Three marketing items from my client Gabriel‘s concert at Rockwood Music Hall on Friday night:
1. The place was crawling with hot girls – I do not know why – so I texted a few of my guy friends and told them to get over there. [Does that make me a good publicist or a bad woman?] This led me to wonder (a) whether or not the classical music audience is attractive, (b) whether or not that matters and (c) if it does matter, if it’s a publicist’s job to make that happen. The last time I thought about this was when my friend Megan and I were at a Land of Talk concert at Mercury Lounge last September. I love you Land of Talk, but you had the most unattractive fans we had ever seen in one room.
2. Someone “shushed” the crowd in the middle of Gabriel’s set! Rockwood is a tiny room with a one drink minimum and maybe 12 seats; bascially, a bar with a small stage in one corner. I don’t mean to put the space down at all – I think it’s fantastic – but suffice to say it’s usually a shush-free zone. Here’s a photo from a previous Gabriel/Rockwwod performance, with cellist Alisa Weilerstein:
So this guy in the audience shushed some people (me, for one) who were talking quietly during the concert. Coincidentally, someone also shushed the crowd at The Clientele concert at the Music Hall of Williamsburg on Sunday night. Have anal retentive classical music manners crossed genre borders?? Fan…tastic.
3. They pass around a tip jar for the artist at Rockwood near the end of every concert. It has some church offering plate connotations in that you kind of feel guilty passing it without throwing in some cash, but generally it’s a pretty casual, no-pressure thing. Regardless, I cracked myself up for a few minutes wondering what would happen if a tip jar for the artists was passed around during a NY Phil concert. Would people drop in their $10K donation checks? Would they think about how many ways the five bucks they had in their wallets would have to be split? At what point in the program would ushers have to start passing the jar around to get it to everyone before the concert ended?
#1 makes you a good friend and a good publicist.
I second Maura’s thoughts on #1. I wouldn’t avoid going to a concert because I thought the attendees would be aesthetically unappealing – I have a long track record backing this up – but the promise of aesthetic appeal would certainly draw me in.