Recently, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra went on strike in the middle of an East Coast tour. One of the more interesting things to come out of the controversy surrounding the strike was some startling information about the health of regional orchestras within the United States during this recession. In short, the financial backing that used to support the major, and minor, orchestras is no longer as strong as it once was, and many orchestras are struggling to fulfill their contracts, pay their bills, and keep their doors open.
But why? By and large, the arts aren’t struggling right now. Populist art like movies, television, and pop music are all doing well. To be fair, they aren’t as flush as they were a decade ago, which has caused some risk aversion and some (arguably) overblown worry about the effects of piracy. Still, the concerts get sold out, the movies make back their costs, and television continues on with little impact to its quality or cost. Older mediums, such as theater, opera, ballet, or orchestral music, don’t have the mainstream success that populist art has, by definition, but until recently this hasn’t prevented them from getting by. Even in this recession, theater and ballet are still getting by, so what about orchestras is so different? What has happened recently that has caused them this trouble, and what can they, as organizations, do to fix it?
There are two key, interconnected reasons why the position orchestras used to have in society has been eroded over the last half century. Classical music has struggled to gain traction in the youth market and now, as those youth grow up, they aren’t turning into classical enthusiasts in the same way that older generations have. As a result, symphony orchestras have been losing the cultural capital that made them relevant, and provided them with the funds, through ticket sales and sponsorship, that allowed them to prosper. Simply put, orchestras aren’t cool, and cool is currently a more important currency than classy.
There is nothing about classical music that is particularly loathsome to young people, other than the air of superiority that has built up around it. Recent, and some less recent, concerts and artists have shown that there is a place for orchestral music in the listening habits of today’s youth. Artists like Nightwish, Within Temptation, and Rhapsody (of Fire), although more obscure, European, and not exactly “mainstream” acts, have shown that a fusion between classical and metal music can be quite successful. Although metal has always had classical music in its veins, since many metal artists have drawn on classical tropes to create their signature sounds, classical’s influence on pop music isn’t limited to metal. Hip-hop producers have used classical music in a variety of ways to embellish their beats. Producers like Stoupe (of Jedi Mind Tricks) have sampled recordings of classical music for many of their tracks, and rapper/producer Kanye West even launched the career of Miri Ben-Ari, the hip-hop violinist, by collaborating with her on violin backing for several of his beats. Australian hip-hop outfit Hilltop Hoods collaborated with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra for a live album called Hard Road: Restrung. More mainstream artists like Metallica and Ben Folds have also done live albums with pre-existing orchestras, in this case S&M: San Francisco Orchestra and Metallica and Ben Folds Live with the Western Australian Symphony Orchestra (WASO).
You don’t even have to mix up the music for people to be interested in classical music. Album sales for movie and video game scores featuring orchestral music, from old favorites like Star Wars or Indiana Jones to recent hits like Sherlock Holmes or The Dark Knight, have all sold remarkably well. They can even work as live shows. Orchestras have, for special events, played the music of Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and the Legend of Zelda series. I’ve been to a couple myself, in my home city of San Francisco, and all of them ended up sold out.
Even the old chestnuts can still draw the crowds. There have been a handful of viral videos, exclusively from European orchestras as far as I know, where impromptu concerts get played in unusual places, not unlike a flash mob. For example, one features the Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra playing Morning, from the Peer Gynt Suite by Grieg, on the Copenhagen Metro during the morning commute. Another featured the Vallès Symphony Orchestra playing in a city square as part of Banco Sabadell’s Som Sabadell campaign, in honor of the city’s 130th anniversary. In these videos, the audiences are completely enraptured by the event, with some people standing with their mouths fallen open, and others dancing and hand-conducting along with the music. People clap and cheer when it’s over. And the audience isn’t just one age group, either. Particularly with the Som Sabadell video, as it takes place in a city square, is made up of everyday people who just happened to stop to listen while walking by. There are old people, middle-aged people, young professionals, young parents, kids, and everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. Certainly, some of this could be selective shooting and editing, but if you are not cynical enough to believe they used plants, and take the reactions of the people as genuine, then the fact that so many people were interested in a classical music performance, out of a small subsection of a city’s population, says something about how popular classical music could be, if it was branded differently.
The music, therefore, isn’t the problem. The problem is the music’s image. Orchestra music is seen as something for rich, old people who value being proper over having fun. Not that this image isn’t warranted. In fact, it fairly well sums up why orchestras are struggling. They are perceived as stuffy, boring, expensive, overly formal, and generally lacking in fun.
Take, for example, the visual appearance of the orchestra. An orchestral concert is a very dull experience if you are used to the level of stimulation that most of today’s music consumers are. Everything except the music lacks flair. For some, the music is enough stimulation, but those people are few and far between. And even for those people, how much more are they getting out of the experience than they would get at home with a high fidelity recording? If you look at rock concerts, a genre in which, in theory, the music is enough for people, there is a lot going on. There is often a visual display of lights, pyrotechnics, the performers are kinetic and uniquely styled. An orchestra is lines and lines of identically dressed performers, who sit in even lighting, and just play. This does nothing but perfectly reinforce the image of stodgy old patrons with a distaste for anything new and flashy.
