It seems that there’s been a good bit of writing about how nice classical music has become recently. The Washington Post ran an article that talks about how EMI took out a bad note sung by Pavarotti at La Scala and the resulting boos in extracted from the audience. The Financial Times published a piece about the history of booing and how it never really took hold in the UK or the US and AJ blogger Greg Sandow wrote about a pair of overly complementary radio commentators.
Audience Development
Is Video Game Music The Next Big Outreach Tool?
It’s been a few months since the Los Angeles Philharmonic performed selections from the soundtrack for the video game Final Fantasy. And since that time there’s been some interesting discussion about the outreach true potential of video game music. Since that time I’ve directed a considerable amount of thinking toward this topic and I’ve come to the conclusion that video game music has a tremendous amount of potential, not just at …
Ticket Price And Competition
We All Need To Go See A Psychologist
There is a great deal of talk in the industry about building a new audience, but all that I’ve read in newspapers and discussed with those in the industry tends to focus on "things" to help solve the problem. But in a recent Reader Response letter from Emily in Toronto, she says "…orchestras haven’t meant to shut people out, but it would seem that some people have been alienated." This is …
A new audience in Toronto and Nashville
I recently found two orchestras that are actively implementing an idea that I’ve been advocating here for awhile: marketing to the under 30 demographic. Conventional wisdom in this industry states that it isn’t worthwhile to market toward a demographic that is expensive to attract and notoriously fickle in their tastes.
But I don’t always buy conventional wisdom; I find that all too often it allows an organization to become self satisfied and no longer work to its maximum ability. In essence, it creates a follower mentality, which in this business results in nothing more than a slow and painful demise.