The Welsh exception: what the new Audiences in Wales report tells us about our sector

Last year, an estimated 69% of the Welsh population attended an arts event. Honestly, as a Welshman, that's a figure I'm pretty proud of. As Head of Revenue and Growth at Ticketsolve, a market leader for ticketing in Wales, I also wanted to look into the detail behind the headline.

The Audience Agency's Audiences in Wales report, which is an Audience Insight Wales report that uses evidence from Audience Answers was published in March and has that detail. Lucy at The Audience Agency shared it with us last week and I've had a proper read since. A few things stood out - some I expected, plenty I didn't. Here are my takeaways 👇

Welsh venues are doing more with less

The number that really stayed with me after my first read wasn't the 69% - it was the gap between what Welsh venues programmed and what they actually sold. Here's the picture from 2019/20 to 2024/25:

Wales: ticket sales up 26%, performances up just 3%
UK overall: performances up 25%, ticket sales up just 6%

Average ticket yield held in Wales over the same period. UK-wide, it dropped 3%.

That's definitely food for thought. UK-wide, venues are programming a quarter more events to grow ticket sales by a fraction. In Wales, venues are programming barely any more shows and filling the room. By this measure, Welsh venues are outpacing the UK trend by some distance, and that genuinely deserves to be noted.

Home & Heritage are still showing up

The Audience Agency segments the population using their Audience Spectrum tool. One of those segments, Home & Heritage, is the rural and small-town older audience that has been the backbone of so many regional arts orgs. Across the UK, engagement from this group has fallen sharply - down 26% in like-for-like venues benchmarked year on year.

In Wales, they haven't gone anywhere. They make up 13% of the population, were 11% of bookers in 2019, and have risen to 15% of bookers most recently (excluding film). They're also some of the most regular attendees of any segment outside the very top of the engagement scale:

“42% of Home & Heritage bookers come back for more - rising to 44% at mid-scale venues”

So: in semi-rural Wales, the older, loyal local audience is still very much in the room. Mid-scale venues in particular are still being held up by them. If you run one, that's a definitely reassuring, but it's also worth bearing in mind his group will continue to age, and the pipeline behind them needs building now, not when you start seeing a gap.

The shift in who's walking through the door

While Home & Heritage are holding their numbers, the proportional story in Wales is changing fast.

In 2019/20, Home & Heritage and Trips & Treats (the family-orientated, mainstream arts segment) were roughly even shares of the booking base. Five years on, Home & Heritage have dropped to less than two thirds the proportion of Trips & Treats. Booker numbers since 2019/20 tell the same story even more clearly:

Frontline Families: up 68%
Trips & Treats: up 64%
Home & Heritage: up 3%

Younger families are turning up in much bigger numbers than they were five years ago. And yet the volume of Children & Family programming in Wales has actually fallen since 2019/20. The audience for it has grown faster than the supply, which is a programming opportunity sitting in plain sight.

One related quirk worth flagging: Wales' larger venues are pulling older, high-medium engagement audiences. Mid-scale venues are doing the heaviest lifting on families. Smaller venues are where the younger, more highly engaged Metroculturals and Experience Seekers turn up. If you're benchmarking against another venue, scale matters more than postcode.

Where we have work to do

Two things in the report caused me to stop and think. The first is Experience Seekers. Diverse, social, ambitious, usually highly engaged with culture - and yet they make up just 3 to 5% of bookers across most Welsh venues. The Audience Agency reads this clearly: they're culturally interested but they often lack the time, the money or the means to travel, so they don't book. To my mind, that's a friction problem more than an audience problem, and friction is something venues can actually do something about.

The second is the disappearance of neat genre boxes. The biggest growth in programming has been in 'General entertainment' and 'Other artforms'. Welsh venues are programming around their audience rather than around the artform.

What I'd take from this if I were programming a Welsh venue tomorrow

A handful of things stand out to me:

Lean into your loyal Home & Heritage core, but invest now in the Trips & Treats and Frontline Families pipeline, because they're the future of your audience whether you plan for them or not.
Take the Children & Family supply gap seriously too: the data says the audience is there.
Make booking easier for the Experience Seekers you're not currently capturing, with lower-friction journeys, mobile-first checkouts, flexible payment options. The friction often isn't where venues think it is.
And stay curious about the artform shift. If 'Other artforms' is your fastest-growing line, the language in your marketing matters more than the tags in your ticketing system.

A thank you

A real thank you to Lucy and the team at The Audience Agency for putting this together. Wales-specific data of this depth is rare, and the fact that it's free for any cultural organisation in Wales to access via Audience Insight Wales, funded by the Arts Council of Wales, is great to see.

Several of the participating organisations listed on page 30 of the report are Ticketsolve customers. We see the day-to-day data behind these numbers in our platform every week, and the trends the team have surfaced ring true with what we're seeing too.

If you'd like to dig into the detail, the full report is free to download from Audience Answers and there's a TEA Break online discussion on 20 May. I'd recommend both.

Images taken from Audiences in Wales: An Audience Insight Wales report using evidence from Audience Answers, courtesy of The Audience Agency