The Pew Charitable Trust commissioned The Performing Arts in a New Era from RAND in 1999 as part of a broad initiative aimed at increasing policy and financial support for nonprofit culture in the United States. The goal of this study was to assist us in bringing new and useful information to the policy debate about the contributions and needs of the cultural sector at the national, state, and local levels. The study was inspired in part by a pair of landmark reports on the performing arts published during the mid-196Os: The Performing Arts: Problems and Prospects, the Rockefeller Panel Report on the Future of Theatre, Dance, Music in America (1965); and the Twentieth Century Fund's report, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma, by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen (1966). These reports described the burgeoning landscape of the nonprofit professional performing arts in the United States, articulating their benefits to American society and calling for a level of governmental and philanthropic support sufficient to their needs. Both reports noted that it was appropriate, at a time when the industrial economy of the United States had grown and prospered and the material needs of its citizens were by and large being met, for the nation to turn its attention to nonmaterial values-what would now be characterized as quality-of-life concerns-including the emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic satisfaction that the arts can provide. Indeed, in the 196Os, few Americans living outside the coastal cities had access to live professional performing arts experiences, and arts advocates urged that the situation be remedied.