This book presents a wide range of new audience studies research in the performing arts to provide a diversity of perspectives from scholarship, policy, management and practice. It explores the insights different methodologies, carried out with different kinds of audiences, can contribute both to our immediate understanding of audiences and to the future development of audience research. The book showcases research across the myriad fields that contribute to audience scholarship, highlighting the ability of audience research to engage thinkers and practitioners, from across often falsely divided art forms and academic fields. Together in one volume, these different methodologies explore the potential complementarity of evolving approaches to audience research and provide an in-depth opportunity for investigating innovative methods. Focusing on the need to understand audiences in a deeper and richer way, this volume offers a crucible of thinking and re-thinking about how society understands the impact of arts and culture on audiences. Audience Data and Research: Perspectives from Cultural Policy, Arts Management and Practice serves as a catalyst to stimulate new critical debate on the potential of empirical audience research to provide fresh insights into questions of audience enrichment and cultural value. It will be a key resource for scholars and researchers of audience studies, media and cultural studies, performance arts research, arts management, and cultural policy. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Trends.

1) This is the first handbook of its kind in Audience studies. 2) The final section, Part 4, consists of shorter chapters and is orientated not thematically but around a series of keywords. This will enable greater diversity of voice (including of artists and audiences) and space for the playful, the unexpected, the sideways view.

"The Audience Experience" identifies a momentous change in what it means to be part of an audience for a live arts performance. Together, new communication technologies and new kinds of audiences and audience research have transformed the expectations of performance, and "The Audience Experience" explores key trends in the contemporary presentation of performing arts for audiences, among them convergence marketing and cocreation, children and young people as audiences, and the screening of live performance. The book also presents case studies of audience engagement and methodology, reviewing both conventional and innovative ways of collecting and using audience feedback data. Directed to performing arts companies, sponsors, stakeholders, and scholars, this collection of essays moves beyond the conventional arts marketing paradigm to build new knowledge about how audiences encounter, value and experience quality in the performing arts.