February 2009 Archives
Hm, I wonder why Brooklyn Vegan didn't mention Hilary Hahn at SUNY Purchase and Hélène Grimaud a the 92 Street Y as possible competition for this weekend's "fancy seated shows". I'm sure both Hilary and Hélène's recitals will also include seven musicians, three dancers, choreography, and costumes, so David Byrne really shouldn't be surprised when no when shows up to see him at Radio City.
I am working in the Amtrak waiting area for ticketed-passengers-only of
Penn Station (without a ticket, but I convinced the guard he should let
me stay because I'm expecting someone who does have a
ticket), waiting for my friend Josh to come in from D.C.. There is
classical music playing on every speaker, but I have no idea what it
is. How lovely it would be if there was a nice screen somewhere, like
they have in Starbucks-es, telling us all what the piece is and which
orchestra/soloist is playing it.
I suppose this isn't Penn Station's battle to fight, but it reminds me that all of us hear classical music everywhere we go, it just often blends together because 1. we're not told what we're hearing and 2. it's usually not a recording of the best-of-the-best, and thus not as memorable.
Can record labels do something about this by offering their recordings for free to places like Penn Station/whomever produces elevator "entertainment"/showrooms/chain stores in which classical music is played (Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel...), or is that a pointless struggle? Would it be prohibitively expensive to work with transportation centers like Penn Station on having "listening lounges" where travelers could plug their headphones into stations and hear the most recent, say, Deutsche Grammophon, releases while they wait for their trains/planes/friends? And if it was even possible, would that sell records?
I suppose this isn't Penn Station's battle to fight, but it reminds me that all of us hear classical music everywhere we go, it just often blends together because 1. we're not told what we're hearing and 2. it's usually not a recording of the best-of-the-best, and thus not as memorable.
Can record labels do something about this by offering their recordings for free to places like Penn Station/whomever produces elevator "entertainment"/showrooms/chain stores in which classical music is played (Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel...), or is that a pointless struggle? Would it be prohibitively expensive to work with transportation centers like Penn Station on having "listening lounges" where travelers could plug their headphones into stations and hear the most recent, say, Deutsche Grammophon, releases while they wait for their trains/planes/friends? And if it was even possible, would that sell records?
This week, veritable performing arts marketing *celebrity* Thomas Cott on what it's like to work for one of the few international dance brands, the when and where's of publicist self-promotion, and being a jack of all trades.
Thomas Cott is the Director of Marketing for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, currently celebrating its 50th Anniversary. He has worked on approximately 120 plays and musicals for Broadway and Off-Broadway houses, as well as on 40 opera productions in New York. He is a founding staff member of Lincoln Center Theater, working there for its first 18 seasons. Similary, Cott recently consulted for two other Lincoln Center constituents: The Metropolitan Opera and New York City Opera. As an independent producer and management consultant, he has worked with The New 42nd Street, New York City Ballet, the New York Public Library and Paper Mill Playhouse, among others. He distributes a daily e-newsletter on arts marketing called "You've Cott Mail". Additional information can be found on his website.
When someone told me about your newsletter, I was first struck by the fact that you have a website. Not a website advertising your services as an independent publicist/consultant/producer (though I'm sure it also serves that purpose), but an informational website like an artist would have. You even have a press clippings! So meta. Do you think, ideally, all industry professionals should have websites? Something I've also been thinking about a lot: should critics have websites?
Actually, when I first set up my website back in 2004, its sole purpose was to be an electronic resumé. I was looking for work and thought having a website would be more effective than a paper document to show the full breadth of my experience. I ended up consulting for the next four years and I kept adding information and even press clippings to keep track of the projects I did. Although I never advertised my services as a consultant, I did tag the bottom of each day's edition of "You've Cott Mail" with my web address to help drive traffic to my site and I definitely got some consulting work as a result.
However, I don't think most industry professionals need a personal website--it's useful for an artist or other independent contractor looking for work and it can also be a platform for arts professionals with something worthwhile to say. I personally enjoy the blogs created by critics--who are already writers by trade--such as Chris Jones of The Chicago Tribune, Alex Ross from The New Yorker, the London-based Mark Shenton or The Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout.
What are the most effective ways independent publicists and PR people at arts organizations can market themselves and advance their own careers?
I don't think PR people who are full-time employees of an arts organization should be in the business of marketing themselves. Their business is to promote their organization. That said, because this is a relatively small world, if someone does a great PR job as a staffer, their industry colleagues will undoubtedly know who is responsible.
Independent publicists are in a different position. Since they constantly need to look for their next assignment, creating a website to showcase successful campaigns and client testimonials is an easy and inexpensive way to self-promote. Or they might do something less hard-sell, like networking through LinkedIn and Facebook or by writing a blog like yours about industry news and trends (and become a valued resource in the process).
How is a successful publicity campaign different from a successful marketing campaign? What's more important for an organization: good publicity or good marketing?
The impact of a successful publicity campaign is harder to measure than a successful marketing campaign, but that doesn't make it any less important to an arts organization or individual production. While they're both hard to do well, I think it may be a bit more difficult for publicists, since there are fewer traditional media outlets than there used to be and less space available in the mainstream press that still covers the arts.
When I first started out 25 years ago, PR and marketing were often done by the same person. These jobs now require separate skills, although both have had to adapt to an era in which the audience plays a more central role in disseminating the latest news, reviewing productions and even generating direct ticket sales. The most successful publicists and marketers are the ones who have moved on from 'this is the way we've always done it.'
On your website homepage, you define yourself as a "producer, artistic director, marketer, fundraiser, strategic planner, writer, editor, graphic designer, event planner, arts educator and management consultant", and you actually have extremely prestigious credits to support each of those labels (and you don't look 95 in your photo!). In 2009, is it essential to have a wide-range of specialties? Have people been equally successful in the marketing/PR realm with just one X-Man skill?
Well, thanks for saying I don't look 95. (Ah, the magic of Photoshop.)
I do not think it is essential to have had the wide range of jobs I've had to become a successful marketer. I realize I'm a bit of an oddity, because I've done nearly every kind of job in the performing arts. I just never thought of myself as solely a marketing guy, and I've been fortunate to have had lots of different opportunities.
Don't get me wrong. I think arts marketing is a great gig, and it's a job I've done many times. But I like to take a more holistic view whenever I can. Also, because I started out on the artistic side, my orientation has always been to put the art first and figure out how to sell it second. While I agree filling every seat is important, I think filling them with an audience who is connected to the work on stage is even more valuable. It's the best way I know to build brand loyalty, promote repeat business and solicit financial support for the arts.
You distribute a free daily newsletter - You've Cott Mail - which I enjoy very much, and which now has thousands of readers. When did you start the newsletter? Where did those readers come from? Have you considered selling ads?
The roots of "You've Cott Mail" go back about a decade. I've always been a media junkie and so when I found interesting stories I thought my friends might have missed, I would send them around via email. As often happens with these things, they would forward my emails to their friends or colleagues, and some of those folks would email me and ask to be added to my distribution. Like that old shampoo commercial, they told two friends and they told two friends and suddenly I had hundreds of people on my list. I began to do these emails on a daily basis, and the sheer volume of emails (I used to send each story out individually) became too much. So I switched to the current format: one email each weekday with usually 4-5 stories in a digest form plus a hyperlink to the full text of the articles.
I've never charged for the service and I've never considered selling ads -- although if the list grows too much bigger, I may have to rethink that! (The cost of this little hobby has grown now that I'm using a commercial email service to deliver YCM.) That said, I don't have a need for it to become a business; I like the fact that I'm doing it because it's fun for me and I can walk away if that changes.
Nevertheless, people do become attached to these daily emails. When I took short breaks in the past, I would get worried messages, asking if everything was okay when they hadn't heard from me. Now when I take a vacation or work intervenes, I make sure to send out a notification to the list as to when they can expect the next edition of YCM.
I'm fascinated by how the readership has grown, especially in the last year or so. It used to be just a small number of New York theater people. Now the list includes people from every aspect of the performing arts--in places around the world, from Australia to Europe. Because of this, I have expanded the scope of the articles I send around, but the essential nature of YCM has never changed: it's still just me at my computer in the morning, looking to share interesting stories about the arts I think most people on my list would not have otherwise seen.
What was it like to go from being a freelance consultant to having a day-job at Alvin Ailey?
Oh, I am so much happier at Ailey. I never wanted to be a freelance worker. I much prefer having a staff job, to have the chance to build relationships with a board, staff, artists and audiences (something you rarely get to do as a consultant) and invest in one company's mission.
