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A report published last week by the National Endowment for the Arts contained this telling statistic: 31 million American adults said they wanted to go to an arts event in the past year but chose not to. The study's purpose was to examine the motivations behind this data. Why do audiences participate in arts activities and what keeps them away?

In this week's Conducting Business, Sunil Iyengar, the NEA’s director of Research and Analysis, walks us through a few of the key barriers including:

• Time: A significant proportion of the respondents to the survey were parents with young kids and who couldn't find family-friendly arts options (cited by 47% of respondents).
• Access: Another percentage of the survey participants said they couldn't get to venues or museums, whether because of disabilities, other health issues or simple inconvenience (cited by 36% of respondents).
• Lacking someone to go with: 73 percent of the people who went to an event said it was primarily socialize, which, said Iyengar, "was not something we were prepared to see."

The NEA's General Social Study, as the report is called, also cited cost as a significant barrier (cited by one in three respondents). Some class distinctions appear to be tied up in these barriers. Americans who say they are in the "upper" or "middle" class were much more likely to have attended an artistic presentation in the past year, than those who say they’re "lower" or "working" class – regardless of actual income. Those who self-identify as lower or working class are more likely to attend events in order to "support the community" or "explore their cultural heritage;" upper classes often attend the arts "as a marker of their good taste, cultural capital and social identity."

Iyengar tells us about trends in online access to the arts, and how the data can be useful for arts presenters and advocates.

A Symphony Orchestra Rocks the Club

In the second part of the episode, we hear about one orchestra's effort to reach a completely new audience. Earlier this month, the National Symphony Orchestra played a concert in a packed nightclub of around 2,000 patrons in Washington DC – and totally rocked the joint. At least that's according to our guest Greg Sandow, a music consultant, Juilliard faculty member and blogger at Artsjournal.com.

Sandow said the NSO developed the project while "looking to do something new to engage a new audience." It included an electric cellist's riff on a Bach cello suite that became an exercise in audience participation: "When it came to a notable rising passage that's right out of Bach," said Sandow, "the crowd started shouting and their shouts rose with the music. So you could tell they were really, really into this."

The event wasn't without its shortcomings but as Sandow notes, "maybe, and this is scary for people in our field, [traditional] Kennedy Center concerts become more like this."

Listen to the full segment above and tell us in the comments below: What are the major barriers to attending arts events in your view?