Arts Orgs: You're Not Just The Venue. You're The Band.
- 8 hours ago
- 6 min read
How Cultural Organisations Can Use Experience Levers To Meet Audience Expectations
I love gigs. I don't get to go as often these days but live music has always been part of my life and I've been fortunate to have seen some great bands. Radiohead, Bjork, Pixies, The Cure, Neil Young, Amy Winehouse, Flaming Lips (pictured), Tame Impala… and lots more. But I'm also fascinated by how and why they work. How bands use tours, set lists, and fan engagement to grow and stay relevant over such a long time, many pushing 50 years.
The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that cultural organisations have a lot to learn from bands. And the first lesson is an uncomfortable one: most of them are behaving like the venue, not the band.
The Problem With Being A Venue
Cultural orgs are often also venues. This is actually a problem. Because they start to think like venues.
In music, venues are vessels. Containers for experiences. They can control the infrastructure — how things look and sound and how people move about, but they have little control of the content.
A promoter or agent is usually selecting the artists. Sometimes they are in-house. Often they are their own thing. This is the curation. You can often tell when a venue has a promoter pulling the strings, sometimes to excellent effect, as you are getting taste and trust for known audience profiles, and sometimes to negative effect, when you are getting only what the promoter wants to push.
What really makes a difference is what the band chooses to do. The set list, the showmanship, the AV design, the aesthetic, the audience interaction. These are the aspects that generate word of mouth and build a fan base.
Cultural venues often don't allow themselves to be the band.
There is sometimes a prevailing attitude that the art, the objects, the collections are the band. That they are their own entertainment. But for many audiences and visitors, it can feel like going to a gig where they don't know the words. The objects themselves are playing the same hit you don't know, and 20 more listens isn't going to change your mind.
What bands do is mix things up to keep relevant and grow, trying new things along the way, or they drift into obscurity. Cultural spaces should have the confidence to do this too.
So the question isn't whether your collection is good enough. It's whether you're willing to behave like a band.
What A Band Actually Controls
This is where I find a particular idea useful. I call them Experience Levers.
An Experience Lever is a variable you can control that affects someone's experience in relation to their expectations. And the most powerful one a touring band has is the set list.
What makes or breaks a gig for most audience members, whether they realise it or not, is the set list. It is one of the few mechanisms available to a band to serve their varied and disparate audiences. Because here's the thing about audiences: they are never one thing.
In a random selection of audience members at a gig, you might get:
Someone who has been to 9 shows and has a tattoo of the lead singer on their face
Someone who intensely loved the first album but hasn't listened to a thing since
Someone who has heard one song on TikTok and is there to make a TikTok of that one song
Someone who is there with their partner and has no idea what is going on
They may be in the same room, having paid for the same ticket, on the same day. It does not mean they are there for the same reasons or the same experience. An audience is a thousand different expectations, and every cultural space, galleries, museums, theatres, exhibitions, festivals, faces exactly the same problem. Some handle it a lot better than others.
When bands choose a set list, they are weighing the venue, the country, commercial pressures, current popularity, rehearsal readiness, the arena size, and so on. But one of the main considerations is always: how will our time on stage make the audience feel?
Will it please super fans with deeper cuts? Will it win over lapsed fans with newer material? Will it introduce fresh fans to a whole new sound? Two hours of B sides will please someone immensely, but likely not everyone. Just the hits? You'll upset someone else.
So what do you do? You have to have your own strong editorial voice.
David Bowie Is Almost Always The Answer
Who was great at this? David Bowie, of course.
Constant evolution, much risk taking, and for someone who is ostensibly avant-garde, wildly popular with a lot of different types of audiences.
I recently went to Lightroom's immersive David Bowie show, You Are Not Alone. It takes a non-linear trip through Bowie's creativity through the lens of how he expressed himself in different eras. There are moments when the same song, say Starman, for example, is played in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s. But it's mixed in with wild swings per tour between sparkly glam, 80s blue-eyed soul, 90s drum and bass, and jazz. Each with a new wardrobe and hairstyle, obviously.
Not all of these eras were successful. But over time, every perceived failure built to a grand project that allowed the wild swings to become an unrivalled legacy. Each change of direction, theatrical staging, scene-hopping transition, and cultural adoption was an Experience Lever being pulled.
"How can I connect with a new audience? How can I defy expectation? How can I serve the loyal middle? How can I satisfy my own creativity?" The challenge is real. But with each tour, in each era, the theme is new while the spine stays familiar.
That's the discipline. Not chasing novelty for its own sake, and not playing it safe forever. Both at once.
The Art And The Science
There's an art to this, but there's a science too. I've been thinking about Setlist.fm, a crowdsourced site that catalogues set lists from concerts around the world. For any given band it can show you how often they play certain songs, what their average setlist looks like across different years, and where in the world they tour.
What this reveals is how set lists vary between shows. A festival set is a different audience to a headline tour show, so the set changes. It shows how scarcity is created by not playing certain material, and when it does finally get played, the reaction is much bigger. And it shows how openers, closers, and encores can each serve a different audience segment in a different way.
Only by being aware of your content as a continuum can you start to use it to change people's experiences. That's true for any creative project, not just a gig. Identifying a demographic isn't enough.
So, What's Your Set List?
For cultural organisations, the lesson is to use your legacy to keep the majority happy and engaged. Sometimes you have to keep playing Starman over and over. But alongside that, you need to be taking bolder risks. Conservatism is stasis. Sometimes you need to break new ground without leaving the audience behind.
For a museum, your set list might be the curation of collections. Do you open the show with the mega-hit dinosaur fossil? Or do you pull out some deeper cuts from the archives? What lens are you viewing the collection through? What's the new angle, the look, the feel, the presentation? How do you design your set list to leave people satisfied and coming back for more?
Audience persona + established hits + bold new creativity + a clear vision and offer. Each requires you to pull a different Lever. Maybe some you haven't pulled in a while. Use new forms of interpretation. Mix up popular collections with new ideas. Recontextualise. Reaffirm. Reassess. Revamp. Revolutionise. Renew.
So, what's your set list? What's the thing you can control that changes the experience of your audience? Bands do this naturally. The question is whether you will.
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I'm Ian Ravenscroft, founder of Green Raven. You can follow me on Linkedin here. Green Raven offers advisory, consultancy, strategic, and development services for cultural organisations and digital and creative technology projects. Got questions, challenges, or ideas to discuss? Get in touch.
From Kickstart creative and technical support, to wide-ranging Strategic Reviews, and ongoing Field Guide and Soundboard advice and input, Green Raven helps creative and cultural organisations deliver change that lasts and develop ideas with impact.
