Does Opera Need New Audience?

Anne Midgette of the Washington Post published an interesting piece today about the future of American opera.  Here’s a key tidbit:

“American opera is at a crossroads. A production of a new work at a large house costs millions of dollars — hundreds of thousands in commissioning fees alone. It’s a lot to spend on something geared toward the tastes of a narrow target audience, for which there is no mass demand, at a time of shrinking budgets. Will new works help revive the opera field or help sink it under the weight of $3 million productions?”

Anne goes on to mention the fact that newly commissioned operas today can actually be quite impactful.  People are drawn to them, and they lead to foundation grants and other good stuff.  In fact, a newly commissioned opera has some financial and reputation benefits that simply re-mounting a bit hit from last year does not have.

Interestingly, opera has been doing ok, given the overall state of the industry.  And the fact that original intellectual property is being created fairly widely in the field is a good sign.  (Now, the fact that much of this is not being performed enough is another matter.)

So the question is, does American opera need new audience?  Generically, the answer is yes.  There should always be a renewing of the audience, or eventually, you die out.  Admittedly, this can take a long time, but the process of dying colors the remaining years of life undoubtedly, so this is to be avoided.

But to dig deeper, I’d ask it this way:  how does the opera use original material to GROW its audience?

My answer is that it should use new material to grow from the inside out.  While opera is still relatively vibrant, it’s time to build on the base.  New works, according to Anne, excite opera’s core audience, and just by virtue of being contemporary in nature, stand a good chance of attracting the ‘adjacent’ audiences, which in this case probably means educated, arts-oriented, financially successful adults in their 30s and 40s.

But I don’t see anything wrong from building OUT from the core.  It’s how it’s done.  Preach to the choir, by all means, and if they all start saying “Amen” at the top of their lungs (because they’re so excited about your preaching), there’s a decent chance some of the least doubtful become the faithful.

This is something I’ve said before in other contexts:  putting a solid B+ on stage is death.  Well, eventual death.  Your hard core will not complain when you do that.

But they won’t shout ‘Amen’ either!

You Won’t Find the Future By Polishing the Past

As I mentioned the other day, it’s looking like a difficult summer for the folks who make money selling and performing concerts.  Typical of the commentary is this piece” in the New York Post, which I’ll excerpt a bit of below:

“Some are blaming the low demand for tickets on the weak economy and prices that are simply too high for the public to swallow — the average concert ticket price hit $69 in the first quarter…[industry magazine Pollstar Editor Gary] Bongiovanni said there are simply too many artists out on the road and ‘in any market from New York to Des Moines there are going to be losers.‘”

The same three problems are being identified over and over again: prices, the economy and oversupply.

Today’s economy is an all-purpose excuse for any business anywhere about anything.  If a business person blames the economy, it’s best to just go ahead and ignore them.  It’s like a football coach blaming the weather for losing a game, when both teams played in the same weather.   Perhaps one just adjusted better to the new reality of a rainy field.

Oversupply is the result of high levels of interest and high prices are the result of a lag between past and present reality.  The market should correct those quickly enough, and as we can see, it is.  However mighty the new Live Nation might be, it’s not more powerful than the marketplace.  I’ve been saying that for years.

But I don’t believe these are the real problems.

Instead, I believe the real problems are first, that the so-called concert business has been living on the ‘trust fund’ created by the great Rock boom of the 60s and 70s for a long time and is now eating into the principal.

Second, that business has not recognized the end of the Rock boom.  During a boom, a lot of things work.  Everybody’s a genius.  After it’s over, you have to come up with other reasons and ways to get through (and yes, everybody’s an idiot, or at least that’s how it feels), and in live music, that adjustment  hasn’t happened.  At least not yet.  They have generally assumed that the future would be like the past, with different musicians once the old Warhorses just couldn’t do it anymore.

Take it from a veteran of Web Boom 1, the Dot Bomb Era, Web Boom 2, and whatever it is we’re going through now.

In fact the one thing that always works is constantly working hard to build good demand for your product/show/etc. and delivering something great to people.  You’ll look like a laggard during the boom, but you’ll catch up and surpass people later. You’ll never stop getting better and cyclicality or even the economy will be irrelevant to you.

