Composer’s Lament: Making Classical Music Pay

Annie Williamson

OxREP
OxREP
Aug 24, 2017 · 6 min read

It’s the season of the Proms and the garden operas, and classical music fills the British summer air. However, as the hesitant opening vibrato of Tom Coult’s St John’s Dance gives way to raindrops of syncopated violin to open the First Night of the BBC Proms this year, young composers must navigate a career path as economically challenging as the musical difficulty of these pieces. This blog piece explores three economic insights into the obstacles to commercial success faced by living composers. It then considers the opportunities that the new gig economy can offer to support this oldest form of “gig”.

1) The scourge of high fixed and marginal costs.

Like most creative artistic pursuits, classical composition entails substantial ‘fixed costs’ in the initial creation of a piece. To write an opera or a concerto from scratch may take a year or more, an opportunity cost of approximately £27,600 in 2015.

This fixed cost is equivalent to the hours that must go into a newly published book, film, or particularly time-consuming artwork. What sets composition apart is that marginal costs of replication are not so low as to be insignificant. Once a novel has been approved for publication, additional copies can be produced in a print run for a relatively small amount, for example, publishers only spend $3.50 to print and distribute a hardback on average. (1) CD production and streaming of pop music recordings are virtually free, with ad revenue calibrated by services such as Spotify and Tidal to uphold the interests of these musicians.

However, classical music is particularly associated with live performance — a composition must fill concert halls and be accepted by the cultural elite before more easily replicable recordings will be demanded. These live shows require a full ensemble to be hired and paid for rehearsals, often building onto to a single evening or short series. Even compared to plays and musicals, which also require live performers and associated costs, classical music performance runs are often much shorter and the ensemble sizes far larger. Add to this the extra difficulty of preparing a professional ensemble to perform musically innovative, boundary-pushing compositions rather than the Schubert and Tchaikovsky classics with which many will already be familiar, and we find an economic reward structure biased against classical composition.

Larry Nickel composing, img: Craig Waddell 2004

2) Status consumption and sticky aggregate demand make network externalities crucial.

Classical music enjoys a loyal and passionate following, but it also is widely acknowledged that certain attendees are as interested in who they might see, and be seen by, at the interval as what they hear on stage. This has the effect that new pieces of classical music are particularly beset by what the Financial Times labels ‘Premiere Syndrome’; the extraordinary cultural prestige bestowed upon the premiere of a piece. As Sally Cavender of Faber music notes, “a pop tune may take an afternoon to write — a symphony will take several years to write and may only be performed once.”

This syndrome is combined with a relatively sticky level demand for classical music at any given point in time. A positive review for a particular performance by the English National Opera may draw larger audiences and sold out stalls, but this is likely to come at least partly at the expense of other performances that those same patrons would have considered, not least because classical concert reviews are usually only read by those with a pre-existing interest. Thus, we would not expect a surge in composition quality in a particular season to win over thousands of new converts to the music style in general.

These two factors combine to increase the salience of network externalities: the benefit derived from listening to a particular performance or composer increases in the number of others who value and celebrate their work. Therefore, if a promising composer wants to avoid the financial sinkhole of premiere syndrome, they need to get famous amongst the existing cultural elite, and fast. The best way to make a living as a classical composer is to be extremely well recognised; ironically, this is a privilege mostly reserved for composers long dead.

3) Long ‘cultural lag’ times lead to sticky supply.

Lastly, classical music is by its nature fairly resistant to rapid economic change. One does not become a composer to make a fortune, but rather because of musical passion and a desire to create. Funding for postgraduate degrees in classical music, composer-in-residences and other valuable facilitating programs may encourage this sentiment, but available music lessons, and societal attitudes that venerate classical composition must also provide the spark. These cultural attitudes towards elite art forms evolve slowly, intertwined with both national ideals (the centrality of the Bolshoi Theatre or the Opera National de Paris come to mind) and demographic values. Thus, once composers select their profession they will often seek to make it work whether the compensation is sufficient or not — many supplementing their commissions with conducting, research or teaching. Where supply is sticky, wages can fall without a corresponding loss of talent — and thus the composers’ bargaining power is low.

Can the new gig economy save us?

These economic fundamentals present challenges for composers, but we may hear notes of hope on the horizon. Classical music is extremely popular for listening purposes, ranked as the fourth most popular type of music in the US in 1997. This places it only behind country, rock and gospel music and well ahead of jazz, rap and folk. It also suggests that the key difficulty in making classical composition pay is in converting these listeners to consumers, rather than creating audiences in the first place. To achieve this, the classical scene can learn from the theatre, another high cultural behemoth often perceived as too expensive or elite by parts of the population. Leaders including the National Theatre have pioneered live-streaming performances in cinemas across the country, notably packing out both the live and streamed venues with this summer’s hit Angels in America. The live-streamed performances offered a far more modest ticket price but still brought engagement and revenue to the NT. There have been tentative steps in this direction from the classical sector, with André Rieu’s Maastricht Concert and other headline-grabbers occasionally broadcast in cinemas. However, there is huge room for growth in this area, particularly focusing on new compositions and young composers. This could bridge the demand gap, for instance streaming to parks during the summer picnic season, or offering cinema showings for aspiring young musicians and existing classical fans alike.

Further, the new gig economy may be able to assist the oldest kind of musical gig. The new gig economy refers to an increasingly common flexible labour market structure where workers undertake short-term contracts, and are paid for the gigs that they do, such as food deliveries or car journeys, rather than per hour. Firms like Uber, Deliveroo and Airbnb have respectively driven radical overhauls of the transport, food and accommodation sectors — composition may have much to learn. In response to a Financial Times’ piece on the life of a composer, James Olsen wrote via letter, “in a world where the luxury goods market is so commoditised, I have found that private individuals are increasingly drawn to commissioning new music as a unique gift or memorial for a loved one, and that a number of patrons can together fund major new works.” An internet-based system for commissioning compositions, or even crowd-funding new classical music for events or popular causes, could draw on the innovation of the new gig economy in order to sustain classical composition and ensure the life of a composer remains viable well into the 21st century and beyond.

(1) Levine, R. (2011), Free Ride How Digital Parasites Are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back. New York: Random House, Inc.

How should composers respond to the structural economic challenges of their profession? Would changing commissions and performance venues risk what makes classical music special, or protect the art form for generations to come? Join the debate by following us on Twitter, and be sure to check out the OxREP website for the latest analysis on urbanisation, Brexit, and more applied economic policy issues.

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