Understanding Newcomers

With leadership support from the National Endowment for the Arts, OPERA America embarked this year on a multimodal, national research study into the record levels of first-time ticket buyers reported by opera companies since the pandemic: What brought these opera- curious over the past four years? How was their experience? What would bring them back?

The research was conducted by Slover Linett at NORC, a premier cultural research firm based at the University of Chicago. Over the summer, the survey was distributed by 36 opera companies of varying sizes, formats, and geographies to 190,000 operagoers who had attended any virtual or in-person event between 2020 and 2024. It received 10,000 responses, 30% of which were new-to-file.

Select takeaways suggest that new-to-file audiences:

• Want to check something new off their bucket list.
• Are interested in the opera “experience.”
• Are more likely to be drawn to the inherited repertoire.
• Have had some introduction to opera through digital media.
• Have a largely positive experience.
• Want to know more about opera.
• Are concerned about ticket prices.
• Are younger, more diverse, and more likely to have children.

Latest Ticket Data

In the last issue of Across the Board, OPERA America reported on a survey of its Professional Company Members to understand how ticket sales in fall 2023 compared to the same period in fall 2019, before the pandemic. The main takeaway was that most companies had sold the same percent of their available seats, but with the average number of productions and performances down, the volume of tickets sold was down by a quarter.

A new follow-up survey of the months of January to December — comparing 2024 to 2019 — shows some slow progress. While capacities remain steady, the number of productions and performances has regained some lost ground, resulting in a smaller differential in the number of tickets sold: from 25% below pre-pandemic levels to now only 15% below, on average.

This article was published in the Fall/Winter 2024 issue of Across the Board, a publication of OPERA America for opera company trustees.