Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
The executive revolving door at the largest budget orchestras has been working overtime this season. Here at the tail end of the 2016/17 season, we’ve seen more than half of the CEOs at the Big 8 orchestras vacate their post. First up was San Francisco Symphony, where long time Executive Director, Brent Assink, started off the season announcing he would be stepping down at the end of the season. Shortly thereafter, …
As an executive figurehead for an arts organization, there’s a time to be relaxed and approachable and a time to keep it classy. Not too far in the recent past, that was a comparatively easy task but in the age of social media, you’ll need to step up your game. Case in point, Holly Mulcahy recently published an article at Neo Classical about public perception and first impressions. I won’t spoil …
Since Net Neutrality is anything but safe, proactive arts managers will begin developing some skills to optimize your organization’s website so pages load as fast as possible. One of the key elements in creating web pages with snappy response times are optimized images. Just look at how much important Google places on this aspect of web design: Images often account for most of the downloaded bytes on a web page and …
Over the last few weeks, we’ve examined topics that circle back to a problem in the arts field where organizations tend to place artificial limitations on how they connect online with patrons. A key point of contact in that process is e-commerce, which covers everything from purchasing tickets to making donations. Instead of merely ranting about it, I’ve been working with a new arts-based website client over the past few months …
Norman Lebrecht published an interesting post at slippedisc.com that notices the trend in conductors holding multiple titled positions is in no danger of going away; at least in North America. We used to include pointing out conductors who held positions at multiple orchestras as part of the annual music director compensation reports but over the years, it has played a reduced role. The entire notion of music director compensation enters a …