Photo by Haithem Ferdi on Unsplash

Classical Music 2.0 is a 10-part blog series putting forward a possible vision for the future of the classical music industry – imagining a time where we might have larger audiences, more revenue, and play a bigger role in society. (Previously: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5| Part 6)

So if you’ve been with me on this blog journey so far and kept up with my train of thought, you will see that I’ve argued that there used to be a whole pyramid supporting the classical music industry, which has slowly crumbled, as we’ve only focused on the bit at the top – high-level professional music-making. I also spoke about the tyranny of familiarity, where we are predominantly seeing audiences buying tickets to music that they are familiar with, meaning less familiar music gets harder and harder to sell. Finally, I used the example of Brahms’ music to dive into where this “tyranny of familiarity” is coming from – as our audiences (potential or actual) know less traditional classical music theory, they have less of a framework for listening to complex music. Left to the devices of “tune and mood” to determine their musical taste, modern listeners are shaking up the traditional classical canon in ways that we probably haven’t seen in over a century, if at all, in the classical music ecosystem.

The Current Solution

Is there a way out of this? For most orchestras (who have to wrestle with the familiarity problem the most because they have the most concerts to sell in a year) the current method is usually for an orchestra (who have the most concerts to try to sell) to try programming a series of “blockbuster” classical concerts (i.e. concerts with at least one super-famous piece of music in it) alongside more obscure concerts, with a healthy dose of “commercial” concerts (i.e. movie concerts, bands with orchestra, etc) to make the money. The hope is that the commercials and the blockbusters will make enough money to balance out the smaller audiences for the niche works and that the company will come out ahead financially at the end of the year.

This is in the sophisticated companies. Amongst others, there can sometimes seem to be an approach that as long as the music is great and well-played, the programming shouldn’t be tinkered with and that the Marketing team should be able to generate audiences to anything that the Artistic team wants to put on.

Or sometimes companies go through swings and roundabouts – trying the balanced strategy for a couple of years until a new Chief Conductor or Artistic Director comes along, and then they go adventurous for a couple of years until the revenue starts to suffer, and there is a return to balance.

But on the whole, the industry does know, if there is enough familiarity, people will try some unfamiliarity. Put a warhorse on in one half of a concert, you can usually get away with programming something less well known in the other half. Classical music radio will always have a solid amount of famous pieces but they play them side by side with little known gems.

But this “balanced programming” approach seems too risky to me in this new environment. If this problem is being caused by less people being familiar with the music, I’m getting concerned that a day might come where people simply don’t know more than a handful of great classics – which jeopardises the breadth of repertoire that an orchestra can perform.

Populist + Serious

To me, the constraint that rarely gets questions is the persistence in only pairing famous serious classical music with slightly less famous or new serious classical music. Perhaps it’s not obvious (or perhaps it’s too controversial), but I think an obvious solution that is rarely tried is that the industry could push the pairing concept a lot further by deliberately blurring the lines between populist music and so-called serious/art/classical music.

Surely there is almost no more powerful way to introduce people to new music. In fact, I believe this is how it used to be done in concerts a century ago, but we’d lost sight of it by the end of the 20th century.

So I wanted to share a couple of stories where familiarity was leaned into to expand listener’s musical horizons. One is a story from the late 1800s that still has resonance today. The other is a relatively new phenomenon from the last 15 years. But both illustrate a similar point.

1) The story of the BBC Proms

Regular readers of this blog might know that I love reading about the rise of classical music in the 1800s in London because we can learn a lot about how they reached new audiences and grew a following. One of my favourite stories is on the origin of the London Proms concerts (or BBC Proms as they are known now).

According to Wikipedia:

They were inaugurated on 10 August 1895 in the Queen’s Hall in Langham Place by the impresario Robert Newman, who was fully experienced in running similar concerts at Her Majesty’s Theatre. Newman wished to generate a wider audience for concert hall music by offering low ticket prices and an informal atmosphere, where eating, drinking and smoking were permitted to the promenaders. He stated his aim to Henry Wood in 1894 as follows:

“I am going to run nightly concerts and train the public by easy stages. Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Proms

There’s only a brief Wikipedia entry left to tell us about Newman, but what a genius of audience engagement! He recognised in a way that rarely is nowadays – that the programming of concerts itself could, with some work, become a training ground for creating new fans for classical music. But it needed to have a) regularity, b) easy stages and c) start popular. In other words, he was deliberately using familiar populism as the hook to be able to lead people in stages to the serious.

Now, what’ I’m not sure about is the timeframe for this sort of “training” of the public. The original Proms festival lasted for about 10 weeks, so was his goal to get people from popular to serious in 10 weeks? Or was it more the case to have this running over multiple years, and as people came back year on year, their tastes would get more adventurous? I suspect it would have been the latter, but if anyone knows more, I’d love to hear.

2) Spotify Discovery Playlists

This next story I remember hearing, but I can’t find confirmed on the internet at the moment – so I hope this isn’t apocryphal – is that music streaming service Spotify had an issue when they first released their famous Discovery Playlists. (For those unfamiliar with this concept, Spotify gives its listeners a fresh Discovery every week which serves them up about two hours of music that it thinks they will like, based on what they have been listening to before.)

The story goes that when Discovery Playlist was first made, the idea was to show people a list of music that was in genres or styles similar to music they already liked. The idea was to help you broaden your taste and discover new music that you were likely to enjoy. The important thing to note is that at this stage, the music in the Discovery Playlist was designed to be 100% new to the listener.

But the problem was that there was little take-up. Then, apparently, one day – by mistake, in the story I heard – a version of the Discovery Playlist was released where half the music were things that the listener already liked or had listened to before.

All of a sudden, the Discovery Playlist took off. In other words, it was by showing enough familiarity to the listener – which would reassure them that the playlist really did understand their musical taste – that the listener would be encouraged to listen to the newer music in the playlist.

Of course, the dilemma with this kind of playlist is that it is so driven by an algorithm, that it creates musical echo chambers where we only encounter a narrow range of music. But the principle is still there.

So, in conclusion, what might it look like if we used music from one familiar genre to try to draw listeners towards another one (in this case, classical music). In other words, could we push the concept of familiarity a lot further than it is currently used?

I’ll give more thoughts on that next week.