The Tastes and Preferences Survey examines patrons’ tastes and preferences within your organization’s specific discipline(s).

National Survey of Dance Audiences' Tastes and Preferences

For 2025, we will focus on tastes and preferences in dance. The survey will provide dance presenters and dance companies with information about their audience’s preferences for styles of dance, their interest in seeing work by companies they know and they don’t know, and their interest in alternative formats. We hope to contribute to the national dialog about the viability of dance touring.

On-Demand Theatre and Classical Music Versions

In 2024, this survey focused on classical music preferences, and painted a picture of growing diversity in music preferences and appetite for alternative formats. This survey is available on-demand.

In 2024, we also piloted a version of the survey for theatres that delved deeply into knowledge of playwrights, what pushes people out of their comfort zones, and interest in a range of theatrical forms, formats, etc. This survey is available on-demand.

More About the Survey

Artistic and marketing team members are key stakeholders in this survey.

Depending on the discipline, the survey will cover these and other topics:

• Cultural interests (i.e., countries or regions of the world) and folk traditions

• Past involvement in the art form

• Interest in attending specific types of live programs within the discipline

• Interest in specific genres and subgenres within a discipline

• Drivers of purchase decision

• Satisfaction with your selection of program offerings

• Interest in adventurousness work

• Preferences for different presentation formats

• Interest in thematic programs (if applicable)

• Interest in immersive experiences (if applicable)

In the media and around boardroom tables, many assumptions are being made about the kinds of artistic work that audiences want, post-pandemic. In offering this suite of surveys we hope to replace unfounded assumptions with actual data. While we would never assert that arts organizations should acquiesce to audiences’ tastes, we do think that clarifying preferences for formats and types of artistic programs can be a valuable input to organizational thinking about programming (i.e., one of many inputs).

Level of customization: This is a highly discipline-specific protocol, only available for specific disciplines within the performing arts. Otherwise, no customization is involved, although several questions are optional.

To maximize cohort learning, participants in all cohorts must agree to share their results with other participating organizations through the WolfBrown dashboard. After the cohort concludes, aggregated results will be shared with the larger field through the Audience Outlook Monitor community.

Opportunity for Dance Service Organizations 

To broaden access, we’re offering a new way for dance service organizations to participate by hosting a group of small organizations as a single “hosted cohort.”

Here’s how it works:

• The host organization recruits 3 to 10 dance organizations in their region to participate as a group.

• The host organization registers for the survey at the standard fee based on the host organization’s annual budget.

• The host organization will decide what, if anything, to charge the participating organizations—it’s completely up to you.

• Together, the hosted cohort needs to send at least 3,000 total emails inviting co-operation with the survey, with no upper limit, to recent ticket buyers. (We’ll provide email language that explains possible list overlap to ticket buyers who might receive multiple emails.)

In return, all organizations participating in the hosted cohort will:

• Have their results included in aggregate in the national survey cohort’s dashboard

• Be able to view each participating organization’s own data, provided there are enough responses to display

• Be invited to all cohort learning sessions

• Gain access to the cohort’s private resource webpage

For more information about this survey, contact Alan Kline, Director of Audience Research Programs at WolfBrown at alan.kline@wolfbrown.com.