Creating Burning Desire for Live Classical Music — Part 1: Introduction
This is the first in a series of articles proposing a new approach for orchestras in the advancement of classical music.
Market demand for live classical music concerts is plummeting, and it is time for orchestras to radically adapt.
According to the NEA 2017 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, 8.6% of the adult population in America attended at least one classical music concert in the 12-month period covered by the report. This was down from 11.6% in 2002 — a 25% decline in only 15 years. We plainly see the effects of this drop in our increasingly resonant concert halls, with their cavernous rows of empty seats. We were seeing it in 2017, and we are seeing it much more acutely now as we emerge from the most dire periods of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Orchestras have long been almost exclusively reliant on external means of demand generation: music education, the recording industry, music criticism, and so forth. These sources created some level of awareness of repertoire, performers, conductors, and ensembles, providing some public grounding in classical music. To this general awareness, orchestras advertised concerts, usually highlighting a “warhorse” composition, a famous conductor, or a picture of a passionate guest artist with a fancy name and great hair.
This is how orchestras attracted audiences in the past. It cannot be how orchestras attract audiences in the future.
Continued reliance on external means of demand generation will produce disastrous results for our beloved American orchestra institutions. As the performers, curators, and stewards of community investment in this art, it is each orchestra’s mission, responsibility, and business need to create demand for live classical music within.
In this series of articles, I will suggest new ways that orchestras might consider to create demand for live classical music. With created demand, orchestras will have a fatter pipeline of potential concertgoers to whom they can advertise and sell classical music concerts.
Orchestras are measuring the wrong things.
Orchestras measure success of audiences reached through very basic, inward-looking metrics:
How many seats are filled relative to the capacity of the concert hall?
How much ticket revenue was generated from a given performance?
How many subscribers do we have?
Every orchestra on the planet asks these questions, and these metrics establish benchmarks for how the orchestra is doing in relation to the opportunity of its concert hall, pricing optimization and sales, and the orchestra’s ability to attract and retain coveted concert subscribers (also known as season ticket holders).
What these metrics don’t tell us is how effectively an orchestra is impacting its community, or how large a base of potential supporters it is generating. An orchestra’s mission is not in service to its concert hall, or to its gross ticket revenue or to its market success of a particular product package. An orchestra’s mission is in service to its community. This is why orchestras have boards charged with representing the interests of the community, and stewarding the public and philanthropic dollars that the community produces in support of the orchestra.
I don’t know of any orchestra that is satisfied with the results of the inward-looking metrics above. These metrics are certainly important from a business perspective, but these measurements are but a byproduct of even more important outward-looking metrics.
Rather than measuring success based primarily on concert hall utilization, ticket sales, and subscribers, consider first asking more fundamental outward-looking questions. Focus on community potential rather than concert hall potential. Focus on individual household engagement rather than on gross ticket sales.
Try asking these questions as the primary measures of progress:
How many households are we reaching with classical music, relative to the total number of households in our market?
How many of these households come to at least one classical concert each year?
How many households come once and never again?
Make sure you are sitting down when the answers to these outward-looking questions are revealed. It won’t be pretty. I’ll jump to the punchline: The diminishing audiences for classical music concerts are made up largely of two groups: (1) people who come with some regularity, and (2) first-timers who come once and never again.
Conventional wisdom in classical music has been that perhaps 5–6% of the population has a genuine interest in classical music, and of these perhaps half will be predisposed to attending a live classical music performance. So perhaps the potential market is 2.5–3% of a population.
However, when looking at the actual market reach of classical music, an orchestra is likely to find that the number of households reached is actually only a fraction of one percent. And much of this fractional percentage will be made up of one-timers, returning not at all or only once every several years in seemingly cicada-like frequency.
An orchestra’s success in audience development should be measured by both initial attraction and return. For decades, the conversation in the orchestra field has been focused on the subscription model — is it dead or dying? Should we be focused on selling subscriptions or single tickets?
Ultimately I say, “Who cares?” The sales packaging of concerts is a concern, sure, but because all orchestras are increasingly reliant on philanthropy (annual fund and endowment growth) more than on ticket sales, we should be focused primarily on the size of our engaged audience before we worry about which products they are purchasing.
Yes, measure ticket sales. Measure subscriptions. And capacity sold. And donations. And so forth. But let’s focus first and foremost on the people that we’re serving and how we’re engaging each of them, because this is what fundamentally drives all of the other things.
Ask this question:
How many households attend even one classical music concert annually?
It’s a lot less than you think.
Individual household engagement with orchestras’ classical offerings is dreadfully low in all but the skinniest sliver of the population. (More popular offerings including film with live orchestra, “music of” tribute bands, and thematic pops programming do much better — more about this in a future article.)
What if we could grow — by a multiple — the number of people who are engaged with classical offerings on at least a once-a-year basis? What if our annual market penetration could be not a tiny fraction of one percent, but something nearer even 1-2%? Might there be a way to grow the number of households coming at least annually by double or triple? This would be a game-changer for our orchestras and our communities.
Broadening engagement to this degree would drive ticket scarcity. In Kansas City, our classical series has approximately 63,000 seats to fill each season. If 3% of the 2.1 million people in our community came to one and only one classical concert in a season, the series would be sold out. (Of course, much of our audience comes more than once in a season.)
Broadening engagement is the right thing to do. Orchestras are the stewards of a significant portion of a community’s overall cultural investment. We have a responsibility to engage as much of the community as we can, and doing so is happily also in our own self-interests of sustainability.
More households engaged annually means higher capacity sold means happier orchestra and more fulfilled audience through enhanced shared experience. More households engaged annually means ticket scarcity increases, which drives the value of securing your favorite seats via concert subscriptions. More concert subscriptions means higher frequency of attendance, and frequency of engagement is highly correlated with individual philanthropy. More households engaged annually also means greater diversity, more closely reflecting the makeup of our communities as we get a greater percentage of these communities coming to concerts.
I suggest that the solution to growing classical music audiences is in increasing desirability. Right now, we’re selling a luxury product that over 99% of the population perceives they could do without. For all but a shrinking sliver of our markets, there is simply no desire for classical music.
So let’s fix that.
It is not enough for an orchestra to have in its mission the performance and education of great music. Orchestras must also take responsibility of actively growing demand for the music, to make it more desirable to more of our communities.
In the coming articles, I will present an arc of ideas about how orchestras might grow desirability. These will begin with brand introduction — creating a “spark” of attraction or at least curiosity. Then we will go on to initial acquisition of a customer, then to winning back that customer with more engaging concert experiences, then to repeat engagement with increasing frequency, and then over time developing that customer into an arts patron.
Drawing inspiration from my software days, I am open-sourcing these ideas in hopes of spurring discussion, debate, and hopefully some new thinking and new action. I don’t claim to have the answers, but these are ideas that will be tested and measured in Kansas City. No one orchestra is going to solve the classical music problem alone, and so I invite your participation.
Next in this series, I offer “Part 2: The Spark”.
I would like to acknowledge the contributions of some key individuals to this series: Kate Prescott of Prescott and Associates and Tim Gallagher, Chief Strategy Officer at Heidrick and Struggles, both for their thought partnership and for inspiring so much of my thinking in this work; AJ Harbison and Nicole Beckley for their help editing and proofing; and Eric Williams for his hand in researching and contextualizing industry trends.Thanks to them all.
