Background

Sound and Music held an open survey online for two months from November 2014 to January 2015. The purpose of this survey was to understand more about the state of audiences for the preceding 12 months from the point of view of those producing new music events. The survey was run in conjunction with the New Music Audience Development Network Meeting in January 2015.

This report details the findings of the survey. This report and the raw data can be found at:soundandmusic.org/ads2015

More information about Sound and Music’s Audience Development work can be found at: soundandmusic.org/audience-development

About the Respondents

The survey saw a total of 36 respondents taking part over the course of the two months. The respondents were diverse, producing from 1 – 52 events per year. Whilst there were a large number who produced events in London (23 respondents), there was a reasonable spread across the other regions and three respondents who had produced events online.

Region CountLondon 23North East 6North West 6Midlands 8South East 6South West 6Wales 3Scotland 1Northern Ireland 1International 7Online 3

We also inquired about the average audience size for each of our respondents.

Average audience size Count0 - 50 1550 - 100 9100 - 150 3150 - 200 3200 - 500 1

Promotional Tools

We asked respondents which tools they used to promote their events and then which of these tools they thought were the most successful at reaching audiences.

Facebook was the most utilised with almost all of the respondents, 97%, using this tool. There was a clear disparity between the usage of the tools and the perceived effectiveness. Whilst this was true for each tool in the question, the largest disparities were for older methods of promotion: print, press releases and listings sites.

Audience Growth

When it came to audience numbers over the past 12 months there was positive news with 39% of respondents seeing growth of some kind. However, the largest proportion of respondents (48%) saw numbers remain the same and 14% of respondents stated numbers declined with one respondent stating the audiences had declined considerably.

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

Grown considerably Grown a little The same Declined a little Declined considerably

Current Difficulties and Future Opportunities

Survey respondents were asked what they saw as the key difficulties facing them with regards to building audiences and what they saw to be the opportunities for this. Answers from the open questions were categorised to cluster similar answers together.

Difficulties (categorised)Number of

respondents citing this difficulty

Opportunity (categorised)Number of

respondents citing this

opportunityLack of resource/budget 44% Crossover with other artforms 14%Ability to reach audiences 29% Focusing on young audiences 3%Perceptions of new music 18% Online platforms 14%Location/Area 15% Networks/word of mouth 21%Venues 9% Changing perception of new

music17%

Events produced irregularly 3% Staff 3%New contexts 14%

Lack of resource/budget was the most common difficulty with near half of respondents citing this. The ability to reach audiences and audiences perceptions of new music were the two other difficulties that were cited most often. The chart below shows the words used by respondents with the larger words being the most commonly used words to describe the difficulties.

When asked about the opportunities for developing new music audiences the answers were distributed more evenly with fewer respondents citing the same answer. Networks and word of mouth, changing the way new music is perceived and changing the way new music is presented were the top three opportunities stated by respondents. The chart below shows the word usage from respondents describing the opportunities for building audiences.

Contact

e. marketing@soundandmusic.org fb. facebook.com/soundandmusic

tw. @soundandmusict. 020 7759 1800

Credits:Infographic created using Piktochart

Charts made using Infogr.am