And that’s the real opportunity for live music.  On a small scale, this is being done, but on the large scale, companies like Live Nation and AEG have the opportunity to figure out and if not own at least lead the future.  There’s a formula, and it works, but they’re not going to find it by modifying the old formula.  In many ways, it’s not perhaps as good as the past, though in other ways it’s better.  It doesn’t matter because the past is no longer available anyway, so what’s the point of comparing?

The War of Attrition

Via Thomas Cott, I came across this terrific piece from Rick Lester this morning.  Here’s the key tidbit:

“Despite the eternal instinct to lay the arts community problem on a lack of “new audiences,” this is simply not the case. The number of new people entering the arts ecosystem each year is enormous. During our five year study period, nearly two-thirds of all households in the combined database (63%, or slightly more than 3 million of the 5 million households) were first time buyers. This fact endorses TRG’s oft expressed slogan in conference speeches and presentations: arts organizations must stop over-prospecting and under-retaining patrons – especially new patrons.”

What’s great about Rick’s work is that he’s not doctrinaire.  He understands that a smart marketer says “In God We Trust; All Others Must Use Data.”  And in this case, his numbers are pretty compelling:  68-73% of people who come to arts venues once don’t come back.  The implication of that, of course, is that the time and energy that goes into getting new people through the doors is 68 to 73% wasted, which is painful to contemplate.

As Rick says, those are the facts.  I have a few things to add in the way of analysis and comment.

First, as long as we’re talking numbers, there’s a phrase I repeat as a mantra to the marketers that work for me.  When people start talking about numbers being good, bad, acceptable, unacceptable or whatever, I ask “compared to what?”

A number out of context means very little.  If you told somebody who knew nothing about baseball that a player only got a hit 3 times out of every 10 he went to bat, that person might well think that was pretty low.  Of course, even a casual baseball fan knows that .300 is actually a pretty good batting average compared to other players in the game and the difficulty of the task.  Sure, intuitively 68% sounds lousy, and it probably is, but compared to what?

Let’s take as a given that organizations couldn’t possibly retain everyone (that would be 0%).  In fact, there’s absolutely nothing in my experience with large groups of buyers that suggests repeat buyers should be the majority though that could be true for some groups.  For me, that means that 50% could turn out to be a reasonable number for attrition.  68 to 73% is much higher than 50%, but at least  it feels like a workable goal.  I wonder if Rick has some benchmarks he can share in this area that would help people establish good goals in this area. Naturally, I’d love to publish them here.

Second, I’m not convinced this is a marketing problem.  Well, at least not in the sense it’s typically meant.  Rick suggests, wisely, that organizations could be over-committing resources to new audience, and I’m suggesting they could be under-wowing them when they get there.  I’ve been talking for years about the fact that content simply must get better.  A solid B+ performance of something totally in the audience’s comfort zone is a great way to get 73% attrition.  In a way, a B+ is hardly better than an F.  In the words of South Park’s Eric Cartman “Boooorrrring!”

It is a marketing problem in the sense that the content and the overall experience must be designed to delight a patron, not for the convenience of the people creating the programming.  I agree with the proposition that you shouldn’t waste your money or time prospecting for new customers when you’re not prepared to serve up an excellent experience.  There’s an old advertising maxim that says “Good advertising kills a bad product faster.”  I work with a lot of shows and read thousands of pieces of user feedback, and this is very real.

Third, not to be unkind, but I don’t really see venues doing an awful lot to “prospect” other than just buying advertising.  I’m sorry, but I don’t.  I think efforts in this area are anemic when it comes to actual innovation or even just good old fashioned hustle.  Obviously, that’s a generalization to which there are many, many exceptions, but the hard work of finding and connecting with your organization’s true potential supporters is something that’s done a lot less than it could be.  Much less often, for example, than making sure street banners adorn the neighborhoods where board members live, throwing money blindly at ads that haven’t worked in years or making what is often times a half-hearted and uninspired foray into social media.

Paid advertising works in the sense that if you do it big enough, people come, but it also tends to produce a less valuable and loyal customer than customer acquisition done through more organic means.  But that’s much harder and takes more time to show results.

