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Classical Music 2.0 – Part 4: The tyranny of familiarity

June 27, 2024 / / 0 Comments
Photo by Dominik Scythe 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)

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.



Classical Music 2.0 – Part 3: The music pyramid today

June 20, 2024 / / 2 Comments
Photo by Arindam Mahanta 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)

In Part 2, I spoke about the ecosystem that included live classical music back in its glory days of the 60s and 70s. I likened it to a pyramid with live classical concerts at the top, but a whole raft of other layers that supported it.

The helpfulness of considering the industry like a pyramid is that if we look at the state of that pyramid today, we start to see what might be going wrong at the moment. I believe it also points forward to interesting opportunities. Here’s the situation as I see it today:

Starting at the bottom and working up:

  • Orchestral Music in Pop Music (almost entirely gone). By the time we reached the 80s, the sounds of orchestral instruments had started to disappear from pop music. Possibly it was budget-related – a producer and record label that decided to bring in a session orchestra would have to pay a fair few people to lay down tracks. Perhaps everyone was more excited by the prospect of what the new synthesizers and keyboards could do. Perhaps Gen X wanted to show they were different from their parents by showing a propensity for the more dissonant sounds of rock, with its heavy guitars and loudness. Whatever the reasons, orchestras stopped being used as part of pop songs. Fast forward to today, with the music business being even more competitive, if a bunch of musicians start a band, are they even going to consider using an orchestra? Where would they get one? Unless they happen to be friends with someone who can lend 50+ musicians for a week, most modern musicians will write for the instruments readily available to them: guitars, drums, keys, electronics.
  • Easy Listening Classical (some niches but disconnected from main industry). I didn’t completely cross through Easy-Listening Classical, because someone like André Rieu is still the exception to the rule. But in terms of music that is gaining listeners, there are very few breakthroughs to people who don’t listen to classical music already. An exception could be someone like Max Richter, who’s neo-classical style has gained a broader appearance. And I also argue that Víkingur Ólafsson, the Icelandic pianist, came to fame because many of his albums also double as Relaxing Piano Study Playlists. (But more on him in another post.)
  • Classical Music in Pop Culture (largely gone). This is unfortunate at a time when “needle drops” can be spectacular in their impact. When you consider the revival of “Running Up That Hill” from its use in Stranger Things or “Murder on the Dancefloor” in Saltburn, not to mention almost anything that appears in Bridgerton, we can see that a well-placed use of music can create a whole new audience for a song that might have been otherwise disappearing into obscurity. However, I feel this happens far less often with classical music nowadays.
  • Music Theory and History in Schools (simplified to Music in Schools). The last point about pop culture is possibly explained by the overall lower level of teaching Music Theory and History in schools. While learning about classical music in school is no guarantee that children will become fans later in life, nonetheless, if you wanted someone to learn the basic terminology of classical music (e.g. a symphony vs a concerto vs a sonata) or the basic core composers (Beethoven vs Mozart vs Brahms), where do you go? To put it more bluntly, there was a time when the existence of classical composers was as widely-known as we might know the Beatles or Elvis today. That is no longer a universal guarantee, particularly in Australia.
  • Classical Radio (looking promising and willing to innovate). At the top of the pyramid, classical radio still exists and I will say that ABC Classic (Australia’s national classical music broadcaster, for those overseas) in particular is doing the best it can to reach a broader audience and welcome the newcomer. However, radio is a good taster for classical music, but due to the nature of the medium, it doesn’t necessarily contain the same level of rigour without the educational component.
  • Populist Concerts (disconnected from the main artform). Finally, in terms of light concerts, even Populist concerts are a bit different than they used to be. 50 years ago, a populist concert would probably be mostly classical music, but simplified down into well-chosen excerpts and popular “lollipops”. These light classical concerts have gradually been replaced by what is known in the business as “commercial” concerts – so called because an orchestra or classical music organisation considers them mostly to be valuable for money-making, but less so for any artistic value. This is great if you like hearing your favourite pop star with an orchestral backing or you’re a fan of movie music, but with the loss of populist classical concerts, we do seem to have lost an arm of classical music that probably fed into the top category.
  • Classical Concerts (still strong but facing difficulties). The top category is still surprisingly strong relatively speaking, even though there are increasing concerns about audience sizes and how much growth is necessary for sustainability. It’s arguable that the performance standards – much like professional sports – are steadily climbing, with most state orchestras being able to pull off astonishingly top-notch performances most weeks of the year. However, ironically, many of the current audience that comes may not fully appreciate the quality of musicianship they are hearing, and may simply be there to hear their favourite tunes from over the decades. It is certainly fair to say that there can be a massive different in audience size between a concert that features a top 20 work and one that features something less well known. It’s also quite noticeable that even the definition of “well known” is variable. Go back 100 years and Brahms was considered one of the masters and his symphonies and concertos were on regular rotation. However, now, his music is drifting more into obscurity. (More on Brahms in another post as well.)

