Tag: orchestra (Page 1 of 3)

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.

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)

In Part 4, I talked about the concept of familiarity and how it is nearly always the biggest driver of revenue for classical music companies. In my time, I have encountered, if not scepticism, at least some questions about this idea, so I wanted to pause to answer a couple of potential objections before we continue.

Objection 1. What about all the contemporary music groups that exist in classical music? They’re often performing new music and they often attract different audiences that are seeking something new. Doesn’t this disprove the familiarity theory?

Yes, it is true that there do exist many high-quality ensembles that predominantly perform contemporary music and can often have loyal audiences. However, in my experience, the audiences for these types of ensembles are nearly always 1) much smaller than the audience for, say, a symphony orchestra and/or 2) often cross over with audiences that go to the symphony.

In other words, the audience is much more likely to be a sophisticated audience that has spent many years listening to popular classical music and are now looking for something new and exciting. So for them a contemporary ensemble helps them listen to music similar to a genre they already like, but different because it is new (so I would argue the familiarity rule still holds).

Don’t get me wrong, there will always be exceptions to the rules, and if anyone reading this works for or is in an ensemble that is attracting large numbers of brand new audiences that have never listened to classical music, I’d love to hear from you. But in my Australian experience, I’ve never seen a niche contemporary group that doesn’t either have a small niche audience or simply a subset of the larger classical audience. I have seen no evidence that being niche will yield large swathes of new audiences (yet).

Objection 2. If we use audience-centric marketing that talks about the experience and highlights the benefit of going to concerts, won’t that be able to persuade people to try repertoire they haven’t tried before?

The last decade has been fantastic for moving marketing from being very much centred around repertoire and musicians and towards being more “audience-centric” and we’ve seen great advocates of this approach from Aubrey Bergauer, Ruth Hartt and David Taylor amongst others having many great things to say in this space.

In my years as a Director of Marketing with Queensland Symphony Orchestra, I encouraged my team to implement as many of these types of strategies as we could get away with. And definitely, it lifted the overall waters, which raised the average number of audiences in all concerts, so this type of marketing should be considered the bare minimum that a classical music company should do to attract new audiences. But I never saw a magic bullet of marketing which could suddenly get large numbers of brand new audiences to prefer Bruckner over Beethoven. Once users were on the website and had to pick a concert, familiarity was still king at the box office.

[I could maybe make one exception for concerts with an easily graspable concept, such as when we called a performance of Scheherazade “Arabian Nights”, which sold well. However this can’t always be easily done. I challenge anyone to turn a performance of, say, a Mozart Piano Concerto and a Brahms Symphony into an easy-to-grasp concept that doesn’t revolve around mentioning the composers. Having said that, the Danish consulting company Rasmussen Nordic have put together a phenomenal toolkit for orchestras and ensembles to Get More Audiences and they dive a lot into the idea of concert concepts and how to think about the whole experience.]

A Crisis of Repertoire Familiarity

Even if contemporary ensembles and audience-friendly marketing do turn out to be the magic bullet, I would like to propose that the “ageing audience problem” be re-thought as “a crisis of repertoire familiarity”. (The more accurately we describe the problem, the better we can find solutions for it.)

In other words, on the whole, the typical person born in the 1940s in a Western country was much more likely to develop an “internal classical canon” whereby they were familiar with a certain number of key classical composers and their compositions – and enjoyed listening to them. But fast forward to today and that internal canon, on average, seems to be a lot smaller.

Due to the crumbling of the music pyramid already described – which most likely started in the 1960s as Baby Boomers turned their backs on the music that their parents’ generation had happily listened to for the previous 100 years – over time, the collective internal canon shrunk in two ways: 1) Less people now have an internal classical canon at all and 2) of those people that do – the ones that predominantly make up classical audiences today – their internal list is a lot shorter than their grandparents’ generation.

