All You Need to Bring is Your Trust : How free admission to live music venues’ performances influences audience perception of musical performances?

Public institutions, mostly national collections and museums, have operated free admission in terms of realizing democracy and collective ownership of culture. This open-door policy has expanded to indicate a form of pricing strategy across the cultural industry, particularly in the music business. Live music venues have experimented free admission to performances as such. Considering those venues attributes as commercial platforms, their forsaking economic profits arouses curiosity about why they have operated free admission to their performances. This question motivates us to investigate free admission’s impact on audience perception of musical performances. We choose BIRD, the live music venue located in Rotterdam, to collect the data of the audience who attended BIRD’s free admission performances before. With the data collected via online survey, we test the 4 hypotheses using ordinal regression. More specifically, we use ordered logit regression to analyze our data as most of the variables are ordinal that use interval and Likert-scale.