One of the things that drew me to Ailey is its mission to use the beauty and humanity of the African-American heritage and other cultures to unite people of all races, ages and backgrounds. Even before I arrived at the Ailey organization, I marveled at the company's ability to affect the lives of a huge, diverse audience through its performances by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Ailey II, the professional training offered by the Ailey School, the adult classes at the Ailey Extension, and arts-in-education programs and summer camps for underserved youth.
And I feel lucky to have joined Ailey for its 50th Season, which has been marked by so many memorable celebrations. Our golden anniversary has been given even deeper resonance with the election of the country's first African-American president. We were honored that, on his first night out since arriving at the White House, Barack Obama brought his family to see the Ailey dancers perform at the Kennedy Center a few weeks ago.
I saw a photo of Alvin Ailey himself dancing the other day, and I had this rather embarrassing personal moment of "Oh, right: he was a real person." It was very odd, but in my mind Alvin Ailey, as in, Alvin Ailey Dance Theater is such a brand now, that it's easy to forget its origins. How is having international brand recognition like that a blessing? A curse?
The Ailey 'brand' is indeed known internationally, but even as it has grown from a small company to become a leader in its field, the organization Mr. Ailey started in 1958 has never strayed from his core beliefs. We still adhere to his credo that "dance came from the people and it should always be delivered back to the people." Having brand recognition only makes it easier to make his vision a reality.
As Director of Marketing, are you responsible for worldwide marketing as well when the Company is on tour? If so, what is it like to market a commodity you know extremely well to a consumer-base you may not be as familiar with? Are there local marketing/PR consultants on the ground, so to speak?
In addition to all of our New York-based activities, I am responsible for making sure that all of the venues where Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Ailey II perform around the world adhere to our general practices and use our approved marketing materials. Likewise, Ailey's Director of Public Relations, Christopher Zunner, coordinates with local presenters on their PR activities. There are a handful of cities where we have direct involvement in the marketing and PR campaigns but, everywhere else, these efforts are managed by the local presenter, who knows her or his community best.
When you took the job last summer, what were your goals for Alvin Ailey? Without revealing you own X-Man skills, how have you set out to achieve them?
I can tell you what my goal wasn't when I first joined Ailey. I didn't see any great need to reinvent the wheel at Ailey. The company has been well-marketed in the past and my chief goal was to sustain their high level of achievement. Of course, the battered economy has made it a harder environment for all arts organizations, but so far, the Ailey audience has rallied behind us during these difficult times. Of course, there is always room for growth and improvement. One of my big projects right now is overseeing a new company-wide plan to make better use of technology to engage and serve our audiences. That project is going to roll out over the next four years and I'm excited about all the possibilities.
Thomas Cott is the Director of Marketing for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, currently celebrating its 50th Anniversary. He has worked on approximately 120 plays and musicals for Broadway and Off-Broadway houses, as well as on 40 opera productions in New York. He is a founding staff member of Lincoln Center Theater, working there for its first 18 seasons. Similary, Cott recently consulted for two other Lincoln Center constituents: The Metropolitan Opera and New York City Opera. As an independent producer and management consultant, he has worked with The New 42nd Street, New York City Ballet, the New York Public Library and Paper Mill Playhouse, among others. He distributes a daily e-newsletter on arts marketing called "You've Cott Mail". Additional information can be found on his website. When someone told me about your newsletter, I was first struck by the fact that you have a website. Not a website advertising your services as an independent publicist/consultant/producer (though I'm sure it also serves that purpose), but an informational website like an artist would have. You even have a press clippings! So meta. Do you think, ideally, all industry professionals should have websites? Something I've also been thinking about a lot: should critics have websites?
Actually, when I first set up my website back in 2004, its sole purpose was to be an electronic resumé. I was looking for work and thought having a website would be more effective than a paper document to show the full breadth of my experience. I ended up consulting for the next four years and I kept adding information and even press clippings to keep track of the projects I did. Although I never advertised my services as a consultant, I did tag the bottom of each day's edition of "You've Cott Mail" with my web address to help drive traffic to my site and I definitely got some consulting work as a result.
However, I don't think most industry professionals need a personal website--it's useful for an artist or other independent contractor looking for work and it can also be a platform for arts professionals with something worthwhile to say. I personally enjoy the blogs created by critics--who are already writers by trade--such as Chris Jones of The Chicago Tribune, Alex Ross from The New Yorker, the London-based Mark Shenton or The Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout.
What are the most effective ways independent publicists and PR people at arts organizations can market themselves and advance their own careers?
I don't think PR people who are full-time employees of an arts organization should be in the business of marketing themselves. Their business is to promote their organization. That said, because this is a relatively small world, if someone does a great PR job as a staffer, their industry colleagues will undoubtedly know who is responsible.
Independent publicists are in a different position. Since they constantly need to look for their next assignment, creating a website to showcase successful campaigns and client testimonials is an easy and inexpensive way to self-promote. Or they might do something less hard-sell, like networking through LinkedIn and Facebook or by writing a blog like yours about industry news and trends (and become a valued resource in the process).
How is a successful publicity campaign different from a successful marketing campaign? What's more important for an organization: good publicity or good marketing?
The impact of a successful publicity campaign is harder to measure than a successful marketing campaign, but that doesn't make it any less important to an arts organization or individual production. While they're both hard to do well, I think it may be a bit more difficult for publicists, since there are fewer traditional media outlets than there used to be and less space available in the mainstream press that still covers the arts.
When I first started out 25 years ago, PR and marketing were often done by the same person. These jobs now require separate skills, although both have had to adapt to an era in which the audience plays a more central role in disseminating the latest news, reviewing productions and even generating direct ticket sales. The most successful publicists and marketers are the ones who have moved on from 'this is the way we've always done it.'
On your website homepage, you define yourself as a "producer, artistic director, marketer, fundraiser, strategic planner, writer, editor, graphic designer, event planner, arts educator and management consultant", and you actually have extremely prestigious credits to support each of those labels (and you don't look 95 in your photo!). In 2009, is it essential to have a wide-range of specialties? Have people been equally successful in the marketing/PR realm with just one X-Man skill?
Well, thanks for saying I don't look 95. (Ah, the magic of Photoshop.)
I do not think it is essential to have had the wide range of jobs I've had to become a successful marketer. I realize I'm a bit of an oddity, because I've done nearly every kind of job in the performing arts. I just never thought of myself as solely a marketing guy, and I've been fortunate to have had lots of different opportunities.
Don't get me wrong. I think arts marketing is a great gig, and it's a job I've done many times. But I like to take a more holistic view whenever I can. Also, because I started out on the artistic side, my orientation has always been to put the art first and figure out how to sell it second. While I agree filling every seat is important, I think filling them with an audience who is connected to the work on stage is even more valuable. It's the best way I know to build brand loyalty, promote repeat business and solicit financial support for the arts.
You distribute a free daily newsletter - You've Cott Mail - which I enjoy very much, and which now has thousands of readers. When did you start the newsletter? Where did those readers come from? Have you considered selling ads?
The roots of "You've Cott Mail" go back about a decade. I've always been a media junkie and so when I found interesting stories I thought my friends might have missed, I would send them around via email. As often happens with these things, they would forward my emails to their friends or colleagues, and some of those folks would email me and ask to be added to my distribution. Like that old shampoo commercial, they told two friends and they told two friends and suddenly I had hundreds of people on my list. I began to do these emails on a daily basis, and the sheer volume of emails (I used to send each story out individually) became too much. So I switched to the current format: one email each weekday with usually 4-5 stories in a digest form plus a hyperlink to the full text of the articles.
I've never charged for the service and I've never considered selling ads -- although if the list grows too much bigger, I may have to rethink that! (The cost of this little hobby has grown now that I'm using a commercial email service to deliver YCM.) That said, I don't have a need for it to become a business; I like the fact that I'm doing it because it's fun for me and I can walk away if that changes.
Nevertheless, people do become attached to these daily emails. When I took short breaks in the past, I would get worried messages, asking if everything was okay when they hadn't heard from me. Now when I take a vacation or work intervenes, I make sure to send out a notification to the list as to when they can expect the next edition of YCM.
I'm fascinated by how the readership has grown, especially in the last year or so. It used to be just a small number of New York theater people. Now the list includes people from every aspect of the performing arts--in places around the world, from Australia to Europe. Because of this, I have expanded the scope of the articles I send around, but the essential nature of YCM has never changed: it's still just me at my computer in the morning, looking to share interesting stories about the arts I think most people on my list would not have otherwise seen.
What was it like to go from being a freelance consultant to having a day-job at Alvin Ailey?
Oh, I am so much happier at Ailey. I never wanted to be a freelance worker. I much prefer having a staff job, to have the chance to build relationships with a board, staff, artists and audiences (something you rarely get to do as a consultant) and invest in one company's mission.