So on the whole, the industry’s currently shaky audience for classical concerts layer is arguably because classical music organisations are trying to get the same level of concert-going as they had in the 70s – but without being able to draw from a much broader base of people listening and learning about classical music and instruments from the layers below

Viewed at from this perspective, I think a new and exciting challenge opens up for the industry. During the last 20 years, there has been a great focus on how we can use audience growth initiatives (usually focused around sales and marketing) in order to break down barriers and reach new audiences. This type of promotion has had some great success – and is certainly met with less opposition than it was when I started in the business and there was a fear that too much audience-friendly marketing would dumb down “the brand”.

But I say, why stop at the marketing? If the core issue is a half-collapsed ecosystem, why not set to work rebuilding it? Why not rebuild all the levels, in order to have a thriving classical concert scene at the top?

Later in this series, I’ll talk about what this might possibly look like in the future and some of the obstacles that might exist to getting started. But for the next few posts, I want to take a deep dive down an issue that every classical music marketer and artistic programmer has encountered in their time, but is talked about surprisingly little: the tyranny of familiar music.

More soon.

Classical Music 2.0 – Part 2: The music pyramid

June 13, 2024 / / 2 Comments

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)

In my last post, I suggested that rather than thinking of classical music organisations as separate entities, rising and falling on their own steam, we should instead think of them all as being part of an ecosystem. And then I suggested that we need to think of the ecosystem as being a lot bigger than just organisations playing classical music. It’s actually something like a pyramid.

The best way to illustrate this is to consider the ecosystem of orchestral music – by which I mean, all the places where you encounter the use of an orchestra (or orchestral instruments, if you prefer – I won’t quibble!). When we consider this definition, going back to the 60s or 70s, the ecosystem would have looked something like this:

At the top in the Classical Concerts layer are orchestras and elite chamber music groups, performing concerts of new and old classical music. This would be the kind of live classical music as we think of it today: orchestras performing concerts with three works – an overture, a concerto and a symphony (and most likely no clapping between movements). And it is still this level that most people in the classical music business think of as “real” classical music. This is the high art, the pinnacle, the reason the ensemble exists.

However, there were other layers.

There were Populist Concerts (or “pops” concerts), known for their, well, populist music. Nowadays this would probably be something more like a movie music or video game concert, but back 50 years ago, it might have been a concert that featured excerpts of famous classical works, rather than full works. It was still “classical” in the sense of that’s where the repertoire came from, but giving people excerpts of longer serious pieces and/or light works (often known as “lollipops”) meant that it was generally agreed that this was classical in a sense, but a bit dumbed-down for a less sophisticated audience. (Though then as now, you would never put that sort of line in the marketing copy!)

Meanwhile, classical instruments could be heard in many other places. Consider the next layers down:

  • Classical Radio. It’s well known that thousands more listen to classical music on radio than ever attend in the concert hall, so it was clear that this was a part of the ecosystem that created a large enough critical mass of fans that some of them would shell over cash to hear the music live in a concert hall.
  • Music Theory & History in Schools. There are many debates of how necessary music education is to enjoying classical music. I personally don’t think musical education necessarily guarantees someone will like classical music or become a future ticket buyer, but there are nonetheless connections between music education and being able to get deeper enjoyment out of classical music. For instance, if you get a music education that teaches you that a concerto is a piece of music for solo instrument and orchestra, often broken into three movements, etc. – that will allow you to listen to many different pieces that have the word “Concerto” in it. Ditto for symphonies. Basic music theory provides a road map for knowing how to explore classical music, in much the same way as knowing a little bit about wines or degustation can open up a world of exploring the culinary world. (I have a lot more to say on this topic, particularly when it comes to the idea of listener familiarity with repertoire, so I’ll revisit this in future posts.)
  • Classical Music in Pop Culture. We also need to recognise that below the surface of music education, classical radio and concerts, classical music was audibly everywhere. It featured in movies (e.g. David Lean’s Brief Encounter, which is scored exclusively with Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto, the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey with all its Strauss music – Johann and Richard). Not to mention the thousands of hours of original orchestral music composed for almost every soundtrack from movies and TV. (Much of it as rich and lush as anything being created for the concert hall.) You almost couldn’t consider using any other types of instruments to highlight the emotion on screen. Classical music also featured in commercials and, of course – perhaps more successfully than anywhere else – it featured in cartoons. Bugs Bunny cartoons regularly riffed on the great orchestral classics and I still say one of the funniest Disney cartoons is “The Band Concert”, the first colour Mickey Mouse short where the mouse tries to conduct the William Tell Overture while being traumatised by a flute-playing Donald Duck. In short, classical music was as prevalent as, say, the music of the Beatles or Elvis Presley or Taylor Swift is today. Yes, it might seem unusual that 100-year-old music was used everywhere, but society wasn’t yet at the stage where it felt a need to ditch music that had wowed audiences for decades.
  • As if all that wasn’t enough, it’s also important to understand that the sound of orchestras or classical instruments was present everywhere. There were whole ensembles set up to playing “Easy Listening” Orchestral Music – the Mantovani Orchestra being the most famous – often covers of popular old-time pop songs – performed in slow dreamy “cascading strings” arrangements. It’s somewhat schmaltzy stuff and nowadays you mainly find it for $2 on vinyl at op shops (because there is not really a thriving vinyl market for your great-grandma’s Mantovani records!). But up until the early 80s, it was everywhere. I still remember hearing that sort of string sound being used in shopping centres as piped-in music or played on easy-listening stations as a kid.
  • Finally, there was an awful lot of Orchestral Music in Pop Songs. From the Beatles to Neil Diamond to the regular addition of strings in disco (or even what sounds like an oboe in Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe”), classical instruments were everywhere.

