Two weeks ago, Hilary and I went to LA so she could film The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien. You can read all about how I didn’t think her appearance would sell any albums here, and watch her performance on Hulu if you missed it. But I can’t imagine any of *my* readers missed it.
For me, the strangest part of this experience, perhaps besides watching Hilary Hahn and Andy Richter get their make-up done at the same time, was that I, Classical Music Publicist in NYC Who Doesn’t Really Watch Late-Night TV Unless Frasier and X-Files Re-Runs Count, was not so many degrees of separation away from one of the biggest media stories of 2010. Because of this loose personal connection and despite my previous disinterest in late night, I obsessively followed the immediate media fall-out and ensuing commentary of The Tonight Show drama. The piece “Jay Leno triumphs over what’s cool” in the LA Times was especially interesting. In it, Neal Gabler posits that Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno are on opposing sides of a variety of cultural, geographical and generational divides, and that the decision to reinstate Jay Leno as the host of The Tonight Show was “a function not so much of money or ratings but of
demographics.” His point, which I’ll delve into further in a moment, is that it doesn’t matter what the Conan or Leno audiences look like; all that matters is that Leno’s audience is larger.
Since Alex Ross came out as Generation X yesterday, I feel confident coming out as Generation Y today. When I was heading to LA, friends and colleagues who are my age said, “Tell Conan we’re ‘Team Coco’!” When I returned, my dad and grandmother said, separately, “It was nice to see Hilary on the show, but we’re happy Jay’s coming back. We don’t really ‘get’ Conan.” It’s completely inconceivable to me that anyone might enjoy Jay Leno’s general presence or sense of humor. I don’t “get” him. The night Hilary was one of the guests on Conan’s show, a man who could kick himself in the back of the head was a guest on Jay’s earlier show. Sure, there have been plenty of self-kicking-esque stunts on Conan’s shows, so perhaps my bringing this up is unfair, but the juxtaposition that night was especially striking.
But back to the LA Times piece. Neil Gabler writes,
Everyone agreed [in 1992] that Letterman was edgier than Leno, more
iconoclastic, and, to a lot of people, funnier. Letterman wore the
self-deprecating dork’s mantle, but it was a ruse. He was the cool,
droll kid who had reinvented late-night television, and NBC decided he
might not be the best fit for the square “Tonight Show,” where
middle-American Johnny Carson had held forth for 30 years.As it turned out, NBC was right. Leno had been an edgy — and very
funny — comedian once, but he had gradually drifted to the center
where the larger audience was. If that meant blunting his comedy, Leno
was willing. By the time he took over “Tonight,” Leno’s basic commodity
was not his humor, which had become toothless, but his likability. He
was your grandmother’s comedian — the comedian of the Silent Majority.Meanwhile, Conan O’Brien was handed Letterman’s vacated spot after
Leno. O’Brien had never been before the camera. He was a writer. But he
was a great idea for a late-night show host: Harvard-educated, then
trained at the writers’ tables on “Saturday Night Live” and “The
Simpsons.” It didn’t get any cooler than that. Even if he was as
jittery as a nervous Chihuahua and milked his handful of jokes for
everything they were worth by shameless mugging, he was young and
different — a hipster.
The most noteworthy line of this piece, at least for the purpose of this blog post, comes next, when Gabler explains why NBC wanted Conan O’Brien for The Tonight Show in the first place:
Younger viewers, they said, were better viewers. They were more
susceptible to advertising blandishments. They were more likely to
decide on a product and maintain loyalty to it for life. And they were
harder to reach and therefore more desirable. Whatever the excuse, the
result was that older viewers — and old meant over 50 — were suddenly
worthless in television terms. Losing Conan O’Brien, should O’Brien
have gotten restless and decided to leave NBC when his contract was up,
wouldn’t have been much of a loss on its face. Even if he had gone to
Fox or syndication, there was no way he could have competed against
Letterman, much less Leno. … [but] If [NBC] lost him, it would lose his cool. Leno, for all his ratings prowess, was just too square for NBC in the
age of the almighty 18-to-34 demographic that everyone now lusted
after. In a way, NBC, like an aging suitor, was addled by youth. There was just one complication. Leno, unlike O’Brien, actually could take his Silent Majority elsewhere, uncool or not.
