I'm sorry, but blaming the audience is not acceptable, unless it is an accountant's Conference.
My pet peeve, as audience, is the inability of the performers to give reasonable help to the audience.
There are innumerable elements in this (I have posted some elsewhere):
(1) Encouraging audience participation for a song that is not participation friendly. Like the verse of a song.
(2) Encouraging it, and then letting it die. They say "everybody!", and everybody joins in, and then the performers go back to what they were doing before. Now the audience does not know if they are supposed to join in again or not.
(3) The performers give a 2 second lead, at about 1 second before the audience is supposed to come in, thus making them feel insecure.
(4) The performers start the audience, and then immediately go into harmony, continuing to confuse the audience.
(5) The performers don't consistently encourage the audience -- they mumble the words, clap about twice, and then go about their business.
(6) You can tell they are doing this so as to get what a friend of mine calls a F***ing participation hand. Bigger applause because the audience helped showcase the performer's song.
(7) I'll stop.
Getting audiences to participate is an art. I am audience. Do not blame the audience! If you do we will be even quieter in future!!!!
yours, Peter T.