Arts revenue and the fallacy of the “savior demographic” (younger audiences)

Mae Mai: The received wisdom from the Chicken Little Think Tank (the “Classical Music is failing” camp) that with declining revenues from ticket sales (sometimes referred to as “performance income” or more erroneously, “earned income”) as a proportion of total revenue for classical music organizations and the [purportedly] declining audience (as well as the increasing median age of the audience) there’s this notion that the industry must get a bigger [and younger] audience to offset the performance income gap (the gap between performance revenue and operating costs).