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From 3 February, the millions of residents of London and visitors from around the globe will be able to come to the British Museum to experience a new and limited-time exhibit dedicated to samurai. The famous warriors, their ways, and the Feudal Japan period looks to be one of the biggest draws of the year.
Despite Britain being famous for its free museums, the Samurai special exhibition will join a growing trend of paid exhibits at museums. So, if anyone wants to see the impressive collection supported by the HFF before it leaves on 4 May, they’ll need to pay up.
Increasingly, museums are leaning into paid events. Their angle is that it allows them to mix up the offering and cover the costs that are increasingly tough to pay for as funding dries up. Even so, is ticket pricing too off-putting given Britain’s fame for having free museums, and how is the British Museum managing this as a business?
Perhaps Museums Shouldn’t be Free Anymore
Over the last couple of years, a debate around the sustainability of museums as free venues in Britain has bubbled up. Ultimately, a museum has to be run as a business in several ways, needing to pay for high-grade security, curators, cleaning staff, tour guides, and raise enough money to pay for new exhibits and events.
Previously, this has been well-funded by donations and authority spending. Now, a change in spending across the UK by local authorities has caused many museums to look for other options. Were a museum to take the leap to start charging per visitor, they might be able to negate the need to charge for their one-off events.
In the meantime, entry tickets remain somewhat taboo. The venues are at least being partially funded to help keep from installing a debit card scanner by the door. Even so, more ways of raising cash are being explored. The British Museum, for example, offers an annual membership of £74 to grant access to all of their special events.
Sizing Ticket Prices Based on Potential Popularity
Certainly not as malicious and grubby as the hybrid pricing model put up by the likes of Ticketmaster, the British Museum will be sizing the tickets between its special events seemingly based on anticipated popularity. Right now, samurai warriors and Feudal Japan are wildly popular in pop culture.
Shōgun garnered millions of viewers in the US at launch through to its finale, which saw it watched for over 600 minutes in the week of its finale. It fanned the flames of an already very interesting period that’s been explored greatly in other forms of entertainment, too.
Games like Samurai Code and Samurai Fury play into the fearsome warrior persona among the slots online UK players can spin, while Silent Samurai and its Mega Cash Collect spinoff explore the subterfuge side of the class. The number of samurai slots available speaks to the perceived demand for more similar experiences in the theme.
The British Museum seeks to harness the appeal of the samurai and add an additional selling point by challenging the myths of the warriors – many of which will have been promoted by entertainment productions. To find out about the ancient duellists, adults will need to pay £17 during the week and £19 on weekends.
Samurai is clearly being seen as a potentially very lucrative exhibit over its four-month run. The Hawai’i: a Kingdom Crossing Oceans event will only charge £14 on weekdays and £16 over its weekend runs. Making the most of having what should be a very popular event makes good business sense and may help to make later ones more appealing for being cheaper.
The model British museums have operated on for decades may soon need to change. Paid exhibits and events like Samurai are a move in this direction, and if they garner enough income, might just stave off the need to charge for entry down the line.
