Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
The 2007/08 season was an up and down year for average ROPA music directors. On one hand, average compensation only increased by 1.02 percent, less than musician stakeholders, but the real average moved that to a level twice as high as musician stakeholders…
Although they didn’t enjoy nearly as large of an increase in compensation as their ROPA peers, the average ROPA executive still managed to outpace inflation by a healthy margin. Comparatively, the 2007/08 season produced the highest percent increase in average compensation since the 2002/03 season…
For the second year in a row, the average Music Director of an ICSOM ensemble experienced the smallest real average percent increase when compared to the other stakeholder groups. Granted, those figures continue to be skewed a bit since several of the larger budget orchestras did not have a full time music director during the 2007/08 season, but it stands in stark contrast to executive gains in the same season…
If you were the CEO or Executive Director for an ICSOM orchestra in the 2007/08 season, odds are you enjoyed the largest single increase in compensation in recent history. Taken in context, the 2007/08 season was the height of the economic bubble and clearly, most orchestra executives didn’t miss out on the benefits associated with the rise of the executive class…
As promised, it’s time to take a deep dive into what Google Analytics tells us about the last year. In addition to the 2021 review, I’ve included notes and commentary connected to 2020 data in italics. Audience Number of pages per session went up by 3.73 percent. Overall traffic decreased 7.88 percent. What’s interesting here is there was a clear slide about six weeks after 2020’s pandemic driven layoffs and furloughs …