One of the things that drew me to Ailey is its mission to use the beauty and humanity of the African-American heritage and other cultures to unite people of all races, ages and backgrounds. Even before I arrived at the Ailey organization, I marveled at the company's ability to affect the lives of a huge, diverse audience through its performances by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Ailey II, the professional training offered by the Ailey School, the adult classes at the Ailey Extension, and arts-in-education programs and summer camps for underserved youth.
And I feel lucky to have joined Ailey for its 50th Season, which has been marked by so many memorable celebrations. Our golden anniversary has been given even deeper resonance with the election of the country's first African-American president. We were honored that, on his first night out since arriving at the White House, Barack Obama brought his family to see the Ailey dancers perform at the Kennedy Center a few weeks ago.
I saw a photo of Alvin Ailey himself dancing the other day, and I had this rather embarrassing personal moment of "Oh, right: he was a real person." It was very odd, but in my mind Alvin Ailey, as in, Alvin Ailey Dance Theater is such a brand now, that it's easy to forget its origins. How is having international brand recognition like that a blessing? A curse?
The Ailey 'brand' is indeed known internationally, but even as it has grown from a small company to become a leader in its field, the organization Mr. Ailey started in 1958 has never strayed from his core beliefs. We still adhere to his credo that "dance came from the people and it should always be delivered back to the people." Having brand recognition only makes it easier to make his vision a reality.
As Director of Marketing, are you responsible for worldwide marketing as well when the Company is on tour? If so, what is it like to market a commodity you know extremely well to a consumer-base you may not be as familiar with? Are there local marketing/PR consultants on the ground, so to speak?
In addition to all of our New York-based activities, I am responsible for making sure that all of the venues where Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Ailey II perform around the world adhere to our general practices and use our approved marketing materials. Likewise, Ailey's Director of Public Relations, Christopher Zunner, coordinates with local presenters on their PR activities. There are a handful of cities where we have direct involvement in the marketing and PR campaigns but, everywhere else, these efforts are managed by the local presenter, who knows her or his community best.
When you took the job last summer, what were your goals for Alvin Ailey? Without revealing you own X-Man skills, how have you set out to achieve them?
I can tell you what my goal wasn't when I first joined Ailey. I didn't see any great need to reinvent the wheel at Ailey. The company has been well-marketed in the past and my chief goal was to sustain their high level of achievement. Of course, the battered economy has made it a harder environment for all arts organizations, but so far, the Ailey audience has rallied behind us during these difficult times. Of course, there is always room for growth and improvement. One of my big projects right now is overseeing a new company-wide plan to make better use of technology to engage and serve our audiences. That project is going to roll out over the next four years and I'm excited about all the possibilities.
One
I only got DVR about a month ago (not unrelated to Lost's return), so it's still new and fascinating to me. Since I'm fast-forwarding all those commercials that advertisers paid lots of money for, I wonder if there will be a movement to produce television commercials in slow-motion with words on the screen so they are most effective while being fast-forwarded. Similarly, do commercial creators now film commercials using similar tones/filters/settings as the TV shows during which they will be played? Like in magazines, when often the ad layouts are so similar to the editorial layouts that the pages have to say "Advertisement" on top? That way, I *think* The Hills has come back on so I press play, but MTV really just wants me to buy Voluminous mascara.
Two
In last week's issue of Time Out New York, page 15 began a list of ways to get ahead in everyday life. Number 2 was "Invent an Ally", which I loved, possibly a bit too much:
I only got DVR about a month ago (not unrelated to Lost's return), so it's still new and fascinating to me. Since I'm fast-forwarding all those commercials that advertisers paid lots of money for, I wonder if there will be a movement to produce television commercials in slow-motion with words on the screen so they are most effective while being fast-forwarded. Similarly, do commercial creators now film commercials using similar tones/filters/settings as the TV shows during which they will be played? Like in magazines, when often the ad layouts are so similar to the editorial layouts that the pages have to say "Advertisement" on top? That way, I *think* The Hills has come back on so I press play, but MTV really just wants me to buy Voluminous mascara.
Two
In last week's issue of Time Out New York, page 15 began a list of ways to get ahead in everyday life. Number 2 was "Invent an Ally", which I loved, possibly a bit too much:
2 INVENT AN ALLY
"When my first book was coming out, I wanted a write-up on a website that did not accept self-write-ups. So I spent three months constructing an elaborate online persona with which to promote it. By the end, it didn't seem as much like self-pimping as an authentic personality disorder."--Molly Crabapple
I misread this the first time, and thought Ms. "Crabapple" meant she created her own website where she reviewed other people's books, and then gave herself a glowing review on that site. Either way, I like it.
Three
Elizabeth Streb's extreme action company STREB is looking for "co-producers" for what will be "the shortest dance with the longest credits":
For a fully tax-deductible contribution of only 10 Dollars, you can be co-producer of a new series of 10 Second Dances by Elizabeth Streb, with music composed by David Van Tieghem and projection design by Aaron Henderson to be premiered on March 27, 2009 as part of the Spring Home Season at SLAM.
That's the price of a Mint Mocha Chip Frappucino and a plain scone!
We will roll the producer's credits following each 10 Second Dance. All producers are invited to an exclusive backstage tour following each Saturday evening performance.Get involved in the ACTION! Support Elizabeth in the creation of new work - our goal is to involve at least 1,000 producers.
Click the link below and forward this to anyone who wants to be a PRODUCER too!
I love that they are calling all donors "producers" - I've not seen that before. The beverage/scone comparison is useful, though who can eat anything while drinking those frappu- things? I hope they do reach 1,000 producers, so Obama-esque fundraising measures like this are encouraged throughout the industry. So, if you want to be (one of) the greatest, grandest and most fabulous producer(s) in the world, click here.
I should also note that I sat next to Elizabeth Streb at a conference last June, and she has the best title on her business card of anyone I have ever met: "ELIZABETH STREB: ACTION ARCHITECT". Boom.
You learn something new from other publicists every day. From here on out, I'm going to craft press releases with this in mind, from Gawker:
Meanwhile, I wish one of my client's grandfathers had invented the Henderson grapefruit. The Owens peach. The Lang strawberry?
Our totally unsolicited press release of the day has arrived! "Hello, as Julie Henderson's publicist, I've read some unflattering blogs calling her a 'high fallutin' call girl' and a 'golddigger,'" it begins. There's more!Think of how much attention a press release that started with, "I've read some unflattering blogs calling __insert the most conservative male or female classical musician you can thing of's name here___ a 'high fallutin' call girl' and a 'golddigger'" would get. And then we could go on to write the usual redundant praise phrases, so we still felt like we worked in classical music. A recent redundant favorite of mine from a release: "X artist is recognized worldwide for possessing a talent of uncommon ability and as an exceptionally gifted performer."
This arrived under the subject line "Further Clarification Regarding Russell Simmons and Julie Henderson."Julie Henderson comes from a good family. Her grandfather Samuel Henderson invented the Henderson grapefruit in the 1960's and built an empire in Texas . She has been modeling for the past 7 years and is an accomplished Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue favorite appearing in the issue 3 years in a row.
Meanwhile, I wish one of my client's grandfathers had invented the Henderson grapefruit. The Owens peach. The Lang strawberry?
After discussing the recent Onion article entitled "If Itzhak Perlman Is Performing On TV Right Now, Who is Feeding My Cat?" (thanks, Denise)
at lunch yesterday, my friend Maureen and I debated who was more famous: Itzhak Perlman or Yo-Yo Ma. I argued for IP, and she
for Yo-Yo.
Post King's Singers' concert in Princeton last night, I decided to obtain some hard evidence on the subject and polled three male Woodrow Wilson School students at the Dbar. "Name a classical musician" was my test. Two out of the three said Yo-Yo Ma. (The third proudly proclaimed "Hilary Hahn!", which I suspect directly correlates to his being the only guy in the group I knew.)
You out there reading this - you're probably in the industry, and I don't think we can count ourselves. But can you ask your friends? Or total strangers, like I did? Who is the first (and perhaps only) classical musician the world-at-large can name, and why do we think that is? What does Yo-Yo have that Itzhak doesn't, and vice versa?
N.B. The Woodrow Wilson boys elaborated that they thought Yo-Yo was the famous-er of the two because his name is both easier and "more fun" to pronounce. Thanks, Future International Conflict Resolving Minds of America.
Post King's Singers' concert in Princeton last night, I decided to obtain some hard evidence on the subject and polled three male Woodrow Wilson School students at the Dbar. "Name a classical musician" was my test. Two out of the three said Yo-Yo Ma. (The third proudly proclaimed "Hilary Hahn!", which I suspect directly correlates to his being the only guy in the group I knew.)
