WARNING: This post contains spoilers.
POSSIBLE SELLING POINT: This post contains spoilers.
I’m going to embarrass my sister now. There was one year she desperately wanted to know what her “big Christmas” present was. She knew our parents were hiding (” “) it in our dad’s workshop (not to be confused with Santa’s Workshop, but, as it turns out, the same thing) in the basement, so she ran downstairs one day and looked. She saw it–I think “it” was a new bike?–came upstairs, and immediately burst into tears. Now she knew what her gift was, and Christmas wasn’t going to be fun anymore.
I’m going to embarrass myself now. I’ve spent a considerable portion of the past month trying to get myself a ticket to one of the Sondheim birthday evenings at the New York Philharmonic. I finally found one in my price range: a “cheap” $75 ticket posted on Craigslist by someone who, as it turns out, works at the Metropolitan Opera. Small town U.S.A..
I picked the ticket up from my Craigslist Hero at the Lincoln Center Plaza earlier today, and learned that he had seen the show last night. The same thing happened the last time I bought a ticket off Craigslist: I procured a My Bloody Valentine ticket at a Right Aid rendezvous, and the scruffy seller lad had seen the show the night before. In both cases, I was extremely curious to know what had been performed, but didn’t want to know everything. I kept saying, “So did they play X? Wait wait – don’t tell me.” Today, my curiosity got the better of me, slightly, and I found out that Chip Zien and Joanna Gleason sing “It Takes Two,” that the audience laughs because the song starts with “You’ve changed….”, that the finale is fantastic, and that Elaine Stritch does not, in fact, sing “Ladies Who Lunch.” Knowing that last bit is probably for the best, since when my friend Mark and I went to see the Broadway revival of Company, we drank way too many vodka stingers beforehand as a gesture of Joanne solidarity. And in retrospect, all I really needed the My Bloody Valentine guy to tell me was to bring earplugs, which he decidedly did not.
This makes me to wonder: is a concert where potential audiences don’t know the set-list/program easier to market? I personally knew the set-list for my client Gabriel Kahane’s American Songbook show a couple weeks ago, and I was kind of sad that I did. It would have been more fun to guess what was coming next, rather than scroll through the program I had in my head. Lincoln Center prints the set-lists from their Songbook shows and hands them out at the end of the concerts, so they make a conscious decision not to use the program as a hook, even though they know it in advance. Can you imagine if say, the set-list for the upcoming Spoon concert at Radio City was advertised on Radio City’s website? You *hope* that they’re going to play 1020AM, but you don’t *really* want to know. There’s an intake of breath and an excited murmur every time a violinist plays Air on the G String as an encore; would audiences be as excited if they knew it was coming?
This all begs the question, do we see classical music concerts for the performers or orchestra themselves, or do we see them for the repertoire? Would you go to a solo piano recital if you didn’t know what the artist was going to perform? Is the artist, the venue, and the type of music enough? Presenters are funny about this: they often book soloists without
asking what the program is going to be, and then when they receive the
program from management at a later date, they complain that the program isn’t good for their
audiences. So were you booking this date for the artist or for the
program? I have a friend who will go see basically anything at Rockwood, a tiny club on the Lower East Side. Sometimes he doesn’t even remember what he’s seen there the night before; he just likes being at Rockwood.
The Vienna Philharmonic comes to New York once a year, not unlike Christmas. Maybe I don’t want to know what their program is in advance; I’m going to see them anyway, so it doesn’t matter, and maybe I want to be surprised. On the other hand, I could see the New York Philharmonic any time, so in that case the program and the soloist(s) are the most important things. You want to be surprised by your Christmas gifts; you don’t want to get home from the grocery store and be surprised by your groceries for the week. (“What? Brooooccoli? Come on.“) I think presenters and orchestras can play with this idea, though. If they have soloist who they know will sell tickets on his or her own, maybe they don’t announce the program. If they have an intriguing program (the Berg concerto I’m going to see on Thursday, for example), maybe they don’t announce the soloist. The problem, here, is that it’s hard to identify the one thing everyone cares about, but I do think the element of surprise is something to consider.
Hi Amanda,
Really liked the post. I think you’ll find that knowing the repertoire varies depending on your audience – but I think that your idea of not necessarily sharing the program chould be used to target various sectors.
For example, for those kind of middle-ground classical attenders who don’t subscribe to every concert but pick and choose – I imagine you’d find that it’s got a lot do with the repertoire (if we’re talking about orchestra music). I’m one of these people. The best thing you can do is put an index of composers in a prominent place in your brochure and on your website, so I can put the Bruckner 7 and the Missa Solemnis in my diary for next year. That sort of thing.