More rigorous research could be done by academics on this point – or if any research has already been done, I’d love to know about it – but an approximation of this can be estimated (at least in an Australian context) by looking at the ABC Classic 100 countdowns.

In the last post, I mentioned these ABC Radio Countdowns and their freakish predictive ability. But I find the list itself fascinating – and slightly disturbing – just looking at who doesn’t make the cut. One hundred pieces seems like a lot, but last time the list was ranked, there were none of the three Big S composers on the list beloved by orchestras and conductors – Stravinsky, Shostakovich (except The Gadfly) and Strauss (Richard, of course).

Coming Up Next: Whatever Happened to Brahms?
But the one that really haunts me is Brahms. When I was a boy I learned about most of the famous composers from my Dad (who was perhaps unusual as a Baby Boomer in being into classical music), and as an amateur pianist, he loved the music of Brahms. And amongst musicians and conductors, it is still undisputed that Brahms is one of the great composers of all time. Also, unlike Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Richard Strauss, who can be either too modernist or long for conservative audiences, that has never been the case with Brahms’ music.

And yet, no one voted a single Brahms piece at all onto the last Classic 100 countdown in Australia of “the one piece you can’t live without”. So in my next post, I’ll do a deep dive into Brahms and why he is disappearing from the classical music scene, because I think he is a great example of what might have changed with our audiences.

See you then.

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)

In the last couple of parts of this series, I talked about the classical music ecosystem that used to exist. My hypothesis was that it is the crumbling of some of the lower layers – i.e. the diminishing of widespread classical music education, classical music in popular culture, and even light classical music – that has contributed to the decline of the top part of the classical music pyramid: live serious classical music.

Repertoire Familiarity & Ticket Sales
To go deeper into how this playing out currently, I want to talk about a concept that is deeply familiar to many in the industry – particularly if you work in the Artistic or Marketing departments of a classical music organisation – and yet I find rarely talked about in writings about the state of the industry. That concept is: the relationship between audience repertoire familiarity and the sale of tickets.

To explain: a typical symphony orchestra will put on something like 20+ performances a year. Those concerts will be bundled up, divided into groupings (the Master package, the Great Classics series, etc) and put on sale in a glossy season brochure. (Or a matte season brochure, if the marketing team decides to go a bit contemporary for a year or two.) The brochure, if it’s doing its job, will attempt to shine an even-handed spotlight on all the concerts, showcasing not just the big and popular, but the niche and interesting.

Then the orchestra has a big season launch, and tickets go on sale. For the first few weeks of sales, when there is a window for renewing subscribers to get tickets, things will be awesome: there will be a nice spread of tickets evenly across shows. Those people who have been going for 30 years or more and always have seats B12 and B13 on Thursday nights, fork over the big buckets, and those concerts fill up.

The Fickle CYO and Single Ticket Customers
But then things get interesting. Generally, the next lot of people to buy tickets are “choose your own” (CYO) subscribers. The trade-off for getting them to lock in a minimum of three or four concerts a year is that they get to pick whichever shows they want. All of a sudden, the nice even spread of customers in the concerts starts to shift. Some shows fill up really quickly. Other shows are barely touched by the CYO crowd. The data crunchers in the office can start to put together a table of “winners and losers” in terms of ticket sales. (Please note: this is nothing to do with artistic quality. A loser concert might be amazing. It’s just simply got less people in it.)

The third stage of selling tickets is the launch of single tickets. Now we throw open the box office to the general public and people who want to buy a ticket at full price for just one show. Nearly always, an interesting pattern will emerge for the year – regardless of how hard individual shows are promoted, tickets will flow in the same pattern as the CYO sales. In other words, the concerts that have proven mega-popular with CYO subscribers will be mega-popular with single tickets buyers. The shows that have the lowest number of subscribers will nearly always sell the lowest number of single tickets.

