The COC board reviews ticket sales data

Broken down by age and sex – that’s what they say happens to statisticians over time but this one retains his fascination with data and will happily torture it in search of a conclusion or three.  In this case the data is contained in an interesting round up of the Canadian Opera Company’s 2011/12 season.

Here’s the data on ticket sales:

– 77,509 subscription tickets
– 42,216 single tickets, the fourth-highest in the company’s history
– Total ticket revenue of $11.8 million
– 9,777 tickets sold to people under the age of 30

Those 119,725 tickets cover 67 performances of 7 productions.  5 of those productions had 8 performances and there were 12 Rigolettos and 15 Toscas.  Since one would expect subscription sales to spread more or less evenly across the productions that tells us a lot about the single ticket audience.

Let’s make that assumption and assume 11,073 subscription sales per production.  Similarly let’s assume each performance was equally well attended with 1787 tickets sold.  A bit of arithmetic then tells us that while the five shows with eight performances would have accounted for 16114 single tickets (3223 per production) while Tosca and Rigoletto would have accounted for 15731 and 10371 respectively.  This appears to show a huge bias in favour of those two shows among single ticket buyers, which is probably somewhat exaggerated.  Now, subscription sales include “select subscriptions” (four performances)  and not just full season subscriptions so it would be reasonable to assume a leaning toward the popular shows among that group which would reduce the single ticket sale bias somewhat but not hugely as season subscriber sales almost certainly outnumber the select subscriptions and the bias has to be less than among single ticket buyers.

So either the subscription audience has less of a mainstream leaning than the casual opera goer and/or there are financial or other incentives that cause subscribers to be more willing to fork out for the less mainstream shows.  I strongly suspect both and would suggest the following factors are in play.

• There’s a hard core audience that will go see everything because it’s not like there is so much opera in Toronto that we get to pick and choose!
• There’s a sizable season subscription audience that is in it for the social and psychological benefits of being a season subscriber; the best seats, social obligation, our family always has etc.
• The pricing structure is very clever.  The cost of a seven production subscription isn’t much more than for five so why not take a risk or even give away the tickets to the show you don’t want to see?  (Ironically,this is how COC manages to sell me tickets to Tosca or Trovatore)

The bottom line in all this is that COC can afford to programme one or two shows per season that might be a very problematic if all sales were single tickets and the current management shows every sign of walking that fine line with some skill.  Which suits an oddball with out of the mainstream tastes like me very nicely thank you!

The other, more obvious, conclusion I draw from the data is that with 9% of seats unsold the odds of picking one up half price on the day are pretty good and that looks a pretty good strategy for anyone who lives or works near the Four Seasons Centre.