Consumption of the Performing Arts from a Supply-Side Perspective: Searching for Artistic Benefit

This paper focuses on the artistic benefit for the audience in arts and culture consumption. This benefit is defined as the feeling of being part of the artistic process and it is generated by participatory dynamics and value co-creation. The artistic benefit interacts with other benefits (functional, symbolic, emotional, social) that are involved in the performing arts experience. Its analysis, from a supply-side view, could help to advance arts and culture marketing into a service-dominant logic. An empirical study involving two phases has been designed. First, a qualitative, explorative and item-generation investigation was carried out. A quantitative study was then undertaken to streamline the item-generation process and evaluate the validity of the identified semantic dimensions. The analysis identified the artistic benefit as composed by three different factor, that we labelled: breaking, participatory and dialogic. The results confirm the relevance of the topic as a means of shedding light on the audience experience in arts consumption.