An artist’s path to audience experience design, vol. 10

Weighing audience preferences and music selection in designing new arts experiences

Conduit
Conduit
Nov 6 · 5 min read
Photo by Calum MacAulay on Unsplash

Intro

We are Evan Saddler and Zach Manzi, co-directors of a musical group called Conduit that is currently designing three performances for millennial audiences in Miami. Our theory is that utilizing tools and methods from design thinking, a creative approach to problem solving rooted in audience empathy, will allow us to make strategic choices in designing audience experience. You can read more about our project in our first post. This project is funded by Knight Foundation, and we are in residence at University of Miami Frost School of Music.

Where we’re at

We recently synthesized some audience member data into three personas, for which we will design an arts experience. Having come to the end of our discovery part of the process, we are moving into the actual design of the experience. Now we’re asking ourselves…where to start?

Our constraints

Constraints are necessary in creating anything successfully––they help you know what you can and cannot do. Generally, we’re looking at constraints as (1) the resources available to us and (2) the conditions set by stakeholders. So, as examples for the former, we only have so much time and money. For the latter, we have certain terms set in our agreements with funders and regulations that our venue must abide by in order to comply with the law. These constraints are the tools and toolbox with which we will design a performance experience for our audience.

We may go into depth about all of our constraints later, but for the moment, we’d like to focus on one:

The music.

We knew what we would be playing long before we even started doing audience research. If you brought that to any business person or startup coach, they would likely tell you that your product will fail. We have long struggled with this idea. How can we show our best and most authentic work AND interest a particular audience in engaging with it? This is not the first time this question has been asked, but asking it through a design thinking may lens help us effectively address worries around audience attendance and retention in our field. We must know what we are trying to achieve before an effecrtive answer can be reached.

Our goal

Is it to entertain? Is it to introduce people to new work? Is it to enrich their cultural palates? Is it to connect with audiences in real time? Is it to bring audiences live renditions of their favorites? The answers could be yes to all, some, or none. There could be more questions than these that need to be asked in order to get to the core of our goal.

As an exercise, we’ve tried to think of how a design process might start given the different goals. We assess each process in terms of how we weigh audience preference for particular music and the selection of the musical program. It’s not that one is more important than the other, but we’re finding that we realistically have to start with one or the other, depending on the goal.

  1. Our goal is to entertain. Where do we start with the design process? Begin from scratch (with no music in mind), do audience research, and put together a program of music that is most likely to succeed in entertaining our audience. Audience preference comes first.
  2. Our goal is to introduce audienecs to new work. Where to start? Gather the new work, do audience research, and figure out the format in which the introduction most resonates with our audience. Music selection comes first.
  3. Our goal is to enrich our audience’s cultural palates. Perhaps we can start with a a general idea of the musical program, then do research, and then figure out how to finalize the program and create an experience that fills the gaps of their cultural palate. Music selection comes first.
  4. Our goal is to connect with audiences in real time. This might begin similarly to the goal of entertaining audiences, with no music at all, and only after doing research decide design a format that fosters connection, and with it, music that best fits the format. Audience preference comes first.
  5. Our goal is to bring audiences their favorites. This would of course begin with research (or perhaps you’re a super famous group and you have large audiences that are already partial to your music). Audience preference comes first.

We could see any of the above being a goal of ours. However, since we’re a new group, play new music, and are not super known in Miami, #2 is probably closest to articulating our goal.

What’s viable?

As a parallel example, restaurants don’t necessarily take requests for what to make from their customers. They make what they know to be a high quality product, and as long and the brand and presentation resonates with an audience, they will have customers. It’s difficult to say which is the chicken or the egg in making the restaurant viable––the selection of the cuisine or the audience’s preference for it (especially if it’s something they’ve never had before).

In the for-profit world, a product needs to create monetary value to be successful. You will be successful if you identify a market need and design a desirable and usable solution. It’s actually best if you keep your own desires out of the equation and focus on the customer need.

We absolutely do need to make money in the arts, but we’re not completely reliant upon selling our “product” to make a viable product. We are primarily funded by foundations and private donors who want to see some kind of social capital being created as a result of their investment. Also, the definition of success in the arts is much more vague––is it to engage as many people as possible, create art of the highest level, discover new innovations in incorporating tech into music, all of the above? Who determines that success? There’s no right answer here; it’s all determined by the performing group and its funders. That being said, groups should not be surprised to see low audience attendance and retention if they are spending little to no time investing in understanding audience preference.

Next steps

In pursuing a goal of introducing people to new music, we are mostly looking at the design of the “frame” for our musical program. This will encompass how we weave our musical program together––what story we tell, how we tell it, and how the audience interacts with it––into an experience is familiar to and resonates with our chosen audience.

As we continue with our process, we’ll be looking at some design precedents that have successfully achieved a similar goal. From there, we’ll do some ideation, similar to what we did last season with our design sprint.

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Co-founded by clarinetist Zach Manzi and percussionist Evan Saddler, Conduit is a musical group focused on creating alternative performing arts experiences. Learn more about them and their project here. Read more of their posts by visiting their Medium profile.

Conduit

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Conduit

A musical group exploring the future of performing arts

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