to any monetary payment. Thus, it differentiates cultural “consumption”, in which money is involved, from cultural “participation”, which refers more to amateur or unpaid practices. Nevertheless, polls about cultural participation refer to both consumption and what has been defined as participation.

    I’ve taken the Survey of Cultural Habits and Practices in Spain as a reference for all of these, since it is one of the most complete polls I’ve seen on this topic. The newest one right now is 2021-2022, so good indicators can be taken into account though the effects of the COVID-19 crisis should be highlighted. What does it tell us?Well, this graphic portrays the main indicators of cultural participation, from which only performing arts and musical arts have been selected:


The orange bar shows us the situations in 2018-2019, while the brown one portrays 2021-2022. It can be observed that the general attendance is lower due to the health crisis, but the general attitudes are maintained. Cinema, Theater and contemporary music concerts are at the top, whilst Operetta and Opera have almost no attendance.


The orange bar shows us the situations in 2018-2019, while the brown one portrays 2021-2022. It can be observed that the general attendance is lower due to the health crisis, but the general attitudes are maintained. Cinema, Theater and contemporary music concerts are at the top, whilst Operetta and Opera have almost no attendance.



Survey of Cultural Habits And Practices In Spain 2021-2022, page 5.


    We should know our audience in order to reach it properly, so I’m going to show you the main reasons why this attendance is low. COVID related reasons were obviously a main reason then, so I have decided not to include them. I’m going to explain the different cases:

  • Music, opera, theater and dance: the main reasons rely on the lack of interest, chiefly related to Classical music concerts. Lack of time (economic related post at sight!!) and low supply around play an important role, too. Regarding theater, contemporary and musical theater are the ones which attract more people, whilst children and avant-garde are the least wanted.  
  • Contemporary music: here we can find a difference. Though the main reason is still lack of interest, it only involves the 23.1% of the ones polled, while in other disciplines it exceeds 60%. Low supply plays a more important role here, but it is still behind lack of time.
  • Cinema: lack of interest and time again, but the entrance fee plays an important role here.
    In all cases, the attendance grows within the education level. The higher it is, the more the individual is likely to attend cultural activities, but it also dwindles with age (from 15 years of age), so the older  the people are, the less likely are they to attend:


Survey of Cultural Habits And Practices In Spain 2021-2022, page 27.


    All this information definitely puts us in a difficult place. You may be asking yourself what can be done with all this data and numbers. Don’t worry! This is just a basic tool to understand the position of culture and to build a base to develop a wider understanding of the different types of audiences and their characteristics, topics that will be developed in future entries of this section. Although these results are from Spain, they can be used with no problem to understand the audiences from other countries.
    Pay attention to the words in bold! They are keys to what is going to be explained in other sections and future posts.



References and related links:


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