Pricing isn’t just a marketing tactic, a programming decision, or a box office task. It’s one of the most consequential leadership decisions you’ll make. The way you set, communicate, and adapt your prices impacts your revenue, audience trust, and long-term resilience.
Yet too often, pricing gets set in stone by tradition or shaped by fear rather than strategy. Arts leaders and boards don’t need to build pricing tables in ticketing system, but they do need to ask sharper questions of their teams.
Here are ten to start with:
If your team can’t articulate a strategy, chances are you don’t have one, or it’s not clear enough.
A pricing strategy goes beyond “what tickets cost.” It should connect pricing to your organization’s purpose, reflect the true cost of doing business, and respond to actual demand for a performance, program or season of work.
If your expenses have risen by 25% but ticket prices have stayed flat (when adjusted for inflation), you’re falling behind. Every dollar/pound/euro not earned through ticket sales must be found elsewhere.
Relying on philanthropy to plug growing revenue gaps isn’t a sustainable business model, it’s a survival mode. It places unnecessary strain on fundraising teams, limits growth, and puts long-term financial stability at risk.
Success isn’t always about a sellout. Some performances are designed to deepen loyalty with subscribers, donors, or multi-buyers; others are about engaging a niche community or testing new work. Leaders need to ask whether the goal is volume, revenue, or relationship, and measure success accordingly.
If cheap tickets are going unsold, lowering prices further won’t solve the problem. Awareness and value perception might.
If awareness is low, no price will move the needle. If audiences don’t perceive the value of the experience, they won’t engage even at a discount. The question isn’t “how cheap can we go?” but “how are we building desire and signaling value so that all seats feel worth buying?”
The most resilient organizations treat pricing as a living strategy, testing, iterating, and learning from the data week by week.
Caps and discounts can feel like easy fixes; holding ticket prices below a certain threshold, or leaning on “standard” offers to attract audiences. But without data, these decisions often protect fear rather than strategy. Leaders should be asking: What revenue are we leaving on the table? Are these discounts actually building loyalty, or are they training audiences to wait for a deal? Every cap or freeze comes with an opportunity cost, and leadership must understand what it is.
Demand shows up in real audience behavior. You can see it in how quickly tickets move once they go on sale, which sections or price bands sell out first, how early loyal segments like subscribers and multi-buyers book, and where sales flatten. These signals are the best indicators of value perception in real time.
The role of leadership isn’t to parse every sales report, but to make sure the right data is being tracked and surfaced. Metrics like sales velocity, conversion rates, and seat absorption at each price tier give you a picture of demand that’s clearer than instinct or “gut feel.”
Remember: Demand drives price, not the other way around.
Accessibility and revenue are not in conflict; they can strengthen one another when leaders think strategically. By optimizing revenue where demand is strongest, you create the margin to subsidize access opportunities elsewhere. This ensures that affordability is intentional, not accidental.
It’s also worth noting that first-time buyers often pay higher average ticket prices than loyal audiences. That means the narrative of “cheap tickets for new audiences” isn’t always true, and leaders should be asking whether their pricing strategies are genuinely expanding reach, or unintentionally undervaluing demand.
This isn’t just a question for your team; it’s a question for you. If pricing decisions stay frozen in fear or habit, what risks are you accepting for your organization?
If you delay aligning pricing with demand and rising costs, where will the shortfall show up, and who will have to fill it? Every choice not to act has consequences: Will the gap show up in donor asks, in budget cuts, in programs you can no longer afford to deliver?
As leaders, we can’t outsource this accountability. Asking yourself what happens if you don’t act makes pricing a matter of leadership courage; not just operational detail.