One of the many great services of the Broadway League is the demographic survey they do of our audience.

It’s essential for any industry or business to find out who its customers are in order to . . .

1. Tailor our marketing dollars towards the people who are coming to make our advertising more efficient.
2. Find out who is NOT coming, so we can make concerted efforts to get them TO come.

The future of our industry and our art depends on the above, which is why these surveys are so important, and why I summarize them for you here.

Here are the top-level bullet points from this year’s demographic survey of the Broadway Audience:

• In the 2018–2019 season, Broadway shows welcomed 14.8 million admissions, an all-time high.
• Approximately 35% of those attendances were by people from the New York City metropolitan area.
• Sixty-five percent of admissions were made by tourists: 46% from the United States (but outside New York City and its suburbs) and 19% from other countries.
• This represents the highest number of attendances by foreign visitors in history— 2.8 million.
• Sixty-eight percent of the audiences were female.
• The average age of the Broadway theatregoer was 42.3 years old. This average has hovered between 40 and 45 years old for the past two decades.
• Along with the overall growth in attendance, the number of admissions by non-Caucasian theatregoers reached a record high of 3.8 million.
• Of theatregoers age 25 or older, 81% had completed college and 41% had earned a graduate degree.
• The average annual household income of the Broadway theatregoer was $261,000.
• The average number of attendances by the Broadway theatregoer was 4.4 in the past year. The group of devoted fans who attended 15 or more performances comprised only 5% of the audience, but accounted for 28% of all tickets (4.15 million admissions).
• Playgoers tended to be more frequent theatregoers than musical attendees. The typical straight-play attendee saw seven shows in the past year; the musical attendee, four.
• Respondents reported having paid an average of $145.60 per ticket.
• Fifty-nine percent of respondents said they purchased their tickets online.
• The average reported date of ticket purchase for a Broadway show was 47 days before the performance, four days more than the previous season.
• Google was the most common initial source theatregoers named when they were asked where they looked for information about Broadway shows. Ticketmaster and Broadway.com followed Google.
• Twenty-two percent said that they relied primarily on word-of-mouth from people they knew.
• Most theatregoers attended in pairs or small groups of family or friends.
• The vast majority of current theatregoers had some connection to theatregoing as a child.

Want your copy of the full report (which goes into MUCH more detail than the above?  Click here.)