Theaters in a social-media-driven experience economy

The decision to go to the theater is rarely spontaneous. It happens weeks, sometimes months in advance, when someone looks at the program and starts weighing options: Is this the right show? Is this how I want to spend that evening? Should I commit now, or wait and see if something better comes along?

At that moment, a theater competes with every other option for that evening, and the competition has never been stronger. Netflix, digital events, immersive arts, pop-up festivals, etc. The question is how you win that moment.

A look at the numbers

But first: where does theater actually stand right now?

According to the 2024/25 statistics from the German Stage Association, 441 theaters across German-speaking countries recorded a combined 20,854,689 visits during the 2024/25 season. That’s nearly 800,000 more than the year before, even though the number of productions slightly declined. The audience is coming back.

In the US, recovery is uneven. Only 15 percent of performing arts organizations have fully regained their pre-COVID attendance. Broadway is the exception: the 2025/26 season brought 14.6 million visitors and a record gross of $1.91 billion.

Broadway has always had an advantage: the show. Not just on stage, but everything around it. For many visitors, a Broadway night is non-negotiable when traveling to New York, the same way the Brooklyn Bridge or Central Park is. It’s part of the city, part of the experience of being there. In a social-media-driven experience economy, that pays off more than ever.

Performing arts organizations across the DACH region know both the opportunities and the risks that come with that economy. The challenge is figuring out how to play along without watering down what culture actually is.

The question of relevance

Theater was never just entertainment. It was resistance, reflection, community. A space for ideas and conversations that had no place anywhere else.

For a long time, that was an almost exclusive role. If you wanted to engage with social debates, sit with uncomfortable truths, or think collectively about the world you were living in, you went to the theater. Today, theater shares that role with Netflix documentaries, podcasts, and TikTok creators reaching millions.

That puts theater in a different position. It’s competing not just for an evening, but for relevance. And yet it offers something digital formats can’t: the shared physical moment. People sitting in the same room at the same time, experiencing the same story together. Theater creates space for silence, for ambiguity, for questions without easy answers. In an increasingly fragmented world, that’s a need worth speaking to. But a need alone doesn’t fill seats. It depends on how you address it.

The dramaturgy of an evening

“Anyone who wants to fill a theater uses dramaturgy,” wrote Oliver Hassencamp. His point: dramaturgy isn’t just a craft of the stage. It’s the art of shaping tension, anticipation, and experience.

Many cultural organizations, including KKL, are already investing in a dramaturgy that extends beyond the performance itself. Who better than a theater to design exceptional experiences? Directors who read a room. Dramaturgs who build a story. Set designers who create atmosphere. These skills can do far more than shape two hours on a stage. They can shape an entire evening, before and after the curtain. And every one of those moments decides whether the evening belongs to the theater.

How do others do it?

There’s an art form that theaters know well, one that has always thought of an evening as a complete experience: immersive arts.

Punchdrunk is one of the most recognized examples. Sleep No More, their immersive reimagining of Macbeth, ran for 14 years at the McKittrick Hotel in New York and welcomed over two million visitors. In Shanghai, the production ran for eight years, drew more than 620,000 people, and generated the equivalent of around 75 million dollars in revenue.

Two things stand out.

First: the evening never started with the first act. Guests who entered the McKittrick Hotel found themselves in a cabaret with a live jazz band and a bar. From there, they were split into smaller groups, given Venetian masks, and escorted by an elevator operator to the upper floors. After that, they were on their own: no assigned seats, no linear story, just an invitation to follow their instincts. The atmosphere, the arrival, the immersion into the world of the hotel. All of it was part of the experience.

Second: food and drink weren’t a side offering, they were built into the evening. The attached lounge in Shanghai runs at 85 percent capacity daily. For many visitors, the evening began or ended there, not on the stage.

Both of these ideas can be adapted, with some creativity, to any venue that wants to think about an evening as a whole and sees the theater as a space for encounters.

Theater as media house and experience space

What could that actually look like? Broadly, it plays out on two levels.

Inward: what happens with the space a theater already has? The lobby, the bar, the moment of arrival. Many venues have these spaces. Fewer use them intentionally.

Outward: stories that play out online, long before opening night. A conversation with the director, a topic the production explores that’s already being debated publicly. People who don’t have a ticket yet get curious. People who do start looking forward to the evening.

Then there’s the purchase itself. How does it feel? Is it simple and intuitive? Does it carry the identity of the venue? Does it reach the right people with the right offer?

And after the performance, the evening doesn’t end when people walk out the door. The conversation that starts in the lobby can continue online. A scene that stays with you, a theme that keeps getting discussed. A production people are still talking about days later has done more than deliver a good night out. It’s built a relationship. The evening gets a frame that’s bigger than the two hours in the seat.

The underestimated role of ticketing

When people think about the theater experience, ticketing rarely comes to mind first. But it’s the infrastructure the entire experience is built on.

Theater audiences are diverse, and a large part of them didn’t grow up with digital processes. A checkout that works intuitively, on any device, without unnecessary steps, is a prerequisite for people buying at all. A complicated purchase or a third-party platform that overrides the venue’s own branding costs goodwill, and sometimes the sale.

A modern ticketing system can also extend the experience directly into the purchase. An upgrade to a better seat, a glass of champagne at intermission, a pre-show introduction. All of it can be offered right in the checkout, no separate booking required. The evening doesn’t start when people arrive at the venue. It starts when they buy.

And anyone who connects their digital presence, newsletters, Instagram posts, YouTube videos about a production, to their ticketing can see which touchpoints actually led to a purchase. That closes the loop between digital experience and physical evening, and turns instinct into something you can actually act on.

Every purchase also generates data. Who’s been before. Who comes regularly. Who opened the last email but hasn’t bought a ticket for the next production. Who already renewed their subscription. That data is the foundation for any kind of audience communication that reaches beyond a single evening.

Where to start

The right starting point looks different for every venue. That’s why we’d like to invite you to the Audience Success Conference in Munich on November 2nd and 3rd. Come by our stand, meet the team, and bring your questions. We’ll have our ticketing platform on-site, so we can think through first steps together in person. Reach out to me on LinkedIn.