Finally, let me just say that Rick’s idea that organizations should spend more time retaining existing customers is right on the money.  What I hear instead from venues more often than I’d like is that they don’t have time to do that, especially when trying to retain the customers that Goldstar, for example, has just sent them by the dozens or even hundreds.  Anybody who thinks they don’t have time to figure out how to retain a new customer who just walked through their doors should listen to what Rick is saying and figure out how to make time.

There’s No Such Thing as the “Concert Business”

At the risk of being redundant, I feel it’s important to cover this ground again.

There’s no such thing as the “concert business.”

As you might know, Live Nation recently canceled about 200 shows. (UPDATE:  apparently the number of cancellations is in dispute.  Live Nation says it’s “comparable to past years” and other disagree.  Just FYI.)  This is big stuff, and it’s an indicator that concert tours are possibly in for a long, hot summer.  (And by “hot” I mean they’ll be sweating, not that they’re “hot” in the Paris Hiltonian sense of the word.)  This has led to wailing and gnashing of teeth about the state of the ‘concert business.’  What will the concert business do to adjust to this?  How will the concert business recover?  Lower prices!  No, make the experience better!

Blah, blah, blah.

The first law of economics states that if the price drops for something, there will be more units demanded overall.  True enough.  You can see in any of the literature on customer satisfaction that money spent on improving a customer’s experience leads to an increase in loyalty and satisfaction, especially if you know what you’re doing like the experience designers at Disney.

But all of that, while potentially valuable, misses the bigger point.  As long as a person thinks they’re in the ‘concert business,’ they’re already sunk.

Live music is eternal.  Rock ‘n’ Roll-era concert economics are not.  And remember that for most of the Rock era (since, let’s say, the 60s), concerts were cheap and scarce, designed to sell out fast and make you want to buy the album.  In the last few years, that’s reversed itself, but some of the cultural fundamentals underneath all that have totally changed.

First and probably most powerfully, the cultural primacy of popular music has ended.  You can probably mark the date of death (or at least terminal illness) at about the year 2000, and it coincides completely with the declining cultural power of the baby boomers.  Boomers, you see, lived for music.  I mean, really lived for music.  It was their soundtrack; it expressed their politics; it provided their worldview in many instances.  Boomer-era Rock ‘n’ Roll has even been credited with winning the Cold War and defeating communism.

A Boomer would say “is there anything a great 3 minute record can’t do?”

Interestingly, though, this gooiness about music is not a feeling shared by those before and after them.  Not to say that people don’t love music.  Like I said, that’s eternal.  But the historical blip on the radar screen that was the Boomer attitude toward music has passed.  Younger people, even Gen Xers who aren’t all that young anymore, don’t put music on the throne of their lives the way boomers did.

And the Gen Y and Millenials?  Don’t be fooled by the fact that they’ve got 5000 songs on their ipods.  It’s not the same and they’re still at an age where music carries with it the emotional punch of everything else about growing up.

There’s no law of nature that says the most popular musicians can sell out arenas.  Just because Elton John or the Who rocked people’s faces off at the Hollywood Bowl in ’79 doesn’t mean the latter day equivalent will do that in 2010, or 2015.

In fact, here’s a little thought experiment:  who’s a gigantic rock/pop star under the age of 40?    Not the Flavor of the Month like Ke$ha, but somebody that has a chance of being a viable commercial entity in 5 years? And somebody most people would know, not some niche-y nerd rocker (who might be awesome, don’t get me wrong).

Yeah, there are a few, but it took you a minute, didn’t it?

In 1980, you could have sat there for a half hour rattling off names like Springsteen, The Who, The Stones, The Beatles, Elton John, Billy Joel, Eric Clapton, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Michael Jackson, Led Zeppelin, and so on.  (I only stopped because I got bored with the sentence.)

What you have now is not the ‘concert business’ but a sub-genre of the live entertainment business.  It’s not a question of ‘which star do you like?’ but ‘whether you care at all.’

At one time, the ‘champion’ of the music world was the champion of the whole world.  The biggest rock star was probably the biggest star period, and definitely right up at the top.

Not anymore.

Is this bad news?  If you’re deeply embedded in things as they’ve been with concerts, yes, I’m afraid the news is a little grim.  If you’re not, either because you’re just a fan or because you’ll entertain the possibility of change, the news is what I’d call neutral.  It never did anybody any particular good that Led Zeppelin could drive Rolls Royces into swimming pools because they were so rich.  Except them and the local Rolls Royce dealer, of course.