I have made what can loosely be described as a “career” of assuming that younger audience members are better audience members. When I left my job at IMG Artists two and a half years ago, someone offered that I was “pretty young for a classical music publicist.” Turning the dial to 99.9 Cocky FM, I responded, “I”m exactly who everyone wants in the concert halls and I know how to get me.” (What a prize.)
On his New Yorker blog yesterday, where he revealed himself as a Gen X-er, Alex Ross posted a graph from the League of American Orchestras’ Audience Demographic Research Review, “in all its scary glory.” Previous generations, he writes in his analysis of this data, have increased their participation in classical music as they got older, while “the so-called Generation X, however, has yet to exhibit an upward spike as it moves into middle age.” He continues:
If the light-gray line doesn’t reverse direction in
the next ten years, [classical music] organizations may begin to fold. There is, in fact, reason to hope that such a reversal will
take place. I’m a member of the fatal X, and I’ve noticed anecdotally
that a number of friends who had previously paid little heed to
classical music have begun to show interest. It’s worth remembering
that a great wave of fear came over the classical world in the
nineteen-sixties, when it appeared that an entire youth generation–the
baby boomers–had lost touch with the music. This specimen of alarmism
appeared in Stereo Review in 1969: “Today’s dying classical
market is what it is because fifteen years ago no one attempted to
instill a love for classical music in the then impressionable children
who have today become the market.” Then again, many boomers were
exposed to classical music in their formative years, even if they made
a show of rejecting it in favor of Dylan and the Beatles. They had some
music education in school; they saw Bernstein’s young people’s
concerts, opera singers on late-night television, conductors on the
cover of Time, and so on. Such exposure fell off sharply in
the eighties and nineties, when Generation X came of age. Orchestras
and opera houses will have to work considerably harder to bring this
cohort in.
So perhaps “I’ve made a huge mistake,” and if you don’t get that reference, I’m really sorry: you’re not one of the cool kids I’ve been courting for classical music. (But now I’m a-comin’ for ya!) We should be spending time and money trying to reach all potential new audience members and music lovers, regardless of age, because as the LA Times pieces ends, “As O’Brien faded into the evening last night with bundles of cash and
newfound martyrdom, the baby boomers have finally gotten some small
measure of revenge, however old and dorky and undesirable they may be.”
I always thought this blog was too cool for me. Now I know for sure. Godspeed!
“Younger viewers, they said, were better viewers. They were more susceptible to advertising blandishments. They were more likely to decide on a product and maintain loyalty to it for life. And they were harder to reach and therefore more desirable.”
I’m disturbed by this quote and the what it implies: TV likes younger viewers, despite their short attention span, because they are more gullible.
That’s sort of it in a nutshell — they are more malleable and can be persuaded to buy cheap junk (advertisements) and will maintain product loyalty. That adds up to “not too bright and timid.” That doesn’t square up with the “smart, edgy hipster” image that they attach to the coveted younger viewer.
What do the advertisers actually think of the people they are pursuing?
Are older viewers square, or just less impulsive (and smarter) and less likely to lust after the newest gadget if they’re shown an advertisement for it?
I’m using a lot of loaded terms in this comment, I know. But this is a loaded-term sort of discussion, and I hope I’m using them in a way that sort of rips the bandaid off of the underlying assumptions beneath them. Those assumptions are that the mass media like younger viewers because they can be BS-ed more easily. Not because they’re cool, edgy, hip, smart, or ironic. They fork over money for cheap plastic gadgets more quickly, and once they use one gadget, they are fearful of switching to a new one. That’s it.
I mean, TV doesn’t care who watches. Advertisers do. The classical world has to find another way to connect with audiences than to take that model of assuming that the most coveted audience is the one with the shortest attention span and the biggest appetite for trendy gadgets. Younger viewers and listeners are of course incredibly important to the classical world … but not for those reasons. You may be pursuing the same younger audience that the mass media do, but as God is your witness, don’t do it for the same reasons or using the same methods.
FTR, I’m Generation X pretty firmly. I’m in a weird space regarding classical music though, since I was raised in an Italian-American family that pretty much was soaked in classical and opera for my entire youth. I didn’t even know outside music existed all that much in the 1970s. The 70s for me are Beethoven, Beverly Sills, and Virgil Fox. My nonclassical vernacular is 80s stadium rock, and I still have a hard time telling the difference between the types; it’s all highly melodic and virtuosic instrumental music with a huge voice in the front.
