All You Need to Bring is Your Trust: To what extent does free admission to live music venues influence music audience’s perception of music performances?

Cultural public institutions, mainly national collections and museums, have adopted free admission to realize democracy and collective ownership of culture. This “open-door” policy has expanded broadly, nowadays, to indicate a pricing strategy adopted across the cultural industry, particularly in the music business. Live music venues have experimented to apply free admission to their music performances. Most of those venues are profit-seeking, and given music performances are the crucial components of their services. Despite this, their forsaking economic profits over the performances arouses curiosity about their continuous interest in operating free admission to the music performances. This question motivated us to investigate the influence of free admission to live music venues on audience’s perception of music performances. We choose BIRD, the live music venue located in Rotterdam, to collect data about the audience who had attended BIRD’s free admission performances. With the data collected via online survey, we test 3 hypotheses using ordered logit regression. The formulated hypotheses test these: The relation between a music audience’s past and present cultural consumption, The impact of free admission on the audience’s appreciation of music performances, The impact of the experience with free admission on the audience’s future consumption.