The Try-Angle: a tool for audience development

The Try-Angle is a tool for audience development that I am building together with Live DMA.

European audiences are rapidly changing and a lot of existing music venues struggle to bring in a new crowd. Audience development is deliberate work, not something that happens automatically. But how do you start? And what can you learn from other venues?

After studying a series of best practices during the 2017 and 2018 Live DMA working groups on Audience Development, we found that there was an abstract structure underlying most best practices.

In short: venues operate inside the triangle between audience, artist and setting.

If you want to change the audience, you need to change either the artistic programme or the setting (time, location, context, …)  of the event.  

This triangle became the Try-Angle, a tool for audience development I helped develop with Live DMA. It helps venues discover new ways of building audiences, not by telling them what to do, but by helping them see new opportunities within their own work.

The Try-Angle is a flowchart that guides venues through a set of questions and invites them to re-think the dynamic between the three elements audience, artist and setting.

The tool starts from the belief that venues can reach new audiences not by following a uniform cookie-cutter method that is the same in every venue, but by finding unique strategies fit for their organisation.

The Try-Angle is developed by Live DMA together with European music venue professionals and it is still a work in progress. In 2022 and 2023 we will be test-driving the first version of the tool. 17 music venues will use the existing prototype and we will be reworking parts of it based on their user feedback.

By the summer of 2023 we will have finished the test-drive and this will allow us to present a second version of the tool.

Interested in audience development? Read all of the articles here.