Barbican Theatre, Plymouth are celebrating the impact of a year selling all their shows as Pay What You Decide tickets. It has encouraged risk taking and engagement of new audiences with arts and culture in Plymouth.  

Our Pay What You Decide (PWYD) events offer audiences the opportunity to pay whatever they feel an event is worth to them (including £0). They can pay when they book or after they have seen the show. 

The Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation has recently published their Impact Report for the 2021-22 financial year, which details the impact of the Pay What You Decide scheme which had been implemented for 52 shows and events including comedy, dance, live music, theatre, drag and improv. (This figure has since increased to 67 with a further 15 events, shows and workshops programmed as Pay What You Decide between April and September 2022)   

During the 2021-22 year 3103 Pay What You Decide tickets were issued, generating an income of £17,224 and resulting in an average yield of £9. Our data shows 61% new audiences who are the holy grail of under 35s non-arts attendees! 

In her article ‘Stop listening to loud ghosts’ about how change in the culture sector is possible, Laura Kriefman,  Barbican Theatre’s CEO and Artistic Director says

“We’re fuelling a new consistent audience, with shows selling extraordinarily well and with our ‘small’ venue achieving a reach of over 2 million people in the last two years.

Our passion has been about creating new routes into seeing ‘culture’ and that means we have to rethink everything from price, value, how you talk about money, coded and biassed language and advertising, what copy and images actually say to totally new techniques to reach different audiences.”