You out there reading this - you're probably in the industry, and I don't think we can count ourselves. But can you ask your friends? Or total strangers, like I did? Who is the first (and perhaps only) classical musician the world-at-large can name, and why do we think that is? What does Yo-Yo have that Itzhak doesn't, and vice versa?
N.B. The Woodrow Wilson boys elaborated that they thought Yo-Yo was the famous-er of the two because his name is both easier and "more fun" to pronounce. Thanks, Future International Conflict Resolving Minds of America.
I was sitting in the last row of the orchestra at Alice Tully last night and, at one point during a performance, the woman to my left leaned back and loud-whispered to an usher, "There's someone taking pictures down there!", gesturing to her right dramatically. No sooner had the dutiful usher trotted off to investigate the situation did the woman to my left whip out her iPhone and take a photo herself.
Bold, madam.
[That would be seat Z104, if anyone from Lincoln Center is reading.]
During the final bows, my tricky left-neighbor took another iPhone photo, and this time, the usher told her to stop, so she first took the picture and then turned off the phone. If I were the usher, I might have said, "Ma'am, I'm gonna need to delete that photo..." and then mistakenly deleted her contacts. Simultaneously, the woman to my right busted out her camera equivalent of Zach Morris' cell phone and took a flash photo! The usher asked her to stop, at which point she implored, "But I'm a critic." and waved scribbled notes on her program in his face. (Keep in mind, this was all happening while the Chamber Music Society was playing.) I was going to point out that, as a Publicity Professional, I can safely say we were not in press seats, but I thought it best not to cause a scene while on the new hall's maiden voyage.
Call me a prude but I, not unlike Patti LuPone, do not like it when audience members take photos during performances. My real problem is that rules are rules; if I'm obeying them, you should be too. There's a music blogger in the city who constantly posts illegal concert photos on his blog; I'm sure he'll have a few posted from last night at Alice Tully soon enough. If I worked at a presenter who gave him press tickets, I would be infuriated by his lack of respect for the artists and the houses. I'm also the person who would have deleted the iPhone contacts, so perhaps I'm not the best acid test for such things.
On the train ride home, I found myself wondering why I was being so rigid. What is actually the problem with audience members taking non-flash photos at performances? Flashes distract performers, but iPhone/Blackberry/camera phone photos are very discreet: they're silent and flashless. A second potential problem is that the artists don't have approval of photos that are taken during concerts then posted who knows where, but shouldn't performers be thrilled that someone was enjoying the experience of them playing enough to want to preserve a memory of it? We take photos when we like something, when we want to remember something or when we want to share our personal experiences with others. With that in mind, how can taking photos at concerts be against the rules? And if the photos end up on blogs or Flickr, or videos are posted on YouTube or Vimeo, what damage is done? If anything, a positive concert experience at your venue is being advertised. By prohibiting photos, presenters are essentially preventing audiences from doing the viral marketing leg-work for them.
I've personally been known to Photoshop my vacation photos, so I understand artists' fear of not having any semblance of approval of live concert photography. Perhaps one solution is providing a gallery of water-marked high-resolution photos from every concert taken by an in-house professional photographer, advertised in the program and available to all ticket-buyers. That way, if someone who may or may not be on the official press list wanted to blog about the concert the next day - or simply e mail a photo to a grandparent in Michigan - he or she could procure a great shot without having to ask the venue or artist's permission. The photos would be high-quality, and presumably the artist could approve or not approve them directly after the concert.
A second option is to allow photos and video during one piece only, be it the first piece on the program or the encore. The artist would know when he or she would be filmed/photographed, and could mentally prepare for it. This, of course, may prove to be a flawed system, but I have to believe if you give people a legal window to photograph, they'll be less inclined to break the rules during the rest of the concert.
Bold, madam.
[That would be seat Z104, if anyone from Lincoln Center is reading.]
During the final bows, my tricky left-neighbor took another iPhone photo, and this time, the usher told her to stop, so she first took the picture and then turned off the phone. If I were the usher, I might have said, "Ma'am, I'm gonna need to delete that photo..." and then mistakenly deleted her contacts. Simultaneously, the woman to my right busted out her camera equivalent of Zach Morris' cell phone and took a flash photo! The usher asked her to stop, at which point she implored, "But I'm a critic." and waved scribbled notes on her program in his face. (Keep in mind, this was all happening while the Chamber Music Society was playing.) I was going to point out that, as a Publicity Professional, I can safely say we were not in press seats, but I thought it best not to cause a scene while on the new hall's maiden voyage.
Call me a prude but I, not unlike Patti LuPone, do not like it when audience members take photos during performances. My real problem is that rules are rules; if I'm obeying them, you should be too. There's a music blogger in the city who constantly posts illegal concert photos on his blog; I'm sure he'll have a few posted from last night at Alice Tully soon enough. If I worked at a presenter who gave him press tickets, I would be infuriated by his lack of respect for the artists and the houses. I'm also the person who would have deleted the iPhone contacts, so perhaps I'm not the best acid test for such things.
On the train ride home, I found myself wondering why I was being so rigid. What is actually the problem with audience members taking non-flash photos at performances? Flashes distract performers, but iPhone/Blackberry/camera phone photos are very discreet: they're silent and flashless. A second potential problem is that the artists don't have approval of photos that are taken during concerts then posted who knows where, but shouldn't performers be thrilled that someone was enjoying the experience of them playing enough to want to preserve a memory of it? We take photos when we like something, when we want to remember something or when we want to share our personal experiences with others. With that in mind, how can taking photos at concerts be against the rules? And if the photos end up on blogs or Flickr, or videos are posted on YouTube or Vimeo, what damage is done? If anything, a positive concert experience at your venue is being advertised. By prohibiting photos, presenters are essentially preventing audiences from doing the viral marketing leg-work for them.
I've personally been known to Photoshop my vacation photos, so I understand artists' fear of not having any semblance of approval of live concert photography. Perhaps one solution is providing a gallery of water-marked high-resolution photos from every concert taken by an in-house professional photographer, advertised in the program and available to all ticket-buyers. That way, if someone who may or may not be on the official press list wanted to blog about the concert the next day - or simply e mail a photo to a grandparent in Michigan - he or she could procure a great shot without having to ask the venue or artist's permission. The photos would be high-quality, and presumably the artist could approve or not approve them directly after the concert.
A second option is to allow photos and video during one piece only, be it the first piece on the program or the encore. The artist would know when he or she would be filmed/photographed, and could mentally prepare for it. This, of course, may prove to be a flawed system, but I have to believe if you give people a legal window to photograph, they'll be less inclined to break the rules during the rest of the concert.
This week in interviews-with-people-who-know-more-than-me-land, we have jazz pianist and composer Dan Tepfer on blowing off astrophysics for music, putting on concerts that actually speak to young people, and the difference between coconuts and peaches.
Dan Tepfer is a New York-based jazz pianist and composer. Originally
from Paris, France, he earned a bachelor's degree in astrophysics from
the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, before settling down in the
United States. Today he divides his time between sideman work with some
of the great jazz musicians of our time (Lee Konitz, Charles McPherson,
Paul Motian, Ralph Towner to name a few), and a busy touring schedule
with his own projects. One of his compositions was recently premiered
at Carnegie Hall.
How is your time playing with your trio, playing solo, and supporting other artists divided?
You know, I was talking to a friend the other day who has been following my music for quite a while. He mentioned that he had gone on my website a few days before and realized that my gig listing went back to February 2004. It's fun for me to think of your question while going through this list of five years' worth of gigs. They are of all shapes and sizes, from trio gigs in hotel lounges to soloist gigs at Carnegie Hall. In my mind, I feel like most of my energy is devoted to my projects as a leader -- mainly the trio and solo gigs, but the truth is, in looking at these listings, that a good number of my performances are as a sideman. It's a great way to learn (especially when you're lucky enough to be playing alongside one of the great old sages of the music). It comes in waves, too -- in the last year I've been doing a disproportionate amount of solo playing, for instance, and my trio gigs have taken a little bit of a back seat to that. But overall, it's really pretty even, really. keeping different artistic interests in balance is one of the keys to working well, I think.
Do you actually have an undergraduate degree in astrophysics? Normally, I would say having a degree in something besides music makes you more accessible to audiences but..I'm not quite sure sure I'm going to say that about astrophysics. Generally speaking, though, do you think having had a "normal" college experience makes you relatable to the masses?