On the other hand, the life-size scale of music may be a little less exciting.  In compensation, you’ll get a more intimate experience and there will be a lot more music to choose from.  Eventually, the paradigm of mega-shows will collapse, and really, that’s no great loss.  So the big stars will play in 5 to 7 thousand seat houses, which tend to be recently built and have better seats and acoustics.  Sure, the acts like to make more money, but I bet you would too.  They’ll still do fine, or at least some of them will.    Is it really that big of a tragedy if only 100 people worldwide get to live the rockstar lifestyle instead of 500?

So welcome to the new world.  There’s no such thing as the concert business; it’s just a part of the spectrum of live entertainment options for a dramatically empowered consumer with the tendency to put their preferences on shuffle.

There’s still success to be had and innovations to be created, but only if you can convince yourself that something’s changed.  Letting go of what’s already gone is the critical first step to getting to what’s next.

“Discounting Silliness” Presentation Now Live

As promised, here’s a recreation of the presentation we gave at EAMC last week in Chicago.  It’s a quick recap of some of the points I made in the “How Not To Discount” series.  Please take a look and pass it around, though you might want to click on the little ‘expand’ button in the bottom right as the player is quite small for some reason.  (BYOSS-Bring Your Own Silly String.)

EAMC Conference Presentation Online Tomorrow

Last week, the Goldstar team and I went to the EAMC Conference in Chicago (more commonly known as the Arena Conference), and even though I spent most of my time either buying half-price drinks for conference attendees or covered in Silly String, it was a great week.

I gave a presentation called “Discounting Silliness:  A (Somewhat) Serious Discussion of Silly Discounting Practices.”  I created a video of the talk which I will be putting online tomorrow, so stay tuned for that.  We had a number of people ask where they could see the presentation again or show it to someone else (usually their boss).  So here’s the answer.

Well, the answer will be here tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Write the CEO an Email, Get a Lawyer Letter

Wow.  Here’s a tidbit from an incredible story:

“… Giorgio Galante found out today [that] sending AT&T’s CEO two emails in two weeks results in a phone call from AT&T’s Executive Response Team and a warning that further emails will result in a cease and desist letter.”

Now, to be fair, we don’t know what was in Galante’s emails.  They could have been abusive; they could have been threatening; but barring that, this story is a great example of a company getting completely twisted around the axle when it comes to interacting with people.

Sure, the CEO of AT&T has to guard his time, and I’m certain the pr team was slightly embarrassed that the big boss was dealing with stuff he wasn’t supposed to in his actual inbox, but come on, people.  It’s just an email.  It’s not as though Galante was expecting to actually hear back from him.  If, unlike Steve Jobs, to whom Galante apparently also wrote, you don’t want to deal with inbound stuff like this, just delete it or filter the guy’s email address.

What does threatening a ‘cease and desist’ say?  At least three things I can think of:

1.  In our hearts, we don’t want to be bothered by actual customers.  There’s a time and place for interacting with the icky marketplace, and we’ll tell you where and when that is.

2.  We’re kinda techno-incompetent, which is unfortunate for a technology company.  I mean, really, how much harder is it to deal with this situation the way they have than the way a person who could use in-box filters would?

3.  We might be afraid of our boss.  I can’t actually see the CEO of AT&T making the decision to do this; much more likely, it’s some underling trying to use napalm to get rid of a mouse.  Sometimes the PR/Comm team’s mission goes from trying to help the boss communicate to merely protecting him from actually having to communicate.  If that’s the culture, then failing to protect him makes you look bad.  Well, at this point, they all look bad.

By the way, I’m by no means suggesting that the CEO of AT&T throw himself open to interruption by everyone in the world with an opinion on his company.  That would be difficult to manage.  But I’m strongly suggesting that if it happens to happen, just go with it.  You’ll survive contact with a paying customer.

The Agony of Defeat and How to Use It

This article (via Thomas) has me thinking about some big stuff.  To sum up, it’s about the National Theatre (UK) and its program to broadcast theatre productions live around the country to satellite-equipped movie theatres.  That’s familiar, of course, and the Metropolitan Opera (NYC) obviously was the leader in this area starting several years ago.

Here’s what I’m really thinking about though.