Janis, as I understand it, younger viewers are better not because they are more “gullible” but because they have not yet made the product and lifestyle choices that will stick with them for the rest of their lives. It seems that the soap you choose at 18 is often the soap you’re using at 60, strangely enough. Since buying soap can seem to some of us like a largely arbitrary act of looking at a Wall of Product and choosing the most appealing ingredient or purity-percentage or color, spending ad dollars to subliminally get young people to like your color or attribute is a really good move, because that’s 30+ years of soap purchases. Also, young people have more disposable income than do older people, in many cases, because of the absence of dependents and the presence of family support, educational loans, lower cost of living, etc., so they are more likely to go to movies, etc.
Amanda, I’d be curious to know why you think it’s important to get young people to hear classical music (though I’m sure you’ve written about this before and I just didn’t catch it). From what I’ve heard, time and time again, the rationale from the perspective of Arts Admins is EXACTLY the same as for the good people at Lever or IvoryCorp or whatever it may be – a young person who decides that going to the orchestra is Something They Do is going to be Doing that for a long, long time. When they get older, they will also be likely to fork over their year-end surplus to that orchestra, and when they die, they might bequeath something extra, as well. And, if we want to be less cynical about it, they will also get their friends to come, inculcate love-of-orchestras as a value in their kids, etc. So it’s a great investment, for the same reasons that the soap people might think so. Again, it’s not about being gullible, it’s about having not yet made the decisions in your life about how to spend resources – time and money. A Gen X-er who’s already made the “decision” to be a fan of REO Speedwagon – or KRS-One, or Dolly Parton, or Cecil Taylor (this is a suddenly-weird list!) – is much less likely to have consistent brand loyalty to the NY Phil, and that makes the achievement of getting them into a single concert much less valuable.
None of this is to say, of course, that it’s a small achievement to get older audience members. And, in fact, the Leno-esque backlash against the over-emphasis on younger audiences is something that one sees on comment boards, etc., all the time. Orchestral administrators and other core-classical admins have a nearly-impossible game to play – satisfy the older demographic while building a new audience. It’s like Big Tent politics, and the older listeners are the taken-for-granted political base, often gently alienated by the outreach efforts of the Party. But perhaps less alienated than one might think….
I love nothing more than getting my dad and other relatives to fall in love with the artists whose albums we release and shows we present. For my own music, it’s absolutely as personally meaningful to find older listeners drawn to my musical voice as it is to have peers and even younger fans. The point I’m making in this excessively-long comment is just that the rationale for TV executives and arts administrators are more similar than it might seem. And in the arts, it does not seem to be quite the either/or game that has gone down in the Late Night TV arena.
Judd, I don’t necessarily think that younger viewers ARE more “gullible” or whatever, but that they are most definitely being marketed to with that in mind by advertisers. Advertisers are hardcore cynics, and they do feel this way, and it informs their messages even if they think it doesn’t.
It’s a dangerous thing for an entire cultural movement to either make those assumptions (especially if they aren’t aware that they are there) both because they are insulting and because a model that promises to deliver paying eyeballs to advertisers probably isn’t the right one for an entire cultural movement to use.
(I’m also not persuaded of the “the brand of soap you use now is the one you use at 60” idea, though … mostly because until today’s 18 year olds have aged to 60, we won’t know if it’s true any longer. Long-tail effects make it infinitely easier to shift niches in a lot of ways that were not possible prior to that sort of niche-specific marketing.)
The point I was trying to make was not that orchestras are using Madison Avenue techniques for determining their target market, but that the same logic applies, distinct from that mentality. The big difference is that the “culture providers” (those who deliver the cultural product) and the “advertisers” (those who stand to benefit from the audience’s attention) are distinct in the case of the TV shows, but the same in the case of classical music. NBC wants younger viewers because they buy soap for the long term. The NY Phil wants younger audience members because they buy the NY Phil for the long term. Classical music organizations aren’t delivering eyeballs to advertisers, they are building a subscription and donation base. But if younger people yield a greater long-term return – in whatever metric you want (attendance, donations, etc.) – organizations ignore that at their own peril. That’s the “Conan” argument, but it’s a long-term strategy, not a short-term one.
At the same time, if you ignore the “Leno” demographic, that’s as problematic in classical music as it is on TV, and for similar reasons.
Judd,
I understand the soap analogy you’re making, but I wonder whether it really works. Is classical music really the same as soap? Your need for soap remains pretty constant throughout your life, but your need for classical music isn’t necessarily so consistent (although it might be). It’s possible that it’s just something most people come to later in life. Until that question is satisfactorily resolved I’m not sure the comparison can be fairly made.