However, if you’re marketing to my friends who don’t know anything about classical music – never mind the usual overture, concerto, symphony work listing. They’re either not going to know what the works are or see the name Mozart and think “pretty background music”. So for them, ow about just advertising the overall mood of what the night might be about without telling the program? Perhaps with some quotes from raving fans and reviewers? Seeing as they don’t really know the music, advertising other factors instead of the program would be a great idea. It might disarm them enough that they want to try this new experience, rather than just thinking that they know what it is before they go in.
Of course, all of this is skirting around the bigger issue – once we get past the marketing, when we’re actually in the concert hall, what is the experience like for the audience? If it’s just an ordinary orchestra concert that we weren’t that interested in before, it’s really just a case of having a great DVD case and a B-grade movie on the DVD, you know what I mean? Except that it cost us more than $10 bucks to find out that it was a dud.
Does anyone know – are there many places where artistic is working with marketing to ensure that the concert experience is as engaging as the marketing? Or is it still the old “artistic tells marketing what to sell”?
A good example in the classical biz of concerts where the program is not announced in advance is the chamber music series at the Spoleto Festival, run for many years by Charles Wadsworth and now by Geoff Nuttall of the St. Lawrence SQ. That’s been the most popular and consistent draw of the Festival for many years now.
The fun of knowing a program in advance is wondering whether the performance will provide a new and/or interesting interpretation. The virtuosi of today think fast and loud and with perfection. Kreisler and Schnabel played out tune or wrong notes but their interpretations were always different and fascinatingand gave you cause to think. One left the concert hall taking something new with you.
This is an interesting concept. We’ve gone with lots of “surprise” in the past for reasons like we don’t have enough staff to get *all* the details on the website before tickets go on sale or our artistic director has decided *exactly* which overture at the time of the season brochure printing. But, overwhelmingly, the #1 question we get on the phone is “what is the repertoire?” Whether it’s a program we’re producing or presenting, people seem to want to know. Perhaps that’s just the Metro area that I’m in (Orlando)…I don’t know. We’ve also discussed the “mood” aspect of programming. We’ve worked really hard with the artistic side of our organization to plan overarching themes for the last two seasons, but it’s hard to say if that really sold any tickets or not. Because, when people call they still want to know what’s on the program. The other problem is, with limited resources on every front, how do you segment and target marketing to the mood vs the programatic peoples? Money is always a problem – for research, multiple designs, multiple printings, etc. How do you put it all in one package without being *super* wordy, etc? Ah, the joys of nonprofit arts……..
We presenters are “so funny” about the program because our patrons are. This point has already been made in previous comment – but I wanted to assure you that this thought is very much alive and well in the midwest too.
There are many patrons that classical music is not just a pass time, it is a passion and a hobby. Like some might know every stat on their bracket picks for March Madness, these patrons know each work, who they have heard play it and in what hall. They collect these experiences like trading cards.
Far be it from me, to tell them what is and what is not important when they are curating their own cultural life, that I am a better curator of their experience then they are. I made this mistake once, when I did not put the programs in my brochure, and spent the better part of a week on the phone reading the program lists to patrons who really wanted to know.
Those who care – really do. Those who do not – won’t read that part.
We asked this very question in an audience survey a few years ago. While the various audiences (subscribers, single ticket buyers, students) ranked “interest in artist” as a “very important” factor by a ratio of 2:1 over the specific works being performed, fully 30-35% in each category said the program was critical in their decisionmaking. I have to agree with Karen and Jonathan on this one — it does matter, and there are people who will hold off purchasing until they know what is being performed. This is true for dance audiences also.
For classical music, it’s essential for me to know what’s being performed so I can listen to some or all of it beforehand. Classical music (whether it’s Mozart or Messiaen) is accessible to anyone, yes, but it’s also a lot to absorb!
If I go in a try to process a couple hours of unfamiliar classical music, my mind starts wandering but if I’ve listened beforehand, I have little islands of familiarity to swim to. That expectancy during the performance (“Hmm, this section is sort of noodling around but there’s a cool part coming up.”) makes it more exciting too.
I’m one of those people who always wants to know the repertoire, whether it’s classical music, a pop or rock concert or even a radio program. It helps up my anticipation. But then I also don’t mind movie spoilers so I probably an exceptional case.