The agony of defeat.

Well, not the agony of defeat itself, but instead, this clip:

If you were a sports fan, well, really anytime in the last 40 years, there’s a good chance you’ve seen that obscure ski jump from 1970.  Why?  Because it was in ABC’s intro sequence to “Wide World of Sports.”

And if you haven’t seen that jump, you’ve probably heard the phrase, “The Thrill of Victory, and the Agony of Defeat.”

Well, this ski jump went with the ‘agony of defeat’ part.

And what the hell does this have to do with Helen Mirren on stage at the Olivier in London?

I’ll tell you what:  Roone Arledge.

Roone Arledge was the man who pretty much invented modern sports.  No, he didn’t design plays or better training methods or any of that.  He invented modern sports in that he took them from a niche-y jock backwater to the broad cultural juggernaut that they are today.

You see, in the 50′s and 60′s, sports was on TV and in the papers, but it wasn’t the same.  Mostly, TV and radio stations would stick a camera or microphone somewhere in the vicinity of the field or court and then some earnest reporter would dutifully recount what was happening on the field.

Roone turned sports into entertainment for the masses.  He gave it drama.  He brought you into the action.  He took it from no-nonsense transmissions of the details of athletic contests to an unfolding human drama in multiple dimensions.

If it weren’t for Roone, kids in the 90s wouldn’t have wanted to “Be Like Mike.”  If it weren’t for Roone, the Olympics would be a droning, dull, endless broadcast of shot put attempt after shot put attempt, and you’d never know that the guy about to try to break the world record survived the war in his home country by hiding in a cellar for two years.

When Tiger Woods makes a bad shot, you expect to see the expression on his face.  Is he mad or does he look calm and ready to plan his next shot?  Before Roone Arledge, no camera would have been there to let you know that.

So when I hear about this program at the National Theatre, it’s not, for me, so much about getting theatre “out there” to other places.  It’s about using the techniques of live broadcast NOT JUST to broadcast, but perhaps more importantly to BRING MORE to the performance.

Who’s the Roone Arledge of theatre?  Who’s in a position to take what now seems to be a niche-y drama geek backwater and turn it into a broad cultural juggernaut?  It doesn’t work to sit back and say “let the work speak for itself.”  Sure, of course, let the work speak.  But that’s like saying Roone Arledge should have let the on the field performances speak for themselves.

Wrong.  Roone realized his job was to tell the story that gets you TO the field or the court or the ski slope, and then HELP the performances speak for themselves.

You could not care less about the result of some obscure ski jumping competition in Austria that happened during the Nixon administration.  But if you watch that ‘Agony of Defeat’ clip, you’re transported instantly, and you care.

Roone did that.  He used broadcast techniques and story telling techniques to make the content better for the audience.

Who’s going to be the Roone Arledge of Theatre?  I can’t wait to find out.

Get Ready for More Targeting Failure

I’ve never read Uwe Hook before, but this piece really got my attention.  Uwe echoes my thoughts on the subject of ad “targeting” exactly.  Here’s the key tidbit:

“Behavioral Targeting 1.0 promised to deliver relevant messages to targeted audiences. I’ve tested these campaigns for years and they never delivered on their promise. Facebook’s Behavioral Targeting 2.0 will fail even more miserably.”
He’s so right.  High performing ads have been just around the corner for the entire 12 years I’ve been in the Internet business because, pretty soon, we’d be able to ‘target’ the ads in new ways, based on your browsing history, based on your demographic information, based on a combination of what you ate for lunch and the numbers in today’s date rearranged from high to low.

And yet, ad performance has gone from what was, in retrospect, pretty good to absolutely abysmal.  Here’s a graph I used in a presentation a few days ago to show the Click Through Rate on display ads in my personal experience since the late 90s.        

Wow, look at the impact of all that targeting over the last bunch of years!  It’s funny because this has been going on for so long that people are saying things NOW that they said in 1998, except since some of those people weren’t there the first time, the think the idea is new!

Do you like to be targeted? I’m guessing not.  People are the ‘targets’ of assassination plots and investigations, not fun things that they actually like. (Or, as I once put it, “you’re targeted by the Air Force for a JDAM down your chimney or by a scam artist for using your identity to spend a weekend in Cabo.”)

No thanks.