In the next post, I’ll talk about what the music pyramid has become today, but the main point is that the bottom of the pyramid makes the top of the pyramid possible. In other words, if classical instruments and sounds are everywhere – in pop music, in pop culture, catering to easy listening audiences as well as highbrow – and most people are familiar with the basic composers, canon and musical structures, it is that ecosystem that allows the music at the top to thrive. It becomes a numbers game which benefits elite music-making.

But, sadly, over the years, the pyramid has started to crumble. More on that in the next part.

Classical Music 2.0 – Part 1: Can we create a new classical music ecosystem?

June 6, 2024 / / 5 Comments

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.

I’m no longer working full-time in the classical music industry, but I’m still fascinated to see how it’s going from the sidelines. I started in the business back in 2007, and at the time, I thought I was the only one who was really thinking about the future of the industry, whether the audience would die out, how to grow new audience members. But since then, it’s been great to see that I wasn’t alone. In the last decade, there have been a rising number of voices contributing to the discussion around this, most noticeably Aubrey Bergauer and Ruth Hartt in the US (and occasionally Greg Sandow, who really was the first to sound the alarm on the issue), David Taylor in the UK, Australia’s own Susan Eldridge, the great folks at RasmussenNordic who are working with orchestras across Denmark, not to mention fascinating things happening in the academic world as well. (And if there are more of you out there that I haven’t heard of – hit me up! I’d love to know who you are and what you’re thinking.)

But despite ongoing discussion and commentary, as a whole, we’re still a long way off tackling the issue of organisational and industry change. By which I mean, it’s one thing to say that the industry needs to look completely different to attract new audiences, increase diversity, etc. But how does a classical organisation get there? How do you implement the changes that might be necessary, when you’ve got a bunch of stakeholders with strong thoughts on how things should be – musicians, conductors, the current audience, Board members – PLUS the weight of a couple of hundred years of classical music history and tradition that we’re expected to live by?

It’s a lot.

Classical Music 2.0

So in this series of blog posts, which I’m calling Classical Music 2.0, I want to put forward a positive vision of where the industry might go (either because we choose to go there, or maybe societal forces just drag us there) and the steps that might be involved. Rather than spend too much time pointing out the things we’re doing wrong, I’d like to suggest some things we could do that might be right.

Obviously, any speculation about the future is just that – speculation. And things like COVID caught us by surprise. But I would like to think there are enough general principles operating about how people interact with music to indicate what a positive future might look like.

The Idea of an Ecosystem

But I wanted to start in Part 1 with the idea of ecosystem. Because each classical music company or ensemble is a separate entity (at least in Australia), we can be forgiven for perhaps thinking of them as being independent. Company X has its set of customers, Company Y has a different set of customers, etc. However, there are far more likely to be relationships between those elements.

For instance, in my experience of the Australian scene, a capital city will often contain a major state orchestra, an opera company and a ballet company, and also many smaller niche chamber orchestras and groups. And these organisations, far from being separate, will often share common audience members. Frequently, the way it works is that the more niche organisations – while having a few loyal unique fans of their own – will share most of their audience with the more broad-reaching organisations. In other words, subscribers to see chamber music will often be subscribers to see the symphony orchestra. However, because chamber music is the more niche type of music – sorry, chamber music fans, but it is true! – while it is safe to assume that most of the chamber music fans will be orchestra fans, it’s not at all safe to assume the reverse.

A Pyramid – but how tall?

All this is because, rather than separate entities, we are really seeing a pyramid. In this structure, niche organisations are able to be successful (albeit with a smaller audience base) because they draw on the larger audience base of the broader-reach organisations below them.

But the hypothesis that I want to put forward is that too often the classical music business can think the pyramid goes as far down as, say, the symphony orchestra in a city. But my hypothesis is that symphony orchestras traditionally were part of a much larger pyramid that included populist music for classical instruments, in various different forms. And I believe, whether we like it or not, that relationship between populist and classical music is part of what drove large audiences for classical music.

In my next couple of posts, I’ll elaborate a bit further on the pyramid idea.

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