Ticket Sales Dashboard
See the latest trends for your region and artform, based on data from 460 organisations across the culture and entertainment sector
Overall ticket sales in April were 0.3% lower in 2023 than in 2019, a drop from March’s positive story.
The Spektrix Ticket Sales dashboard is designed to help you benchmark your sales against current sector-wide booking patterns, updated every month to track recovery across the arts industry.
Throughout this dashboard we're looking at the number of tickets sold, not the value of those tickets. That means we're comparing how many tickets, in total, were bought and paid for in 2023, compared to the same month in 2019.
- April 2023 ticket sales dropped 0.3% lower than April 2019 levels, a decrease fuelled predominantly by a drop in sales in the US & Canada.
- Year on year sales recovery currently sits at 95% of 2019 levels.
All of our charts share the same key, making it easy for you to compare numbers across the dashboard.
Bars in orange show that sales in 2022 are lower than the same month in 2019.
Bars in blue show that sales in 2022 are higher than the same month in 2019.
How do ticket sales in 2023 compare to 2019?
How does the number of tickets sold each month compare to pre-pandemic levels - and can we see trends emerging?
Each bar shows the number of tickets sold in 2022-2023 as a percentage of the same month in 2019.
Hover over the chart for more detail.
We are now working with a rolling 12 months of data. We’re continuing to use 2019 data as a benchmark for comparison, both for sales in 2023 and 2022. That allows us to compare recent activity with pre-pandemic levels.
The road to recovery continues to be a rocky one. Ticket sales in the US & Canada have dropped, and continue to sit below 2019 levels. In the UK and Ireland, April 2023 sales have outperformed those in April 2019, but by a smaller margin than we saw in March.
Overall sales in the previous rolling 12 months sit at 95% of sales in the calendar year 2019.
UK and Ireland
The UK and Ireland have seen April 2023 ticket sales exceed April 2019 by nearly 3%.
US and Canada
April 2023 sales sit at 87% of March 2019 levels. This is a slight reversal in the incremental improvements in sales performance we’ve seen so far this year.
In April, how did ticket sales compare across different genres or artforms?
Ticket sales patterns vary for different types of organization within the cultural sector. Last month, were ticket sales for each business type up or down, as a percentage of the same month in 2019?
Each row shows the number of tickets sold in 2023 as a percentage of the same month in 2019.
Hover over the chart for more detail.
- Arts Centres, Receiving & Presenting Venues and Community Venues are all recording increases in their ticket sales in April 2023 versus April 2029.
- All other listed business types sit below pre-pandemic levels.
Where's my organization?
The chart shows individual rows for artforms in which 10 or more organizations have sold sufficient tickets, using Spektrix, in the relevant months of 2019 and 2022.
To maintain anonymity, all other organizations are grouped into the 'Other' column. These groupings may change month by month (for example, many festivals sell tickets only during the spring and early summer)
Below is a full list of the artform groupings we use. If you're a Spektrix user and you'd like to know which group you're in, please contact us.
Agent
Arts Centre
Cathedral
Cinema
Classical Music
Community
Festival
Fringe Venue
Gig Venue
Participation
Performing Arts & Education
Producing Venue
Receiving & Presenting Venue
Sports
Touring Producing Company
Venue Group
Visitor Attraction
From our partners
Learn more about audience spending and booking behaviors from our partners. Find these and hundreds of other web developers, software providers, data analysts and consultants on the Spektrix Partner Directory.
About the Ticket Sales Dashboard
Where does our data come from?
Spektrix works with over 600 arts and entertainment organizations across the US, Canada, UK and Ireland. Our Ticket Sales dashboard includes real sales data from the vast majority of our users, meaning our figures are based on what we believe to be the most comprehensive dataset of its kind in the cultural sector.
- We’re comparing 2022/23 to 2019 because of the interruption to ticket sales caused by the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in 2020.
- Our data is based on the date of transaction, rather than event date. Tickets that were subsequently returned are included in the data, as they’re still representative of customer behavior at the point of booking.
- We’ve included data from all organizations currently using Spektrix, for which we have data from both 2019 and 2022/23 (447 organizations in total).
- Months are all calendar months, and may therefore be impacted by one-off events or days of the week - for example, January 2019 contained four weekends, whereas January 2022 contained five.
Data used on the Spektrix Ticket Sales dashboard is intended to allow for analysis of how many tickets were sold according to the month and year in which the sale took place.
Only ticket sales (not sales of merchandise, memberships, subscriptions etc) are included in the data. Tickets are shown against the date of purchase; complimentary tickets are not included, but any tickets that were subsequently returned are shown. The purpose of this data is to look at customer intent at the time of purchase, and not at the impact of cancellations which are less in their control.
Spektrix gives users the option to include certain events in metrics, and exclude others. That improves reporting by excluding add-ons like car parking, pre-show talks or dining which are technically classed as separate events by the system. Only events which users have set as ‘Included in Metrics’ are used in this analysis. This isn’t a perfect filter, as different users will have different approaches to which events they do and don’t include in the metrics.
Organizations are only included in the analysis if they sold tickets for the month of comparison in both 2019 and 2022/23. This means that users which closed down or left Spektrix in 2020 or later are not included even if they saw sales in 2019; and that brand new venues (or those who moved to Spektrix without importing historic data) are not included even if they saw sales in 2022/23. This may mean that seasonal clients (e.g. festivals which run every two years) are excluded from certain months/years, and that some 2019 sales may have been processed in systems other than Spektrix.
Months are all calendar months, i.e. August means August 1-31, 2022 or August 1-31, 2019. This may affect certain months disproportionately due to annual events happening on different days of the year. For instance, there were five weekends in January 2022 and only four in January 2019.
Presenting the data
All three charts use the same key, which shows negative figures in orange and positive figures in blue. This color contrast has been chosen to be visible to as many viewers as possible, including people with color blindness or other visual impairments. Similarly, blue has been chosen to represent positive numbers because it enables more people to distinguish between different shades or scales.
If you struggle to access the information on this page, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to talk you through our findings or explore how we can better meet your needs.