Another sticking point for potential symphony patrons is the value proposition it represents. While many people believe the ticket prices are too high (higher than the actually are) the price itself isn’t the issue. Perceptions can be changed about the ticket prices with a clever advertising campaign, and if that doesn’t work, the ticket prices themselves can be adjusted as needed. The inescapable fact, however, is that for the same time and money invested, a person could go to a rock concert, see a touring Broadway show from the cheap seats, or go to a ball game, all of which are more immersive, more entertaining, and more open to people of all walks of life. Factor in an unwillingness to buy the cheaper tickets because affordable tickets for a mediocre experience are worse than paying nothing for zero experience in some people’s calculus, and it’s no surprise that the ticket price is a deal breaker for many people.
These problems aren’t insurmountable. In fact, there are models out there that can provide some insight into how orchestras could rebrand themselves to draw a larger market, bring in more money, and generally live a healthier financial life. While earlier I compared orchestral music to mainstream entertainment like movies and pop music, a more apt comparison might be to sports like hockey, basketball, or baseball. Sports are, at their core, entertainment, and while attempts to artificially heighten its entertainment value, such as WWE or the XFL, are met with derision, the point of sports, just like with any other form of entertainment, is diversion.
So in what ways are sports and orchestras similar? In a lot of ways, surprisingly enough. Both use tiered pricing for different seats, with cheaper seats for the everyman and expensive seats for the wealthy. The price of seats in a theater, where tickets are almost exclusively purchased ahead of time, is determined by many factors: the acoustics, the visibility of the performers, and distance from the stage, just to name a few. Similarly, in sports, the cost of tickets is determined by things like distance from the field or court, and position relative to the central area of play, such as center court or the third-base line. Both have exclusive seating for big spenders, with boxes for rich patrons at the orchestra and corporate booths for donors at sporting arenas. Both rely on corporate sponsorship to cover many of the monumental costs that are accrued as part of simply existing, especially the potentially astronomical venue costs required to play. Orchestras use corporate donors to stock the general war chest for every day expenses. Sports teams use corporate sponsorship, most noticeably stadium naming rights, to offset the costs of maintaining their expensive arena or stadium. Both also have large numbers of talented people who are all paid extremely well for otherwise unmarketable skills. Coaches, like conductors, get paid heaps when they are good. Between the seven figure players and the six figure support teams, the gross salaries of a professional sports team are not that different from the gross salaries of the six figure professional musicians that make up a major orchestra. Even the ticket prices aren’t that dissimilar. For example, at the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, tickets range from $25-$110, depending on the quality of the seat, and at Dodger’s Stadium, Baseball tickets range from $10-$125 per ticket, depending on the quality of the seat. Obviously, sports and music are not one hundred percent comparable, but certainly a main difference between the two, as far as what we can learn to help reposition the symphony orchestra, is that sports are cool and classical music is classy. The type of people this attracts, and repels, is the branding issue that orchestras face these days.
Cool has more cultural capital than classy, right now. Big corporate sponsors, and the executives behind them, find it much more useful to have tickets to the Bulls game than tickets to the Chicago Philharmonic. And it will likely stay that way until people’s perceptions about classical music change.
The first issue to address, then, is how to get people, especially younger people, to go to music they don’t think they like. A great start would be to not advertise some, or all, shows as classical music concerts. It may be difficult to get people to a regional orchestra without making it a special event like the ones I mentioned before, such as playing movie music or collaborating with famous contemporary artists, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. To get around the stigma that classical music has developed, it might be helpful to advertise concerts as if they were a special event and, somewhat paradoxically, try to avoid letting on that it is a classical music concert at all. The trick here is to have a concert of classical music that isn’t a “classical music concert.” For example, if you were going to do a concert centered around Night on Bald Mountain, you could emphasis its inclusion in Fantasia, how exhilarating it is as a piece of music, and what kind of night the audience is in for if they attend, and down play traditional classical music markers, such as naming the composer, how old the piece is, and/or the guest soloists or conductors who might be involved. I’m no copywriter, but you get the idea.
