Economic performances of Italian Performing Arts on an Uncertain and Digital Stage

The pandemic has terribly impacted Italian performing arts. While artists were fully rethinking their role in the society and their job opportunities, managers were committed to the survival, with lockdown, digitization and partial streaming. This paper aims at understanding how much the pandemic urged Italian performing arts to cope with stringency and develop a digital (ICT, Information and Communication Technology) supply as well as social media marketing (communication + e-communication). Thanks to 2019-2021’s accounting data of a sample of 100 Italian theatres in repository AIDA, a multivariate regression analysis was conducted, considering accounting rows of revenues and expenses before, during (2020) and soon after (2021) the pandemic. Revenues are diversified into program service revenues, private funds and public contributions. Main expenses are the ICT and communication (marketing and fundraising) expense and the personnel expense. The ICT ratio ICT&CommunicationExpense/PersonnelExpense means how much digitization is pressing, while the personnel are unemployed, and it separates the sample into two clusters or poles. Results provide evidence of increasing ICT expense and positive correlation with program service revenues. The most crowded cluster (62% of the sample) confirms the highestdigitization ratio and the highest growth of public contributions, which remains negatively correlated to program service revenues. The topic of cultural digitization and social media marketing is quite new in the Italian theatre, and the paper outlines a framework to better understand how much these economic players are struggling with new challenges from a managerial standpoint.