Quebec-produced shows: venue occupancy rates in 2024
Partner · Strategy, advertising and measurement
The Institut de la statistique du Québec, Quebec's statistical institute, measures a 72% occupancy rate for paid Quebec-produced performances in 2024. Nearly three seats in ten sat empty, and each one was an almost full margin lost.
The figure deserves a note on scope. It covers paid performing arts performances of Quebec origin, for the year 2024. Performances of foreign origin reached 83% over the same period, a reminder that these two markets do not compare.
If this figure weighs so heavily in a budget, it is because of a show's cost structure. The venue is rented, the artist fee paid, the technical crew hired. One more spectator does not raise any of those line items. Their contribution margin comes close to the ticket price, that is, what remains of the price once the costs directly tied to that sale are paid, commissions and rights for example.
On a $42 ticket, those three empty seats in ten therefore represent almost three times $42 in unrealized margin per block of ten seats. That calculation, not a percentage of the production cost, is what should set a performance's acquisition budget, that is, the amount invested in advertising to go get ticket buyers.
How to use it
Do not use this figure as a target. An average says nothing about what your venue, your discipline or your territory should reach. Use it instead as an order of magnitude to situate your own performance and to justify an acquisition investment to a board.
The figure that decides for you remains your natural occupancy, that is, what you sell without paid acquisition. It determines how many seats you actually have to go get, and therefore the budget you can commit without destroying margin.
A management team that brings this figure to its board obtains an acquisition budget more easily than by talking about awareness. Three empty seats in ten translate into dollars, and dollars are what a board decides on.
Two figures to pull
- Your actual occupancy rate per performance, compared with this order of magnitude.
- Your contribution margin per ticket, with ticketing commissions and rights deducted.
Establishing these two figures from your past performances is part of what we deliver in a paid audit.
A seat unsold at curtain time does not carry over. Unlike a product that stays in inventory, it is lost for good, which makes cutting the budget at the end of a campaign especially costly.
This point sits inside the plan described in building the marketing budget.
The full calculation of the spending ceiling per performance is in our article on the seat-fill budget.
- Institut de la statistique du Québec, Observatoire de la culture et des communications du Québec, Fréquentation des spectacles au Québec en 2024 selon leur provenance et leur langue d'interprétation, published February 2026.
Gabriel almost always takes your first call and carries out your audit. He builds the strategy starting from your growth goal: where to put your budget, which market to test and how to connect each lead to a real sale in your CRM. He mainly leads engagements for three goals: Optimize the profitability of your digital campaigns, Develop a new market, and Generate demand and growth. With Geneviève, he also works on organic search (SEO), AI visibility (GEO) and conversion rate optimization (CRO). The sales a Google Ads or Meta Ads campaign brings in depend on the page that receives the click. He writes mainly about marketing strategy, paid advertising and measurement.
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