The Intermittent Audience: What We Learned About Occasional Broadway Buyers

Earlier this week, in partnership with Ticketmaster, we hosted a conversation about one of the most interesting segments in live entertainment: the intermittent audience. These are theatergoers who genuinely enjoy Broadway, buy tickets, and still only show up once or twice a year. Understanding why that is, and what it would take to change it, turns out to be (perhaps predictably) a bit of a challenge.

Here is what we found.

Broadway has strong cultural currency as a special-occasion destination, and that is actually an asset worth building on. The data suggests there is room to expand what counts as an occasion, rather than waiting for audiences to arrive at the theater when the circumstances are already perfect. People who already associate Broadway with meaningful moments are not hard to convince. They just need more reasons to decide that this moment qualifies.

Among the groups most open to attending Broadway more frequently, younger audiences stand out. So that’s good news: the appetite is there. What is missing is messaging built for them specifically, rather than messaging that assumes they will find their way in through the same channels as everyone else. This is a solvable problem, and it is worth treating it as one.

Special occasions create natural motivation to attend, but that motivation does not always translate into a purchase. Infrequent theatergoers often hit a wall when it comes to actually navigating the process: what to see, whether the price they found is reasonable, how far in advance they need to plan. The research points to awareness and information gaps that lead people to effectively price and plan themselves out of Broadway, not because Broadway is actually inaccessible to them, but because they do not have enough confidence in their own ability to navigate it. That is a gap that better communication can close.

Awareness of Broadway Week is genuinely high, which is a meaningful win, and a real testament to the reach the program has built. The opportunity ahead is helping that awareness translate into a clearer understanding of what Broadway Week actually offers, how it works, and who it’s for. The research suggests intermittent audiences may not yet be the primary buyers the program is reaching, which opens up a question worth exploring together: are there ways we could sharpen the positioning and messaging so it more directly activates the people most likely to benefit?

The intermittent audience is not a Broadway-specific phenomenon. Every live experience brand has a version of this group. The throughline in this research is that occasional buyers are not indifferent. They are interested, sometimes quite interested, and the barriers between that interest and a purchase are often informational and navigational rather than attitudinal. The first place to start is in the communication.

We will keep pulling on this thread. If you were at the livestream and want to keep the conversation going, we would like to hear what resonated.