What should a digital ticket cost, how do you make great digital experiences for the audience, and who is interested in buying such a ticket?

Those were the questions behind the exciting project we worked on for the Norwegian International Festival of classical music and Theatre, Festspillene i Bergen. They took the leap and became a “hybrid” festival, providing both digital and physical performances. Therefore Festspillene partnered with the Norse company TicketCo which supplies streaming and ticket sales for digital events in Europe.

Together with NPU (Norwegian Audience Development), we were asked to research the commercial market for classical music events and look into the willingness to pay for such events as well as gain an understanding of the audience’s opinion and experience of the digital concert.

We combined substantial market research of paid digital experiences in Scandinavia, Germany, France, the UK, and the US with data from the Norwegian CULTURE MONITOR. Culture Monitor tracked the Norweigains’ cultural habits and relationship with digital culture offers. RasmussenNordic added to these data through a series of deep-dive interviews focusing on the digital guests’ experiences, journeys, and wishes when they attended FIB online.

The result was a thorough report with a nuanced understanding of the potential digital users, price recommendations based on a comparison with 60 paid digital sites for classical music experiences, along with 8 interview cases with digital audiences, uncovering what did and did not work for them.

We gave a long list of recommendations for FIB and TicketCo on attractive digital formats and price packages for the next festival along with the most obvious audience target groups they can aim for.