I don't really think so much in terms of being 'relatable to the masses'. First of all, there are no longer any masses in jazz (are there masses in classical?). The audience that we're playing to is a self-selected, small segment of available listeners. In many ways I regret the loss of the kind of statistical truth that results from the presence of huge audiences, but at the same time the current situation means that nobody has any illusions about 'going commercial'. So I figure that if I can get to a place where I feel that I am being productive and creative in a way that's as true to myself as possible, then the audience will follow. You know the age-old question: "do you play for yourself or for the audience?". Obviously we all ultimately want to reach the audience, but for me, at least, the truest path to that is to make music for myself (i.e. that I personally think is good), then sit back and hope that the audience will find some merit in it. So from that standpoint, I'm thankful that I studied something else than music for my undergrad (although the truth is that I still spent more time on music than on astrophysics during that time...). It gave me the opportunity to clearly make the choice of a career in music, to say 'this is what i want'. And that kind of clarity brings perspective, which I think is essential to finding your voice as an artist. so in a roundabout way, yes, I think having studied something else makes me a deeper artist, and as a result should hopefully make more people dig my music!
What is the most gratifying thing an audience member has ever said to you after a concert?
The most gratifying thing, to me, is when someone has clearly had a very special experience, not one they where necessarily expecting to have. When they're still a little bewildered by what just happened; when you get the clear feeling that this was something different for them, something special. I've been doing a number of solo concerts in the past year where I play completely free, and when it goes well, people talk about having been taken on a long journey through many different terrains and environments. people come up with images, sometimes pretty whacky ones. When my music triggers people's imaginations this way, when they're clearly so engaged, it makes me very happy.
This has been studied and written about ad nauseum by musicologists, but I'm still going to ask: how do American and international audiences receive jazz differently?
This is one of my favorite topics, actually. I grew up in France, lived in the UK for three years and have been in the US for five, so I've always been fascinated by cultural differences between nationalities: how people live, how they think, how they love, how they listen to music. There's an image that I came across in a book about the cultural differences between Americans and the French, and it goes like this: the French are like a coconut, with a very hard shell, but once you've broken through, everything is liquid and easy. Americans are like a peach: a soft exterior, easy to bite into, nice and juicy, but a hard core that is extremely difficult to penetrate. In other words, the French don't make friends easily, but when they do, it's for life. Americans make friends easily and are quickly open and giving, but they might be gone tomorrow.
I see this reflected in the way Americans and Europeans listen to music. fundamentally, Europeans (a caveat -- it's dangerous to generalize about 'Europeans'; but as Victor Hugo said, all generalizations are false, including the one that says that all generalizations are false) are always looking for transcendence in art, that moment when the hard shell is broken into and all is released. They're very passionate about that and will listen hard to see if the music can take them there. Americans don't seem to be looking for that as much. There's an emphasis on craft, on doing things the right way (viz. Hollywood movies, crafted to perfection), but people don't seem to hunger so much for a deep understanding of the message, the transformative element (see how often those same Hollywood movies are substance-free). I mean, how do you feel when you've heard a fantastic performance of Shostakovich 5, arguably one of the most powerful and meaningful orchestral works of the last century, and at the end of it, the audience's standing ovation looks and feels like a way of getting out of their seats and home quicker? My subjective feeling is that Americans don't let the music penetrate them as much as they could; perhaps they're afraid of letting themselves be vulnerable.
This carries over to how audiences specifically receive jazz: Americans are super-knowledgeable about the history of the art form, and are discriminating judges of a musician's craft. Europeans, as a rule, don't really care about whether something is 'correct' or not, and are more interested in their subjective emotional experience, the freshness and newness that they perceive in the music (does this leave them more at risk of being taken by charlatans? perhaps). One of my most rewarding trips was one I took through the Republic of Georgia last year, before the summer war with Russia. I was touring, solo, as a cultural ambassador for the US State Department. The Georgians make the most passionate audiences I've encountered. A country that has been invaded countless times over the last thousand years, they've come to see art as one of the rare elements of stability in their lives: everything else can go, it stays. These people give themselves entirely to the performance. Across the border in Azerbaijan, where oil money flows, people are far more circumspect. And in Japan, where I've had the pleasure of touring a couple of times now, people are passionate and knowledgeable when you talk to them, but they're extremely shy of expressing that enthusiasm in the hall; whooping and hollering is very rare. Humans: so similar, so different. It's really amazing.
I love playing for all these different audiences, using their energies as creative stimuli -- almost like playing different pianos: they shape you in a way, and as a result they can sometimes bring things out of you that you didn't even know were there.
How do you distinguish between self-promoting to your peers (that is, networking with presenters and other artists to get gigs) and self-promoting to the outside world (to get audiences to your concerts)? Can it all be lumped together as general "profile-building" or are there subtle (and not-so-subtle) distinctions? Would a glowing New York Times review of a solo show, for example, solve all problems?
Reviews are nice, and one from the NYT would of course help generate interest; but I know several musicians who've had incredibly laudatory pieces written about them in the Times and who still will tell you that they can't get a gig. I try not to think so much about self-promotion, and more about simply representing myself as clearly as I can. As I was saying before, my main goal is to be as productive and creative in my work as possible. Then it's just a question of communicating that to the outside world as well as I can. The difference between doing that with your peers and with your audience is that in the first case, you're establishing one-to-one relationships, so it's much more of a personal thing -- do we like each other? Do we work well together? In the second, it's more one-sided: I put the material out, and people are free to take it or leave it. I hear from a number of them, but mostly it's just the ones who choose to 'take it', who like what I do.
Do you market yourself differently when you play solo versus when you play with your trio or a group of musicians? When you play with a group, are all the members asked to e mail out to their own lists about performances, post on their own Facebook/MySpace pages, etc., or is it really up to the featured artist/band leader?
The implicit protocol is that getting the word out is mostly up to the band leader. I would say that I do exactly the same thing when I'm playing solo or trio -- as long as I'm the leader, I'll do what I can to get people to come hear the music. sidemen aren't expected to send out emails about their performances, but it does happen. I've been playing with Jorge Roeder and Richie Barshay, the guys in my trio, for five years now, and we're such a tight-knit band that they'll let people know about our shows, too. Pretty much everybody posts what shows they have coming up on their website (or Myspace / Facebook), be it as a sideman or as a leader, but I'm not sure how much good that does. People go to shows when they get the feeling that something special is going to happen, and that's something that can only be expressed by going out of your way to tell people to come -- which isn't the case with a simple gig listing on a website.
What has been the most effective marketing of a concert you've been involved with?
One of the most surprising things I've had happen was a couple of years ago, on a west coast tour with my trio, when the press in Oregon, where my family is from, got the word that a "hometown boy" was doing a "homecoming tour". Boy, they liked that! We got a ton of press on that tour, and great audiences as a result, mainly because, it seems, of the idea that this was a special event, with unique ties to Oregon. The 'home boy makes good' story. Never mind that I grew up in France...
Touring through the Republic of Georgia was incredible because jazz is still super-hip there. I had TV crews following me around all the time. Now that -- having an entire country perceive what you're doing as cool -- is effective marketing. If only we could make that happen elsewhere!
The Hartford Courant said you pay "no attention to that overrated, yet intellectually porous wall between jazz and classical music." Can you explain said porous wall?
Well, jazz is the result of the combination of African rhythms with Western harmony and melody. The best jazz musicians have always been extremely hungry for music from other sources. Louis Armstrong loved going to the opera. Duke Ellington talked about music not in terms of jazz or classical, but in terms of good or bad (the famous "there are two types of music" line). Charlie Parker quoted classical themes in his improvisations. And one could argue that the whole free jazz movement was really made possible by the fact that jazz musicians became aware of the music of the Viennese School and found a way to make atonality their own. Of course, there are lots of examples of this transference in the other direction, from Stravinsky, Ravel and Shostakovich's jazz-influenced pieces to the phrasing of the right hand in certain Ligetti etudes. So, regarding the wall, porous it is.
This is all very personal -- some people (and Wynton Marsalis, for example, would be a leading exponent of this view), feel that jazz is best defined in stylistic terms. It swings, it uses a certain melodic and harmonic vocabulary, it has a certain rawness and brawn, etc., and as such is substantially different from classical music. That's never really worked for me, and I don't think it's how the great figures of the music thought about it, either (witness Duke's quote above, check out the incredible freshness and originality of Ornette Coleman's melodies, listen to Keith Jarrett's free playing) -- I think they happened to come from a certain background, which formed their aesthetics, but really, they were just reaching for music, in as pure a form as possible. To me, the defining characteristic of jazz is improvisation, and it's mind-blowing to realize just how far the great improvisers in jazz have gone in becoming extemporaneous composers. There are great tools to be learned in the history of the music. But to me they're just tools, and what I want to create is a music that's as personal and contemporary as possible, so I'm open to all sources of inspiration, be it classical, jazz, or anything else.
