What if the financial pressures facing arts and culture aren't temporary? What if changing audience behavior isn't a problem to fix, but a sign that the models we've relied on need to change?

Empty seats, disappearing revenue, and pricing decisions that keep coming back to haunt you. Could your scale plan be working against you?

Everyone loves a deal. But when it comes to ticket pricing, is your latest discount encouraging the right behaviors, or giving away revenue you could have earned anyway?

TRG has been a big believer in, and early implementer of, dynamic pricing for many years. I recently came back to a familiar conversation in a webinar with DynamO Pricing and UK venue leaders: technology is moving faster than our deals.

Ask most arts organizations how a new patron arrives and you'll get a detailed answer. There is a campaign plan, a budget, a target and a dashboard that tracks progress every week.

The latest data from the Arts & Culture Benchmark points to a sector that has made real progress since the pandemic, but where some of the drivers of growth are beginning to soften.

What changes when patron loyalty stops belonging to one department?

Pricing a season is full of decisions: price points, seat maps, subscription discounts, access offers, on-sale dates.

Somewhere in your database is a person who did something small and easy to miss. They bought a ticket, came back a few months later, and bought another. Or they took out a membership and then, added a gift.

Most performing arts organizations run on roughly the same clock. Programming gets locked. The season gets announced in the new year. Renewals go out ahead of that. Single tickets go on sale in February or March, ideally. And somewhere in the six...