Encouraging more - and different - people to attend the arts remains a vital issue for the cultural sector. The question of who consumes culture, and why, is key to our understanding of the arts. This book examines the relationship of audience development to cultural policy and offers a ground-breaking perspective on how the practice of audience development is connected to ideas of democratic access to culture. Providing a detailed overview of arts marketing, audience development and cultural democracy, the book argues that the work of audience development has been profoundly misunderstood by the field of arts management. Drawing from a rich range of interviews with key individuals in the audience development field, the book argues for a re-conceptualisation of audience development as an ideological function of cultural policy. Of importance for students, academics and researchers working in arts management and cultural policy, the book is also vital reading for anyone working in the arts, cultural and heritage sectors with an interest in understanding how our relationship with the audience has been constructed.

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.

Encouraging more - and different - people to attend the arts remains a vital issue for the cultural sector. The question of who consumes culture, and why, is key to our understanding of the arts. This book examines the relationship of audience development to cultural policy and offers a ground-breaking perspective on how the practice of audience development is connected to ideas of democratic access to culture. Providing a detailed overview of arts marketing, audience development and cultural democracy, the book argues that the work of audience development has been profoundly misunderstood by the field of arts management. Drawing from a rich range of interviews with key individuals in the audience development field, the book argues for a re-conceptualisation of audience development as an ideological function of cultural policy. Of importance for students, academics and researchers working in arts management and cultural policy, the book is also vital reading for anyone working in the arts, cultural and heritage sectors with an interest in understanding how our relationship with the audience has been constructed.