A lot of classical music critics are former (and current, actually) composers or musicians. Is it the same in the jazz world? If not, where do the critics come from?
A lot of them are former musicians, too. One example that springs to mind is Stanley Crouch, one of the preeminent jazz critics. He used to work as a jazz drummer. What may be lacking in jazz is a body of criticism from actual working musicians at the top of the field. You know, the way novelists will review each other's books. The pianist Ethan Iverson, of the band The Bad Plus, has been been doing something about that, crafting well-written pieces on all sorts of jazz-related topics, with the knowledge of a top-flight jazz improvisor (himself) as a resource, for a number of years now.
In classical music, presenters and artists often complain that, while houses are full, audiences are old. One might argue that, if houses are full, perhaps we should not fret about hair color. That said, I assume there is a similar problem (" ") in jazz? If the traditional audience is aging, how concerned are artists and presenters with getting younger audiences out to concerts?
There are two problems with older audiences: clearly, if most of your audience is old, then your audience is soon going to start diminishing. But also, because of years of habit, older people can sometimes become used to a routine of concert-going where the actual routine, the fact of getting dressed up and going out, can be more important than the experience of the music. I see this happening in concert halls, especially. now, that's certainly not true of all older audiences -- I've had some of my warmest and most perceptive feedback from older listeners who were there for entirely the right reasons. but it's a concern, I think.
After all, we want to be making art not because it fits into some consumeristic mold -- the "I'm cool, so I'll go hear some jazz", or "I'm fancy, so I'll go hear some classical" mentality -- but because we feel that what we are making conveys something specific about our own existence. We want people to come because the music itself speaks to them, not because they want to be seen at a club or a concert hall. So if young people aren't coming to classical music concerts or jazz clubs, is it because the music just doesn't speak to them? I think that needs to be addressed.
That said, classical music is still pretty darn hip in the UK, for example. Audiences are of all ages and contemporary pieces are premiered all the time to unfeigned enthusiasm from crowds that actual care if the music is good or not. And audiences for jazz in New York City are often young, hip, super-knowledgeable, passionate about where the music is going. And all over Europe, in my experience, jazz-club crowds are pretty evenly spread, age-wise. At the festivals, you see more older people, but that may just reflect an economic reality, too. The aging-audience issue, I think, is a bigger factor in the US then elsewhere, which may reflect a lack of exposure or education (as many people would argue), but also might be due to the music itself. Is classical music really being presented in as alive a way as possible in the states? As something that is of today, not as a historical artifact? Is jazz being presented as a thriving, growing art form, or has it been shoehorned, in the eyes of the masses, into a relic of the past, played by musicians with more of a bent for academics than for passion? The thing is that in Europe, since audiences are looking for transcendence, the musicians, whether classical, jazz or pop, are still trying to give it to them. In the US, too often classical and jazz musicians seem to be trying to 'get it right'. That works for a while, while the audience still cares if things are right or not, but the younger audience just wants it to sound good! And as the saxophonist Steve Lacy said, "there's nothing more boring than being right". My good friend Rob Moose recently arranged one of Bach's French Suites for mandolin player Chris Thille's band The Punch Brothers, and I can't help thinking that the performance, grooving, dramatic and a little raw, definitely alive, would have made Bach happy.
My response to this "problem", as an artist, is that we need to make music so strong, so true, that it will speak to young people, no matter what style they think they like in the first place. And there are musicians doing that, today, thank God. I actually have faith that audiences know what's good, in the long run.
Dan Tepfer is a New York-based jazz pianist and composer. Originally
from Paris, France, he earned a bachelor's degree in astrophysics from
the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, before settling down in the
United States. Today he divides his time between sideman work with some
of the great jazz musicians of our time (Lee Konitz, Charles McPherson,
Paul Motian, Ralph Towner to name a few), and a busy touring schedule
with his own projects. One of his compositions was recently premiered
at Carnegie Hall. How is your time playing with your trio, playing solo, and supporting other artists divided?
You know, I was talking to a friend the other day who has been following my music for quite a while. He mentioned that he had gone on my website a few days before and realized that my gig listing went back to February 2004. It's fun for me to think of your question while going through this list of five years' worth of gigs. They are of all shapes and sizes, from trio gigs in hotel lounges to soloist gigs at Carnegie Hall. In my mind, I feel like most of my energy is devoted to my projects as a leader -- mainly the trio and solo gigs, but the truth is, in looking at these listings, that a good number of my performances are as a sideman. It's a great way to learn (especially when you're lucky enough to be playing alongside one of the great old sages of the music). It comes in waves, too -- in the last year I've been doing a disproportionate amount of solo playing, for instance, and my trio gigs have taken a little bit of a back seat to that. But overall, it's really pretty even, really. keeping different artistic interests in balance is one of the keys to working well, I think.
Do you actually have an undergraduate degree in astrophysics? Normally, I would say having a degree in something besides music makes you more accessible to audiences but..I'm not quite sure sure I'm going to say that about astrophysics. Generally speaking, though, do you think having had a "normal" college experience makes you relatable to the masses?
I don't really think so much in terms of being 'relatable to the masses'. First of all, there are no longer any masses in jazz (are there masses in classical?). The audience that we're playing to is a self-selected, small segment of available listeners. In many ways I regret the loss of the kind of statistical truth that results from the presence of huge audiences, but at the same time the current situation means that nobody has any illusions about 'going commercial'. So I figure that if I can get to a place where I feel that I am being productive and creative in a way that's as true to myself as possible, then the audience will follow. You know the age-old question: "do you play for yourself or for the audience?". Obviously we all ultimately want to reach the audience, but for me, at least, the truest path to that is to make music for myself (i.e. that I personally think is good), then sit back and hope that the audience will find some merit in it. So from that standpoint, I'm thankful that I studied something else than music for my undergrad (although the truth is that I still spent more time on music than on astrophysics during that time...). It gave me the opportunity to clearly make the choice of a career in music, to say 'this is what i want'. And that kind of clarity brings perspective, which I think is essential to finding your voice as an artist. so in a roundabout way, yes, I think having studied something else makes me a deeper artist, and as a result should hopefully make more people dig my music!
What is the most gratifying thing an audience member has ever said to you after a concert?
The most gratifying thing, to me, is when someone has clearly had a very special experience, not one they where necessarily expecting to have. When they're still a little bewildered by what just happened; when you get the clear feeling that this was something different for them, something special. I've been doing a number of solo concerts in the past year where I play completely free, and when it goes well, people talk about having been taken on a long journey through many different terrains and environments. people come up with images, sometimes pretty whacky ones. When my music triggers people's imaginations this way, when they're clearly so engaged, it makes me very happy.
This has been studied and written about ad nauseum by musicologists, but I'm still going to ask: how do American and international audiences receive jazz differently?
This is one of my favorite topics, actually. I grew up in France, lived in the UK for three years and have been in the US for five, so I've always been fascinated by cultural differences between nationalities: how people live, how they think, how they love, how they listen to music. There's an image that I came across in a book about the cultural differences between Americans and the French, and it goes like this: the French are like a coconut, with a very hard shell, but once you've broken through, everything is liquid and easy. Americans are like a peach: a soft exterior, easy to bite into, nice and juicy, but a hard core that is extremely difficult to penetrate. In other words, the French don't make friends easily, but when they do, it's for life. Americans make friends easily and are quickly open and giving, but they might be gone tomorrow.
I see this reflected in the way Americans and Europeans listen to music. fundamentally, Europeans (a caveat -- it's dangerous to generalize about 'Europeans'; but as Victor Hugo said, all generalizations are false, including the one that says that all generalizations are false) are always looking for transcendence in art, that moment when the hard shell is broken into and all is released. They're very passionate about that and will listen hard to see if the music can take them there. Americans don't seem to be looking for that as much. There's an emphasis on craft, on doing things the right way (viz. Hollywood movies, crafted to perfection), but people don't seem to hunger so much for a deep understanding of the message, the transformative element (see how often those same Hollywood movies are substance-free). I mean, how do you feel when you've heard a fantastic performance of Shostakovich 5, arguably one of the most powerful and meaningful orchestral works of the last century, and at the end of it, the audience's standing ovation looks and feels like a way of getting out of their seats and home quicker? My subjective feeling is that Americans don't let the music penetrate them as much as they could; perhaps they're afraid of letting themselves be vulnerable.
