Drew McManus on the Orchestra business | est. 2003

Los Angeles Philharmonic

A Good Way To Leverage A Microsite

Tue, Sep 9, 2018
Adaptistration People 044
The LA Philharmonic recently launched a dedicated microsite for their Centennial Campaign (an endowment capitalization campaign) and it’s a good example for how to go about designing a purpose built microsite. Each page is comparatively short and contains big, obvious conversion targets (making an online donation). It’s a very nice mobile first design that clearly

Top-Tier Musician Compensation 2018

Fri, May 5, 2018
It’s time to revisit base musician compensation levels at the top eight highest paying orchestras. For a number of these orchestras, the 2017/18 season marks the end of their existing collective bargaining agreement (CBA) and they have yet to ratify a new contract. In each of those instances, the outcomes will have a large impact

In The Game Of Executive Musical Chairs, Philly Can’t Find Someone To Sit Down

Tue, Nov 11, 2017
Adaptistration People 075
At a time when both the LA Philharmonic and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra announced new CEOs within the span of one day, the Philadelphia Orchestra continues to be vexed by finding someone to fill their top executive gig. On the other side of that coin, Philly may have pulled out the chair for one or

An Updated Look At Top-Tier Musician Compensation 2016

Thu, Sep 9, 2016
Currently, two of the top eight orchestras with the highest base musician annual salary are negotiating new collective bargaining agreements: National Symphony and Philadelphia Orchestra. Interestingly enough, both of these ensembles are in positions where the outcome of those negotiations will likely have a larger impact on their future competitiveness than some of the upcoming

Let’s Take A Look At Big Eight Musician Compensation

Tue, Dec 12, 2015
Big 8 Base Musician Salary
Now that Cleveland has settled, we can begin to get a sense for how base musician compensation compares across the highest tier of big budget orchestras, which we’ll call The Big Eight (Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, LA, National, New York, Philly, and San Francisco). Granted, we’ll be updating this chart with Cleveland’s figures once that data