At INTIX 2026, Situation and the International Ticketing Association were proud to present the initial results of their 2026 Live Entertainment Leadership Survey. The joint research project’s goal was to capture leadership sentiment across live entertainment, pulling in hundreds of leaders from across the industry over the course of about a month and a half.
Damian Bazadona
Situation founder and CEO Damian Bazadona describes the survey as “a mix of scaled questions, multiple-choice and open-ended responses so we could get both signal and texture. We fielded it in the lead-up to INTIX 2026 and indeed shared early findings on site in Las Vegas.”
Bazadona and his colleagues have traditionally spent a lot of time studying fans. But with this new polling, the team wanted to study “the people inside these organizations making decisions under cost pressure, tech acceleration and shifting consumer behavior. And honestly, we also wanted to understand where perspective splits are happening internally because we kept seeing this pattern: the same reality can mean different things depending on where you sit.”
Bazadona gives a lot of credit for the success of the new survey to A Mind at Work Consulting’s Peter Yagecic and Lisa Cecchini, Managing Partner at Situation. The former led the creation of the survey, while the latter “did the heavy lift of reading, synthesizing and spotting patterns in the responses.”
Big Questions, Important Answers
So, what were some of the questions asked? Bazadona was quick to note: “We asked leaders what they believe audiences will cite as the biggest barrier to attending in 2026. We asked what keeps them up at night, their perceived biggest threats over the next 12-24 months. We asked where they see growth coming from. We asked how significant artificial intelligence (AI) will be to their organizations this year, and where they expect it to show up most.”
He continues, “And we asked a few very ‘leadership-forward’ questions, too, like what quality will define successful leaders in 2026, and how confident they are in their organization’s leadership. Those last ones were especially telling.”
In terms of the finding(s) that surprised him the most, it was the rather subdued responses to the researchers’ AI questions. “If you asked me to guess the ‘AI impact in 2026’ score, I would have guessed it would land closer to ‘extremely significant.’ It didn’t. It landed more like ‘moderately significant.’”
Bazadona doesn’t think that means industry leaders believe AI doesn’t matter. He thinks it means that AI is already seemingly everywhere, and a lot of leaders are still calibrating what “impact” actually means in day-to-day workflow versus headline hype.
He adds, “The other surprise was how high confidence in leadership stayed, even with everything moving so fast. That was reassuring.”
With regards to what survey finding confirmed and reinforced what he already knew, Bazadona describes the cost conversation as “still loud. But it’s not as simple as ‘tickets are too expensive.’ Yes, ‘too expensive’ shows up immediately. But when you push one layer deeper, you realize people are using ‘expensive’ as shorthand for a bunch of different things: uncertainty, value anxiety, comparison shopping, subscription fatigue, you name it.”
To this end, he believes the study shows the importance of returning again and again to a certain shift in language. “Expensive” ends the conversation, for instance, and “worth it” opens it. He says, “We’ve seen that over and over in consumer behavior, and the leadership data basically reinforced that we need to get better at talking about value, not defending price.”
What Needs to Change?
Based on the results, the research team believes there are at least a couple of changes and/or course corrections that leaders in ticketing and live events can make to prepare for the year ahead and beyond. First, they need to stop letting internal perspective gaps become invisible. Bazadona elaborates, “One of the clearest patterns was this: frontline and non-C-suite leaders talk about fans and patrons constantly because they’re living it every day. Executives are often looking at system-level pressures like operating costs, scalability, staffing and sustainability. Both are true. But if those two groups aren’t naming the same problem the same way, you get teams talking past each other.”
Second, leaders are urged to treat “value” like a product feature, not a slogan. “If your entire pricing strategy is ‘hope they understand,’ you’re toast,” Bazadona warns. “You have to actively show what makes it worth it. That includes the end-to-end experience, not just what happens when the curtain goes up or the lights go down.”
What to Do With This Information?
Moving forward, adaptability is a hot buzzword that will keep being sounded across ticketing and live events. The 2026 Live Entertainment Leadership Survey tapped into the need for this and the speed with which today’s marketplace demands it. Bazadona comments, “Adaptability was the runaway winner when we asked what quality will define successful leaders in 2026. And, to me, that’s not because adaptability is some new virtue. It’s because the speed of change is different now.”
The survey further shows that consumer behavior is moving faster, and so are platforms. “Competition is coming from weirder places,” Bazadona notes, “and teams are being asked to keep up while still doing the actual work. So adaptability isn’t ‘be open to change.’ It’s ‘can you make decisions with imperfect information, learn fast, communicate clearly and adjust without turning every pivot into a fire drill?’”
Finally, when asked if there is one major takeaway from this survey’s results, what is it? Bazadona’s reply: “Perspective is everything. The leaders who are going to succeed most in 2026 are the ones who can hold multiple truths at once: cost pressure and experience quality, AI acceleration and human connection, short-term constraints and long-term sustainability. These are the themes were going to keep exploring as we continue talk to live entertainment leaders on our Fandom Unpacked podcast in 2026. The best part? Even with everything speeding up, confidence in leadership was still strong. That tells me the foundation is there!”
To hear Bazadona, Cecchini and Yagecic expand further on the 2026 Live Entertainment Leadership Survey and its results, access their recent episode of the Fandom Unpacked podcast.
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