Brian Kite and Tim Kashani explain how theater subscriptions lock in cash flow and seat locations, but retention is harder as audiences shift. They explore flexible membership models like gym passes and discuss reaching younger audiences through digital channels while emphasizing what live performance offers that streaming cannot.
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Some people say to me, I want to start a theater. Talk about the value of the season subscription.
Okay, so it's always been set kind of knowledge in the business, or at least for the last 40 years, that season subscriptions are ultimately the most important thing you can have to sustain a theater. And the reason is, is because all these people buy all 5 shows in our case, even if they only want 2. It's just season tickets are valuable, so they buy the B-side of the record, if you want to say, or the other things they may not know. And then once they're there, hopefully they appreciate and love what they found by coming to these other shows.
But we also get their money up front at the beginning of the season, so it's great for cash flow. It helps us through. They get a great discount.
And I thought it used to be about the discount and the money, but the more time I've spent, I realize it's all about seat location. It's the same as your tickets for the Dodgers. You just want to hang on to your great seats. and some subscribers have spent 20 years moving up row by row each year until now they're in the front row center, or right in the third row where they want to be, and they don't want to lose their seats.
So subscribers get great benefits, they get their same seats, they get to hear about things first, and for us, it's a solid base to have a bunch of money in the bank when we start the season, and it helps pay for the rest of it.
But subscribers are hard to hold on to, and the models have been changing.
I'm always looking for different ways to try to attract people. I mean, as much as I love subscribers, I'm not sure what I want to do next May.
Right.
It's hard for me to pick a day and set a thing like that. So I actually am not an ideal customer to be a subscriber. So I think about that a lot.
Try to think of new ways to try to keep people interested and maybe younger people that are used to making decisions or finding discounts on a day-to-day basis to get them interested and enticed and coming to the theater.
And there's other models in mind, like membership, or you pay a certain amount and you get to come to the theater whenever you want. You just have a membership card that you pay a monthly fee, like your gym membership. Right. A lot of different models like that that I'm interested in.
In this day and age, there's so many different distribution mechanisms too, the way people consume, whether it be on their phone, whether it be live.
That's right.
How do you merge and create an environment that still nurtures the arts yet Hits the commercial side of it, which is—
I agree, and part of that has to do with just communicating with people in the ways they communicate now, but still trying to make what we do unique. You know, you can get a pretty incredible movie experience in your living room now, but you cannot have a live performance experience. And well, I guess you could, but it's going to be pretty mini.
It's not the same as what we do at the theater. So hopefully that liveness And live music actually has a little more significance now that there's so many other ways to consume entertainment.