This carries over to how audiences specifically receive jazz: Americans are super-knowledgeable about the history of the art form, and are discriminating judges of a musician's craft. Europeans, as a rule, don't really care about whether something is 'correct' or not, and are more interested in their subjective emotional experience, the freshness and newness that they perceive in the music (does this leave them more at risk of being taken by charlatans? perhaps). One of my most rewarding trips was one I took through the Republic of Georgia last year, before the summer war with Russia. I was touring, solo, as a cultural ambassador for the US State Department. The Georgians make the most passionate audiences I've encountered. A country that has been invaded countless times over the last thousand years, they've come to see art as one of the rare elements of stability in their lives: everything else can go, it stays. These people give themselves entirely to the performance. Across the border in Azerbaijan, where oil money flows, people are far more circumspect. And in Japan, where I've had the pleasure of touring a couple of times now, people are passionate and knowledgeable when you talk to them, but they're extremely shy of expressing that enthusiasm in the hall; whooping and hollering is very rare. Humans: so similar, so different. It's really amazing.
I love playing for all these different audiences, using their energies as creative stimuli -- almost like playing different pianos: they shape you in a way, and as a result they can sometimes bring things out of you that you didn't even know were there.
How do you distinguish between self-promoting to your peers (that is, networking with presenters and other artists to get gigs) and self-promoting to the outside world (to get audiences to your concerts)? Can it all be lumped together as general "profile-building" or are there subtle (and not-so-subtle) distinctions? Would a glowing New York Times review of a solo show, for example, solve all problems?
Reviews are nice, and one from the NYT would of course help generate interest; but I know several musicians who've had incredibly laudatory pieces written about them in the Times and who still will tell you that they can't get a gig. I try not to think so much about self-promotion, and more about simply representing myself as clearly as I can. As I was saying before, my main goal is to be as productive and creative in my work as possible. Then it's just a question of communicating that to the outside world as well as I can. The difference between doing that with your peers and with your audience is that in the first case, you're establishing one-to-one relationships, so it's much more of a personal thing -- do we like each other? Do we work well together? In the second, it's more one-sided: I put the material out, and people are free to take it or leave it. I hear from a number of them, but mostly it's just the ones who choose to 'take it', who like what I do.
Do you market yourself differently when you play solo versus when you play with your trio or a group of musicians? When you play with a group, are all the members asked to e mail out to their own lists about performances, post on their own Facebook/MySpace pages, etc., or is it really up to the featured artist/band leader?
The implicit protocol is that getting the word out is mostly up to the band leader. I would say that I do exactly the same thing when I'm playing solo or trio -- as long as I'm the leader, I'll do what I can to get people to come hear the music. sidemen aren't expected to send out emails about their performances, but it does happen. I've been playing with Jorge Roeder and Richie Barshay, the guys in my trio, for five years now, and we're such a tight-knit band that they'll let people know about our shows, too. Pretty much everybody posts what shows they have coming up on their website (or Myspace / Facebook), be it as a sideman or as a leader, but I'm not sure how much good that does. People go to shows when they get the feeling that something special is going to happen, and that's something that can only be expressed by going out of your way to tell people to come -- which isn't the case with a simple gig listing on a website.
What has been the most effective marketing of a concert you've been involved with?
One of the most surprising things I've had happen was a couple of years ago, on a west coast tour with my trio, when the press in Oregon, where my family is from, got the word that a "hometown boy" was doing a "homecoming tour". Boy, they liked that! We got a ton of press on that tour, and great audiences as a result, mainly because, it seems, of the idea that this was a special event, with unique ties to Oregon. The 'home boy makes good' story. Never mind that I grew up in France...
Touring through the Republic of Georgia was incredible because jazz is still super-hip there. I had TV crews following me around all the time. Now that -- having an entire country perceive what you're doing as cool -- is effective marketing. If only we could make that happen elsewhere!
The Hartford Courant said you pay "no attention to that overrated, yet intellectually porous wall between jazz and classical music." Can you explain said porous wall?
Well, jazz is the result of the combination of African rhythms with Western harmony and melody. The best jazz musicians have always been extremely hungry for music from other sources. Louis Armstrong loved going to the opera. Duke Ellington talked about music not in terms of jazz or classical, but in terms of good or bad (the famous "there are two types of music" line). Charlie Parker quoted classical themes in his improvisations. And one could argue that the whole free jazz movement was really made possible by the fact that jazz musicians became aware of the music of the Viennese School and found a way to make atonality their own. Of course, there are lots of examples of this transference in the other direction, from Stravinsky, Ravel and Shostakovich's jazz-influenced pieces to the phrasing of the right hand in certain Ligetti etudes. So, regarding the wall, porous it is.
This is all very personal -- some people (and Wynton Marsalis, for example, would be a leading exponent of this view), feel that jazz is best defined in stylistic terms. It swings, it uses a certain melodic and harmonic vocabulary, it has a certain rawness and brawn, etc., and as such is substantially different from classical music. That's never really worked for me, and I don't think it's how the great figures of the music thought about it, either (witness Duke's quote above, check out the incredible freshness and originality of Ornette Coleman's melodies, listen to Keith Jarrett's free playing) -- I think they happened to come from a certain background, which formed their aesthetics, but really, they were just reaching for music, in as pure a form as possible. To me, the defining characteristic of jazz is improvisation, and it's mind-blowing to realize just how far the great improvisers in jazz have gone in becoming extemporaneous composers. There are great tools to be learned in the history of the music. But to me they're just tools, and what I want to create is a music that's as personal and contemporary as possible, so I'm open to all sources of inspiration, be it classical, jazz, or anything else.
A lot of classical music critics are former (and current, actually) composers or musicians. Is it the same in the jazz world? If not, where do the critics come from?
A lot of them are former musicians, too. One example that springs to mind is Stanley Crouch, one of the preeminent jazz critics. He used to work as a jazz drummer. What may be lacking in jazz is a body of criticism from actual working musicians at the top of the field. You know, the way novelists will review each other's books. The pianist Ethan Iverson, of the band The Bad Plus, has been been doing something about that, crafting well-written pieces on all sorts of jazz-related topics, with the knowledge of a top-flight jazz improvisor (himself) as a resource, for a number of years now.
In classical music, presenters and artists often complain that, while houses are full, audiences are old. One might argue that, if houses are full, perhaps we should not fret about hair color. That said, I assume there is a similar problem (" ") in jazz? If the traditional audience is aging, how concerned are artists and presenters with getting younger audiences out to concerts?
There are two problems with older audiences: clearly, if most of your audience is old, then your audience is soon going to start diminishing. But also, because of years of habit, older people can sometimes become used to a routine of concert-going where the actual routine, the fact of getting dressed up and going out, can be more important than the experience of the music. I see this happening in concert halls, especially. now, that's certainly not true of all older audiences -- I've had some of my warmest and most perceptive feedback from older listeners who were there for entirely the right reasons. but it's a concern, I think.
After all, we want to be making art not because it fits into some consumeristic mold -- the "I'm cool, so I'll go hear some jazz", or "I'm fancy, so I'll go hear some classical" mentality -- but because we feel that what we are making conveys something specific about our own existence. We want people to come because the music itself speaks to them, not because they want to be seen at a club or a concert hall. So if young people aren't coming to classical music concerts or jazz clubs, is it because the music just doesn't speak to them? I think that needs to be addressed.
That said, classical music is still pretty darn hip in the UK, for example. Audiences are of all ages and contemporary pieces are premiered all the time to unfeigned enthusiasm from crowds that actual care if the music is good or not. And audiences for jazz in New York City are often young, hip, super-knowledgeable, passionate about where the music is going. And all over Europe, in my experience, jazz-club crowds are pretty evenly spread, age-wise. At the festivals, you see more older people, but that may just reflect an economic reality, too. The aging-audience issue, I think, is a bigger factor in the US then elsewhere, which may reflect a lack of exposure or education (as many people would argue), but also might be due to the music itself. Is classical music really being presented in as alive a way as possible in the states? As something that is of today, not as a historical artifact? Is jazz being presented as a thriving, growing art form, or has it been shoehorned, in the eyes of the masses, into a relic of the past, played by musicians with more of a bent for academics than for passion? The thing is that in Europe, since audiences are looking for transcendence, the musicians, whether classical, jazz or pop, are still trying to give it to them. In the US, too often classical and jazz musicians seem to be trying to 'get it right'. That works for a while, while the audience still cares if things are right or not, but the younger audience just wants it to sound good! And as the saxophonist Steve Lacy said, "there's nothing more boring than being right". My good friend Rob Moose recently arranged one of Bach's French Suites for mandolin player Chris Thille's band The Punch Brothers, and I can't help thinking that the performance, grooving, dramatic and a little raw, definitely alive, would have made Bach happy.
