Win Old Audiences Back, or Invite New Audiences In?

Why we have to think more urgently about the long game

“Is that throwing good money after bad?”

Over the past couple of years working in marketing on Broadway, I’ve heard themes and variations of this question. Do you go after an audience that has left? Attempt to capture new audiences? Or do you capitalize and double down on the audience you have?

Naturally, we’d love for the answer to be all three. But let’s break down where audiences have actually gone. And let that teach us where we should focus our efforts. And I’d like to start with our NY Suburbanites.

The suburban audience cratered to under 13% last season, the lowest in thirty years (the Broadway League). It’s tempting to read that as people getting priced out, but the data indicates otherwise. Suburban theatergoers report the highest household income of any group in the building. When the League asked why people see fewer shows than they used to, the top answer wasn’t money (though this certainly could shift over the next couple of years). It was “not in NYC as often.” They lost the habit. They reorganized their lives closer to home, and Broadway fell out of the rotation.

So do we attempt to get them back? The marketing textbook screams yes. Winning back a lapsed customer runs about five times cheaper than acquiring a new one, and lapsed customers convert at 60 to 70%, against 5 to 20% for a cold prospect (Harvard Business Review, Bain). On paper, the suburbanite is the obvious buy: high income, knows the product, used to love it.

But here’s the hiccup: those numbers assume the want is still there and only the habit went dormant. Ping them, remind them, offer an occasion, they come back. But the suburbanite’s want didn’t lapse. Their behavior moved. During the pandemic, they built a life that doesn’t run through Midtown anymore, and reversing a life is a very different project than reactivating a customer. Some of them will come back for the right reason. Some of them are gone, and spending acquisition-sized money chasing the gone is how you light cash on fire while calling it strategy. The discipline is telling the two apart.

Which points to the other near-term answer: the domestic tourist. They’re already the biggest single piece of the audience, 42% last season, 6.2 million admissions, and a group that’s actually up from 5.6 million the year before. As international travel falls, domestic is rising. New York expects international visitors to drop to 12.3 million this year while domestic visitors climb to 52.4 million (NYC Tourism + Conventions). International is down 5.5% nationally and not projected to fully recover until 2029 (US Travel Association). The American who once would have flown to Europe is looking at a trip closer to home, and New York can be that trip. Anecdotally, I will say New Yorkers tend to care very much about New York, the industry perception, and what is visible to them every single day and sometimes fail to meaningfully broaden their strategy to the largest share of audience living in the rest of the country. (Which would be an excellent moment to again hype the value of school licensing shows semi-early in their runs, the value of a national tour for the Broadway production, treating social media as the entire digital extension of the brand of a show, and–yes–livestreams and proshots…but that’s not what this article is about. So let’s get back to it.)

Unfortunately, we have the same K-shaped caveat from earlier this week: domestic travel is splitting along income. The affluent still fly and still pay up. Everyone else is trading the long vacation for something shorter and closer. So the domestic tourist who backfills the loss may be more price-sensitive than the one Broadway built its prices around. But worth chasing, for sure.

So where does that leave us? The buyer changed how they buy (Part 4), and the institutions running Broadway mostly haven’t altered with it. Fans have already built smarter, more transparent, more flexible tools than the industry offers: the resale apps that cap prices (which, yes, I saw your comments lamenting that theatr doesn’t always work as intended and fair enough), the trackers, the workarounds. The behemoths of Broadway can keep treating opaque pricing and final-sale tickets as the natural order, or they can move toward what the buyer already expects: pricing you can read, tickets you can move, a purchase that respects a (2026) real life. If they don’t, the small disruptors meeting that demand will keep eating the trust, one fee-free transaction at a time.

But reactivation and tourism are both, in the end, fights over people who already know Broadway exists. The most hopeful number in the entire report is about the people who are just arriving.

Firstly, Broadway audiences continue to get younger. The average age dropped again, to 41, down from 44 just three years ago. Our average Broadway attendee is solidly millennial.

Then, notably, last season was the most diverse audience in Broadway’s recorded history. BIPOC theatergoers hit 34%, 4.9 million admissions, the most ever counted in 30 years of Broadway audience data (the League). Asian theatergoers and Latiné theatergoers both reached new highs. Even so, latiné people make up about 19% of the country but only 9% of the Broadway audience. Black Americans are 12% of the country and about 5% of the audience. Two of the largest groups in America attend at roughly half the rate their share of the population would predict. That’s the opportunity: audiences show up when they’re invited and when they see themselves and their stories on the stage. Three things are true at once, and they don’t compete. Casting and programming more kinds of people is the right thing to do. It also makes for more interesting, more varied, better Broadway. And it grows the audience and the bottom line.

There’s a longer game folded inside this too. The surest Broadway regular is the one who was brought as a kid. Under-18s are the most underrepresented age group in the house relative to the country, which reads as a gap and an opportunity in the same breath. Invite the young and the new now, and you aren’t filling a seat this season. You’re building the audience for the next twenty. (Speaking of which, who’s ready for Paddington? We haven’t had a new kid-friendly show in a minute.)

The audience leaving and the audience arriving want the same thing. The international tourist (the group receding fastest) over-indexes on musicals: 22% of the musical house vs 11% at plays. The new audience, younger and more diverse, over-indexes on musicals too. Musical houses skew younger than plays, about 40 against 45, and less white, about 65% against 75%. So the seats going empty as the international tourist recedes are the exact seats the new audience is most inclined to fill. It cuts by run length as well: new shows skew local, the long-running warhorses skew tourist, which means the catalog titles everyone treats as safe are the ones most exposed as international softens. That makes acquiring the new audience more than a feel-good long game. It’s the most direct hedge available against the revenue already walking out the door.

So where should the money go? We spend most of it reaching the people who were already coming anyway. The growth is in everyone else.. It may be a harder, slower, more expensive job, but it’s the one that builds an audience for your next show (or your current one when it needs to be re-energized a couple years in) instead of renting one for the short term. Put the real growth money toward inviting new audiences in.

Tomorrow, Part 6: the brand problem underneath all of it. Why an industry full of brilliant producers and marketers keeps competing show against show for the people who already come, instead of growing the number who come at all. And what a real campaign for Broadway, the whole of it, could look like.

KQ