Broadway’s newest ticketing venture wants theatergoers to subscribe instead of splurge.
Taking a cue from touring theatre presenters, a new service named prioriTIX launched last week to offer monthly subscriptions to see Broadway shows. Customers can now purchase packages of tickets to musicals and plays starting at $90 a month.
Selling subscriptions sustained touring theatre presenters for decades.
The strategy “reduces your cost of marketing hugely,” stressed Michael Kaiser, the chairman of the DeVos Institute of Arts and Nonprofit Management. After all, he continued, “you’re selling three or five tickets for the cost of one.”
In addition, with subscription tickets, Kaiser highlighted that “you get the cash up front, which helps fund the rehearsal period and the producing period.”
Most importantly for some theaters, Kaiser stated, “subscriptions give you artistic flexibility.” “If people are willing to buy all the shows, some subset of the total can be less familiar and more challenging, but if you don’t have subscribers, every production is sold on its own merits, and that makes taking artistic risk much more difficult,” he explained.
But, the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything.
When theaters reopened, many people did not return. Subscriptions shrunk, and 42 percent of theaters reported in 2024 that 30 percent or more of their subscribers had disappeared. The New York Theatre Workshop, which offers subscriptions alongside the not-for-profit theatre companies on Broadway, confirmed that half of its subscribers did not renew after the pandemic.
Nevertheless, the founder of the new ticketing service, Nellie Beavers, thinks that people will want subscriptions to Broadway shows.
In offering curated packages and handling the logistics of purchasing tickets, prioriTIX takes “all of the research spiral off of your plate,” she said. People can spend less time and effort planning everything, and they could even spend less money. “If you want to go see Oh, Mary! tonight in the front mezzanine, then you are going pay $200 or so,” Beavers stated. “But, if you go in six weeks, then the same seat is $79,” she said, adding that “we’re really monitoring all of that to make sure that the order that you go in is the most optimal.”
The service should also increase advance ticket sales for Broadway shows at a time when fewer theatergoers buy their tickets months before. According to the Broadway League national trade association, more than half of Broadway theatergoers now purchase their tickets less than two weeks before the curtain rises.
Beavers, whose family had a subscription to see shows touring in Florida when she was growing up, was amazed to learn that Broadway did not have a similar program in 2020. “Why do they have it, and we can’t?” she asked.
It took her six years, but she made it.