The Cost Of Ownership

One of the aspects I don’t write about much is the consulting work performed on both sides of the management/musician fence with individual overscale contracts. It is actually fascinating work, right from the biggest budget principal contracts through the smaller budget groups. So when the folks at the Strad contacted me to ask if I had any article ideas for their upcoming “money” issue, I said yes; yes I do.

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Is Philly Still Competitive? Let's Examine Some Numbers

Among the largest budget orchestras, one of the most competitive issues is the ability to attract and retain the very best talent and perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the primary components in that equation is base wages. So I thought it would be helpful to take a look at what sort of impact the recent Philadelphia Orchestra concessionary agreement has on the big budget orchestra competition landscape.

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Just In Case You Thought They Were Bluffing

(UPDATE 3:18pm CT – agreement has been ratified) Details from the proposed, and confidential, master agreement between the Philadelphia Orchestra Association (POA) and their musicians are starting to leak to the surface. One of the items with the greatest impact for fallout is whether or not the POA remains in the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) and Employers Pension Fund. According to statements coming from the latter, it doesn’t look like that’s the case.

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Success Stories And Denver

There are two topics for today’s post; the first is a pointer to the second of my two blog posts the 2011 National Arts Marketing Project blog salon. This one, titled Success Stories, focuses on the bear traps arts orgs should avoid in the form of relying too much on vendor provided statistics.

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Harassment? Really?

It was easy to miss and if you did, you should take a moment to check out the 10/4/2011 blog post from Peter Dobrin which reports on the ongoing court battle between the Philadelphia Orchestra Association (POA) and the American Federation of Musicians’ (AFM) national pension fund. If you haven’t been following that dispute, here’s a quick overview.

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