Arts pricing strategies and the gap between intent and impact

Discounts and concessions are often discussed as if they belong in the same bucket. They don’t.

Discounts are there to drive sales. Concessions exist to remove barriers. At least, that’s the theory.

But when we looked at how organisations in Northern Ireland actually apply discounts and concessions, the lines were far more blurred. In practice, concessions often end up doing the job for which discounts are intended, by keeping prices attractive, boosting volume and making audiences feel like they’re getting a deal.

Simply put: if £25 is too expensive for a person, how did we come to think £20 counts as “accessible”?

As a research company for the arts and culture sector in Northern Ireland, thrive has spent two decades working with cultural organisations which are trying to balance rising costs with their desire to be open to everyone. Ideally, every organisation would have a pricing strategy that uses discounts when it wants to increase sales, and concessions when it wants to make sure someone can afford to attend.

But when we asked the sector how they set those prices for our latest report Is the Price Right?: Pricing In The Arts, we discovered a lot of organisations were trying to do both at once. They prioritise affordability in the hope it boosts volume, and that’s where the confusion creeps in. Making something cheaper doesn’t automatically remove a barrier, and it certainly doesn’t remove it for everyone.

The need for concessions versus practical support

Firstly, we wanted to understand why organisations use concessions in the first place. Concessions are supposed to remove barriers for people who genuinely need financial support to attend. So, we asked organisations across a range of art forms what concessions they offer, and for whom they are designed.

Our findings were mixed.

More than half of organisations offering concessions make them available to students, older audiences or carers. But less than half offer concessions to disabled audiences, even though disabled audiences are more affected by the cost-of-living crisis, and more likely to say they’re attending fewer and spending less on cultural experiences. In fact, more organisations offer a concession price to carers than to disabled audiences themselves.

At the same time, our research showed not all disabled audiences require a concession. They attend frequently, many engaging six or more times a year, and a sizeable proportion (24%) say the cost of living isn’t affecting their cultural behaviour. Some disabled audience members might find practical support more valuable than £5 subtracted from the ticket price: clarity on interval times, for instance, a seat near the door, or reassurance about the logistics.

Blurring purpose

We also know the cost of living is hitting LGBTQI+ audiences and people earning below the median wage disproportionately hard. As it stands, however, barely any organisations offer concessions for either group. Our report shows while concessions can be a tool for removing financial barriers, they aren’t always aligned with the audiences most in need of support.

A much more common concession type is for audience members aged over 65, offered by 56% of organisations. This is despite older audiences being the age group least impacted by the cost-of-living crisis. One likely reason for this concession is that the people who already attend tend to be in this age bracket, and organisations therefore hope to maximise attendance from this group. In these circumstances, concession ends up functioning more like a retention tool than one that promotes access.

Younger audiences sit at the opposite end of the spectrum. Many organisations worry about the lack of young attendees, so the most popular concession of all is aimed at students. But once again concessions are not implemented for their intended purpose; used in this instance as a sales incentive, rather than a barrier-removal tool.

As the above examples demonstrate, arts organisations can end up using the same mechanism, a concession, to reach two entirely different types of audience, totally unalike in their levels of engagement. That is where the purpose blurs. Concessions are meant to be about access, not volume.

It is important to be aware price is only ever one barrier to engagement. For many people, the question of cost comes after practical challenges like childcare, shift patterns, timing or simply getting home safely. Unfortunately, a small price reduction won’t fix any of these other concerns.

So what would make a difference? Tracking and considering concessions more deliberately, for a start: who uses them, whether they are reaching the intended groups, and most fundamentally, are they doing the job they’re meant to do. The more clearly concessions are connected to audience targets and real-world need, the more effective they will be.

All of this leaves us with a bigger question. If concessions often do the job of discounts, then how are we using discounts themselves? Are they helping us reach the audiences we think they are?

To answer that, our research investigated how organisations across the sector use discounts as part of their pricing strategy, and what they’re actually trying to achieve with them.

What discounts are really doing for the arts

Across the sector, a few approaches dominate. Most organisations use group discounts, early bird pricing or cheaper tickets for specific audiences. Dynamic pricing shows up alongside early bird schemes, with prices starting lower and rising as demand grows, claiming to ‘prioritise volume and make the arts genuinely affordable’. Multi-buy and buy-one-get-one-free offers also materialise, while members’ discounts, pay-what-you-want, instalments, and pay-it-forward schemes are far less common. Interestingly, some 17% of organisations don’t use discounts at all.

When we asked why discounts were used, the answers were straightforward: to generate sales, bring in bookings earlier, encourage people to come in groups, and create momentum around an event.

Discounts, at their core, are sales tools. They help organisations react to demand, and they matter even more now that audience booking patterns have shifted. People are behaving differently after Covid, booking later and weighing up costs more carefully. That means successful discount schemes need regular attention and interrogation.

How did discounts blur with concessions? When discounts are used to make events “more affordable”, they start doing the job concessions ought to do. And when concessions are used to attract people who don’t usually attend, they start acting like discounts. When both tools try to do both jobs, pricing strategies lose clarity. Ultimately, the sector wants to do two things at once: to keep prices accessible for those who need support, and keep audiences coming through the doors. These two goals can co-exist. But concessions and discounts are designed for different purposes. Recognising when they overlap (and when they shouldn’t) is key to making pricing work.