The next thing to do is to get rid of lots of the pomp surrounding classical music and replace it with flashiness. The “everyone in tuxedo” aesthetic has got to go. Having the orchestra slowly file in at the beginning of the concert, or already seated in full view of the audience when the house opens, has also got to go. Although the practicality of this is questionable, if tuning on stage could go away as well, that should happen too. All of these arguably unnecessary affectations in classical music concerts are dull, boring, and rob the audience of potential excitement at the beginning of the concert. It should be replaced with something fun and thematically linked to the music of the night, to get people into the mood for a show. I emphasis the word show, as I think showmanship in general is something lacking in most symphonies, at least in the United States. Rock concerts are a great place to look for inspiration. Reveal the orchestra in a showy way with a movable set piece or a striking light cue. Include more visually engaging elements throughout the show to keep more of the audience’s senses stimulated for the duration of the night. Set up a giant projector screen that can display images, animation, lights, colors, or anything that augments the auditory experience, as has been done by Coldplay, U2, and Jay-Z. Pyrotechnics are commonly used by contemporary artists too, which could really jazz up a classical piece, but are expensive and difficult to manage in an indoor venue. Obviously, all of this should be done with artistry and tact; the visuals should work with the music being performed, and the show should never come across as over-produced. Purists might argue that any augmentations like the one’s I’ve mentioned would be over-doing it, to which I would counter: The 1812 Overture. It has a full choir, a church bell, multiple cannon firings, and is one of the most iconic classical pieces around. Imagine the impact a piece like that could have with even half the production value found in a rock band’s concert tour. Lastly, an important thing to consider is the choice of music to be performed. The works to be performed should be selected like one would select songs for a mixtape. Classical performance groups are often tied to the idea that concerts should showcase something, be it a specific composer, a compositional era, or a compositional style. I think is incredibly limiting. Almost no other form of musical entertainment uses such a rigid system for deciding a program. All there needs to be is a good number of high energy pieces, some songs with bombast and excitement, and some that are just fun and fast paced, with the occasional slow ballad to break things up and add some emotion.
Orchestras suffer from an image of being unattainable. The perception appears to be that tickets to see a symphony orchestra are astronomically expensive. Perhaps this is because other high-art, like opera, often do cost at least $100 for even the cheapest ticket. But as I pointed out before, the truth is that orchestra tickets don’t cost that much more than tickets to see a baseball game, something that many, many Americans, from both blue and white-collar backgrounds, do without batting an eyelash. So in addition to making concerts a more appealing experience for the average viewer, it would be useful for orchestras to better advertise the low cost of their concerts. An easy way to do this effectively would be to use the Macy’s model. Macy’s is known for stocking quality product that is a bit more on the expensive side. They have this reputation because they consistently mark-up their products’ base prices, and then have big sales. Orchestras could use a similar technique to encourage people to buy their cheaper tickets. “Symphony tickets, now starting at just $25. Hear more classical for less money.” Again, I’m no copywriter, but you get the idea.
The final thing to talk about here is the money. The traditional patrons of classical music are not going to support this kind of concert. Many are going to look on it as an abomination. The money they represent needs to be made up in other ways. This is complicated by the fact that the addition of new levels of production quality, such as projectors or pyrotechnics, actually raises the cost per show. Plus, all of this is intended to jazz up classical music, pardon the pun, in order to attract people who don’t think they can afford to see the symphony as is, preventing the easy answer of raising the base ticket prices to cover the extra costs. One place to look for a solution is in changing the perceptions of marketers and media planners at the same time you’re changing perceptions of young consumers. Get advertisers who are looking to reach the twenty- and thirty-something market interested in classical music, and demonstrate how you plan to capture that market (or how you have captured that market, if you already have) and convince them that sponsorship of the regional orchestra, in one capacity or another, should be part of their strategy. It’s high time that someone other than the traditional banks and real estate firms put money into the arts.
Also, work towards making the symphony something that people are proud to be seeing. If executives feel there is cache, either in simply attending or in being able to bring potential clients or business partners they wish to impress, then the same money that goes for exclusive seats at a basketball game will go towards exclusive seats at an orchestra. This can all be very risky, and seems loaded with potential catch-22 situations, but there is precedent for success. For example, the Video Games Live concert tour and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra series both play classical music, are immersive multimedia audio/video experiences, and have both been financially successful; at least successful enough that they stay in business year after year.
And nothing is stopping orchestras from approaching any of these ideas at their own pace. There is no need to jump in feet first, consequences be damned. Trying a concert or two a year as a big spectacle event, to gauge the effectiveness, is probably smarter than trying to transform a whole established system while simultaneously alienating its most loyal customer base. Orchestras don’t necessarily need to ever commit fully, either. Mixing up their concerts with jazzed up shows for younger audiences and the old style shows for the loyal grey hairs is a workable paradigm as well. This model is one that can be carried over from the wine market. Wine makers, worried that the snobbish culture around their wine was causing young people to permanently gravitate away from wine and towards other drinks, primarily beer, developed table wines and other cheap alternatives that split the market between cheap, consumer wines for the masses and expensive, top-shelf wines for the rich and the connoisseurs. For orchestras, this system would be a lot like taking the current arrangement of having a handful of free/cheap concerts in the park for the young and poor, and the majority of concerts in a hall for everyone else, and putting it on steroids. With a little luck, it could even lead to cross-pollination of the two audience groups. Whichever way you slice it, however, the image of orchestras in the United States could use a serious retooling… and their future may well depend on it.