[There is one exception to this – some orchestras offer populist or family concerts to subscribers – e.g. a movie music concert or a family concert. These might sell only low numbers to the main subscribers who prefer core classical but then pack in a lot later with families or populist audiences. But in terms of regular classical concerts – the type that make up the bulk of a typical season – it will almost always be true that what attracts subscribers attracts single ticket buyers.]

Beethoven vs Bruckner vs Alwyn
So what is it about some classical concerts that makes them massively popular and others much less so? The answer is – in the vast majority of cases – the familiarity of the repertoire. In other words, if you play Beethoven’s 5th Symphony – a classical work that is one of the most famous of all time – it will sell better than Bruckner’s 5th Symphony – a similarly great but much less well known work – and both of those will outsell a performance of William Alwyn’s Symphony No. 5. (In fact, no programmer would ever make Alwyn 5 the main work for that particular reason, but you get the idea.)

We can even be a bit scientific about this because in Australia our national classical music station ABC Classic conveniently polls its audience every year on its favourite piece of music in a particular category as part of its massively popular Classic 100 Countdowns. Approximately every 10 years, ABC has a simple repeat poll of “what is the music you can’t live without” and that list is the closest thing to a record of the favourite classical music of Australia. In all my years in the classical music business in Australia, there was almost no better predictor of the financial success of a concert than how high its repertoire ranked on that Classic 100 list.

[The only other exception I’ve ever seen to this is occasionally a classical music group will add some extra-musical element into the show, which allows the repertoire to be a bit more obscure. e.g. Australian Brandenburg Orchestra does an occasional concert with contemporary circus company Circa, where the orchestras can play almost anything. Similarly, Australian Chamber Orchestra has also had a successful run of nature documentaries with live orchestral accompaniment (narrated, however, by the very familiar voice of Willem Dafoe).]

Put simply, familiarity trumps almost everything at the classical music box office, followed occasionally by an easily – and I mean really easily – graspable concept.

Sweet Anticipation
The best technical definition of why familiarity has this power that I’ve ever come across is the work of Professor David Huron, in his magnificent book Sweet Anticipation. In it, he demonstrates from numerous various experiments performed on music listeners that essentially, our brains are trying to predict where music is “going” when we listen to it – if we can predict where the music is likely to go, then our brain rewards us with a pleasurable sensation. But if we can’t predict where it’s going, then our brain tends to give us an unpleasant sensation.

However, because most of us don’t know that this is the game our brains are playing, we tend to assume that the pleasant / unpleasant feeling is generated by the music. The result? Any music that is similar or identical to music we already know gives us pleasant vibes when we listen to it. Any music that is very different from what we’re used to tends to sound unpleasant to us – or we may simply “not like it”. And I know of very few audience members who are happy to shell over their hard-earned cash to pay for an experience that they do not think they will like.

This is where the impact of the pyramid comes in. Consider the presence of classical music if you grew up in the 1950s (which many of classical music’s current audience did!):

• You were surrounded by the famous tunes of classical music in your cartoons, in your movies, and on the radio and TV all the time.
• Your school taught you the famous classics of music like they would teach Shakespeare or any of the great works of literature.
• You probably had music lessons which contained classical music.
• And at that stage in history, that’s what people had been listening to for years, so it seemed like a good idea.

All these touch points, over and over again, would have primed your brain to be familiar at least with some of the “famous bits” of classical music and with that style of music in general. So if, by some chance, you ended up at a live orchestral concert, hearing that tune live would be like an explosion in your brain.

As you can imagine, for listeners just starting out, the thing that would be most familiar would be hearing a piece they already know played live. But after time, that might start to get too familiar, then they might want something similar but different. This natural seeking out of things that are similar but not exactly the same is what leads to people becoming deep classical music fans. And that is the process that has been so disrupted by the changes of the last 50 years.

In my next blog post, I’m going to answer a couple of possible objections to the familiarity theory and explain why the audience decline of the last few decades should best be understood as a crisis of familiarity. See you then.