Thoughts & news about the future of classical music.

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People Who Don’t Like Classical Music

(Part 2 of A Wild Theory About the Future of Classical Music)

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So in my last post I touched on the fact that the audience for classical music is getting older and we need new people to replace them. The question is: How do we do that? How do we grow our audiences?

Now, the job of audience growth will look different for every organisation, so at best anything I say will be a generalisation. But from looking at the literature and attending conferences, it seems like the strategy that many classical music organisations are taking, whether consciously or not, is to find more people that like classical music and get them along to concerts.

People Who Like Classical Music

This is a great strategy – if there is a steady stream of people out there who like classical music. But if, in fact, the underlying market conditions are shifting – if there are overall less people in society who like classical music – then basing all or even most of our operations around performing and marketing to these people is going to cause problems. Essentially, we’ll hit a point where each year it gets increasingly costly to acquire and retain the same amount of people. With a smaller and/or shrinking pool of classical music fans out there, we will have to spend more to reach further and dig deeper into that pool.

So what do you do about that situation? The way I like to think about it is to start with a question. What if we went to people who don’t like classical music and tried to persuade them to come to concerts?

People Who Don’t Like Classical Music

I’ve deliberately phrased this in an over-simplified manner to provoke some thought. At first glance, what I’m suggesting is utterly ridiculous. If people don’t like classical music, why would we waste money and effort trying to make them come along? They don’t like the stuff, right?

And that’s correct. In some ways. I’m not suggesting that any classical music organisation abandon its strategy of chasing classical music fans. That would be marketing suicide.

But, as a thought experiment, let’s pretend we were going to chase people who didn’t like our music. What would that look like?

It seems to me that you would end up having to ask two massive sub-questions:

  • Why don’t some people like classical music?
  • Can you make someone like a particular type of music?

The Brick Wall of ‘Liking’

Both those questions contain the word ‘like’, which is somewhat of a curly word. In this Facebook-dominated society, a Like is more of a dichotomy: you either Liked or Didn’t Like something. The reality is, of course, that Liking (at least for music) is more of a scale with 1 being ‘Hate Intensely’ and 10 being ‘Favourite Music In The World’. So it would be perhaps more accurate to say that it’s not so much about people Liking or Not Liking classical music, so much as people Not Liking It Enough to go to live performances of it.

But nonetheless, this concept of Liking – whether it’s a scale or a dichotomy – fundamentally underpins the success of all our efforts. Many classical music organisations have surveyed their customers over the years and almost without fail, the #1 reason for customers’ repeated attendance at concerts is: hearing music that they like. If they don’t like the music, or don’t like it ‘that much’, then they’re not going to come along too oftenin the future.

We in the industry haven’t always given a great deal of thought to how powerful this concept is. But ‘Liking’ is the brick wall constraint that your organisation faces. The amount of success or otherwise that any of us will have in presenting classical music in society is directly proportional to the amount of Liking that is out there for what we have to offer.

In the past, nobody had to worry much about why people Liked classical music or how to make people Like classical music. They just Liked it. All we had to do was perform it at a level of excellence and keep up the variety and they were there. In fact, up until the 80s, they couldn’t get enough of it. Liking was working in our favour. But now it’s become a major hurdle.

So, in my next post, I’ll dig further into the concept of Liking: Why do people like certain types of music? And if we knew that, is Liking something we can influence?

A Wild Theory About The Future of Classical Music

Photo by Larisa Birta via pexels.com.

Welcome to the first post for this new blog! To set the tone, I wanted to talk a bit about my writing topics for the next few months.

In short, I’m interested in the future of classical music. All the indicators seem to be pointing towards an ageing audience crisis (this post by Greg Sandow explains it well): a moment in time where so many of the audience will have stopped attending because of old age that the classical music industry itself may not be able to be sustained. I’m sure it will exist in some form or other, but our current levels of classical music culture, where nearly every major city has at least one orchestra, plus small ensembles, opera and ballet companies – all of this may be under threat.

So what do we do about it?

I had the chance to deliver a five-minute talk on this very topic called ‘A Wild Theory About The Future of Classical Music’ at the 2016 Tessitura Learning and Community Conference in Washington D.C. It was part of a set of talks with a challenge – you could speak on any topic that you were passionate about, but you were only allowed five minutes and 20 Powerpoint slides – and the slides would auto-advance every 15 seconds.

Needless to say, with a challenge like that, those five minutes were the most challenging piece of public speaking that I’ve ever done. But the talk was really well received and it was great in helping me articulate some ideas that have been running through my mind about where things might head in the future in the classical music world.

I don’t think there are video recordings of the conference speech, but over the next few weeks, I’m going to expand on a few of the ideas that I covered in the talk and also, as time goes on, I hope to turn this blog into a news site where I can share new and innovative things that people and organisations are trying around the world.

So if that sounds like something of interest, sign up for email updates and I’ll look forward to discussing the issues with you further.

Next post, I’ll be looking at a somewhat provocative question: what would happen if the classical music world went to people who don’t like classical music and tried to make them like it?

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