I really like Amanda’s point about trying to reach all ages at once: as an ensemble director observed to me recently, the audience for classical music conforms to the age demographic of wider society far more accurately than does the audience for rock or pop.
Just to clarify, my previous comment on this post was an attempt at a joke. Looking at it again, it went awry.
I think the classical music industry needs to worry first about having an exciting, invigorating, rigorous product to sell before it worries about to whom it should be sold. If you have a good product, and you do decent marketing, people will find their way there. There are lots of people expending a tremendous amount of effort in the classical music industry, but there is also a lot of decision-making (especially in programming and interpretation) that simply seems lazy, or inherited from an earlier era and never reexamined. Marketing classical music will be a lot easier once those decisions are rethought (or reaffirmed, as appropriate – even a vigorous reaffirmation is more engaging than a simple acceptance of the way things have been).
Now I’m worried I may have gone from making a bad joke to being incoherent. Such is the way of Internet commenting.
Thank you for addressing the (to me) elephant in the room.Which is the mistake presenters make in insisting on gearing their marketing toward the younger “hip” audience. One could miss 70% percent of the potential audience (and dollars) that way. I have been to conferences (which shall remain nameless) where the only music showcased was for the under 30 crowd and I for one (over 30 musician) found little that I would spend money to see, and as far as classical there was none at all. This was explained to me as the need to bring in a younger audience, but seemed to me like “throwing out the baby with the bath water”. Hope the discussion spreads!
Good points here. And the question remains: even when you have a young audience, what do you do with it? For example, I attended the fall 2009 San Francisco Symphony gala (starring Lang Lang, MTT, etc.), and I couldn’t believe the amount of Gen Y-ers — drunk Gen Y-ers, I should say — at the concert. (I’m 27, by the way, and had a glass as well.)
I turned to a young woman sitting next to me and commented on the youthful audience. After she hiccuped, she said, “If you think they’re here for the music, you’re wrong.”
OK. So, it’s a status thing. I get it. And I got it when intermission looked a hell of a lot like prom night.
Still this was a golden opportunity to snag those Marina kids. But this phenomenon hasn’t happened again, and probably won’t until the the next gala.
Maybe it’s a free champagne thing?
On that note, did you see that the LA Phil has a student/senior rush ticket program? Looks like they are going for both ends of the spectrum. Good for them!
I agree that ‘newer’ doesn’t have to only mean ‘younger.’ However, I do believe after a certain age (maybe around 40?) you are pretty set in your musical ways. I know this isn’t based on any scientific fact, but it seems that people really start to develop their personal tastes in high school and especially college, and that’s what they stick with for a while. People change a lot during their 20s too. It’s around those times that they explore new musical genres..lots of things change, their style and appearance, for example. So while new doesn’t have to only mean ‘young,’ I can see how one would want to target younger audiences, since (in my view) they are more likely to be more open to different things since they are in that stage in life.
“However, I do believe after a certain age (maybe around 40?) you are pretty set in your musical ways. I know this isn’t based on any scientific fact, but it seems that people really start to develop their personal tastes in high school and especially college, and that’s what they stick with for a while.”
I’d like to see data on this … I’ve also seen that people over 40 tend to get so jaded with popular culture that that’s when they start casting around looking for things off the beaten path. This really does need some hard data …
There’s also a big problem in the “soap for the long term” premise.
Advertisers do not want people with brand loyalty. Seriously, this is a big misunderstanding of capitalism. advertisers don’t want people to settle on ANYTHING for the long term. They want you to settle on what they tell you … and they will consciously decide to label as obsolete the same thing they were pushing as the newest thing ever six months after its introduction. Been working in marketing for way too long to think that they want you to settle on anything for the long term. They want fickle. Capitalism (and advertising) is about eternal dissatisfaction — keeping the customer constantly disgruntled and looking for something better. It is not at all about settling on anything for the long term. What they want is fickle and insecure — product loyalty is absolutely not their objective, especially when you have megacorporations that sell competing brands.
Again, all of this is moot since music is its own product, greatly unlike television where the shows are nothing but bland carriers for the advertisements, which are the real product.
Sugar, you couldn’t be more wrong about musical taste becoming ossified by in one’s 40s. I’m in my 50s and, in the past 10 years, went from loving underground hip hop to downtempo electronica to, now, blues (which I hated when I was in my 20s).