Karel Lievens has sat on both sides of the cultural sector – as a supplier building websites for venues, and now as Digital Strategist at Viernulvier, an arts centre in Ghent that runs as four different businesses under one roof: catering, building management, venue rental, and its own artistic programme.
Before Viernulvier, he spent seven years at De Bijloke, Ghent's classical and jazz venue, where he rebuilt a decades-old fixed-seat subscription system that he describes as "an administrative nightmare." In its place: a flexible membership model that grew from 200 members in its first year to around 1,200 today.
At Viernulvier, that same instinct for questioning inherited assumptions now extends to pricing. A pay-what-you-can scheme for the venue's own self-hosted shows turned out to generate almost identical revenue to fixed discount tiers, just with far less admin and far more goodwill. And an all-access pass for experimental new music shows at De Bijloke grew audiences from 30–40 people to 200, by removing the financial risk of an unfamiliar show rather than trying to market it harder.
Underneath all of it sits a single idea Karel keeps returning to: audiences aren't chasing a genre. They're chasing a feeling of connection, whether that's in a concert hall, a theatre, or on a dance floor. Get that right, he argues, and the marketing takes care of itself.
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