My response to this "problem", as an artist, is that we need to make music so strong, so true, that it will speak to young people, no matter what style they think they like in the first place. And there are musicians doing that, today, thank God. I actually have faith that audiences know what's good, in the long run.
I live in envy of the Performance Monkey. That is, David Jays, fellow ArtsJournal blogger and Sunday Times and New Statesman critic. I enjoy his writing and his subjects very much, but I truly resent his ability to market himself within the world of ArtsJournal.
After we submit an entry to our own ArtsJournal blog, bloggers have the option of posting a teaser on the ArtsJournal homepage with a heading and sentence-long description. My last teaser was Embracing Excess: Would offering all-you-can-see cards help fill empty seats?. The challenge comes in being clever enough to drive reader traffic to your entry without obfuscating your real point. I was quite smug about billing multi-instrumentalist Rob Moose's interview as Genre Doe, but that doesn't actually make sense unless you've already read the interview. David Jays, however, has mastered the craft of the ArtsJournal teaser. Every time I see a title I like in the blogger column on the mainpage it ends up being his; Bend it like Bacon (on visual artist Francis Bacon) and Ladies Man (on playwright/screenwriter David Hare's female characters) are two of my favorites. His most recent is And the difference is?, promoting an entry about dividing performance awards by gender, completely schooling my Embracing Excess.
As previously mentioned, I spoke at a session for Chamber Music America's annual conference about a month ago. I wanted to call my hour "The Great Depression", but CMA went with "Marketing and Promotion on the Cheap" instead. The session was packed, not because of me, but because "cheap" is what folks have on the brain. In retrospect, who - except me - would want to spend the afternoon at a session called "The Great Depression"? Amusing myself does not good marketing make.
The problem is that presumably, I'm good at this. For other people. Turns out, it's hard to promote yourself, which speaks to both our personal issues with self-identity and a fear that our peers and the public-at-large will perceive us as oblivious and/or self-serving. Artists have to self-promote all the time in interviews, in press pitches if they don't work with PR people and in booking themselves if they don't work with managers, but they're not alone: publicists, critics and generally anyone trying to further his or her own career in industries across the board needs to self-promote. The question is how much, and how to.
A publicist friend recently told me that a colleague asked what set her apart from other classical music publicists; not as a challenge, but as a brand-identity exercise. I wonder if that exercise is meant to be useful for marketing oneself to potential clients and their managers, or marketing oneself to press contacts. Once a publicist has list of clients, the clients themselves become what sets him or her apart from other publicists, in addition to, I suppose, writing style and basic personality. But do potential clients need to be sold on a mission statement, or is it enough for them to meet and brainstorm with a publicist after seeing his or her work elsewhere? Is the pitch to them your epithet, your industry contacts, or your personal "style"?
When I launched my website last year, I was told the font was hard to read and, among other things, was asked why I didn't have a bio or photo on the site. Who am I, I responded, that would make artists want to hire me? I am x, y and z in real life, but as a publicist, I am my clients; if you've heard of the people with profiles on this site, I'm doing a good job. Does it matter that I'm a Gemini with an art history minor from Connecticut? I would be writing my own bio, so does my perspective on myself really make a difference?
The idea of marketing oneself to the press as a publicist is fascinating. I received a great compliment when I e mailed a journalist I admire about pianist Hélène Grimaud's new Bach album and he responded, "You're working with Grimaud now? Well, that makes a lot of sense." I was flattered on two counts: He knew my little roster well enough to know how she would fit in, and he has a sense of what I'm about - my "brand identity", if you will - enough to make a statement like that. [Of course, what I'm "about", as put forth above, to me is who I represent, so perhaps I should have been flattered here on just the one count.]
A publicist marketing him/herself to critics (...managers, artists, record labels) can - SPOILER ALERT - also be a simple as being both easy to work with and generally good at what you do. The summer after I graduated from college, Broadway/TV director Jerry Zaks was generous enough to meet with me and answer my career questions. As I was leaving the office, he said, "Just always do good work, and let your work speak for itself." Now, as a publicist, I wonder if we sometimes lose the "just do good work" attitude in our attempts to promote ourselves. If you have an amazing mission statement but write terrible press releases and rarely secure pieces for your artists, you're simply not going to get very far.
# # #
Next time, on Life's a Pitch: How much do writers pitch themselves and their work to publicists? To publications? Should critics have websites? What should be on them? How much are writers like publicists, pitching stories they want to write to their editors? How often do section editors have to pitch placement to their editors?
And then the time after that, on Life's a Pitch: How much are writers expected to be publicists, or public relations figures, for their publications? Is it their job to sell papers, or the online equivalent?
After we submit an entry to our own ArtsJournal blog, bloggers have the option of posting a teaser on the ArtsJournal homepage with a heading and sentence-long description. My last teaser was Embracing Excess: Would offering all-you-can-see cards help fill empty seats?. The challenge comes in being clever enough to drive reader traffic to your entry without obfuscating your real point. I was quite smug about billing multi-instrumentalist Rob Moose's interview as Genre Doe, but that doesn't actually make sense unless you've already read the interview. David Jays, however, has mastered the craft of the ArtsJournal teaser. Every time I see a title I like in the blogger column on the mainpage it ends up being his; Bend it like Bacon (on visual artist Francis Bacon) and Ladies Man (on playwright/screenwriter David Hare's female characters) are two of my favorites. His most recent is And the difference is?, promoting an entry about dividing performance awards by gender, completely schooling my Embracing Excess.
As previously mentioned, I spoke at a session for Chamber Music America's annual conference about a month ago. I wanted to call my hour "The Great Depression", but CMA went with "Marketing and Promotion on the Cheap" instead. The session was packed, not because of me, but because "cheap" is what folks have on the brain. In retrospect, who - except me - would want to spend the afternoon at a session called "The Great Depression"? Amusing myself does not good marketing make.
The problem is that presumably, I'm good at this. For other people. Turns out, it's hard to promote yourself, which speaks to both our personal issues with self-identity and a fear that our peers and the public-at-large will perceive us as oblivious and/or self-serving. Artists have to self-promote all the time in interviews, in press pitches if they don't work with PR people and in booking themselves if they don't work with managers, but they're not alone: publicists, critics and generally anyone trying to further his or her own career in industries across the board needs to self-promote. The question is how much, and how to.
A publicist friend recently told me that a colleague asked what set her apart from other classical music publicists; not as a challenge, but as a brand-identity exercise. I wonder if that exercise is meant to be useful for marketing oneself to potential clients and their managers, or marketing oneself to press contacts. Once a publicist has list of clients, the clients themselves become what sets him or her apart from other publicists, in addition to, I suppose, writing style and basic personality. But do potential clients need to be sold on a mission statement, or is it enough for them to meet and brainstorm with a publicist after seeing his or her work elsewhere? Is the pitch to them your epithet, your industry contacts, or your personal "style"?
When I launched my website last year, I was told the font was hard to read and, among other things, was asked why I didn't have a bio or photo on the site. Who am I, I responded, that would make artists want to hire me? I am x, y and z in real life, but as a publicist, I am my clients; if you've heard of the people with profiles on this site, I'm doing a good job. Does it matter that I'm a Gemini with an art history minor from Connecticut? I would be writing my own bio, so does my perspective on myself really make a difference?
The idea of marketing oneself to the press as a publicist is fascinating. I received a great compliment when I e mailed a journalist I admire about pianist Hélène Grimaud's new Bach album and he responded, "You're working with Grimaud now? Well, that makes a lot of sense." I was flattered on two counts: He knew my little roster well enough to know how she would fit in, and he has a sense of what I'm about - my "brand identity", if you will - enough to make a statement like that. [Of course, what I'm "about", as put forth above, to me is who I represent, so perhaps I should have been flattered here on just the one count.]
A publicist marketing him/herself to critics (...managers, artists, record labels) can - SPOILER ALERT - also be a simple as being both easy to work with and generally good at what you do. The summer after I graduated from college, Broadway/TV director Jerry Zaks was generous enough to meet with me and answer my career questions. As I was leaving the office, he said, "Just always do good work, and let your work speak for itself." Now, as a publicist, I wonder if we sometimes lose the "just do good work" attitude in our attempts to promote ourselves. If you have an amazing mission statement but write terrible press releases and rarely secure pieces for your artists, you're simply not going to get very far.
# # #
Next time, on Life's a Pitch: How much do writers pitch themselves and their work to publicists? To publications? Should critics have websites? What should be on them? How much are writers like publicists, pitching stories they want to write to their editors? How often do section editors have to pitch placement to their editors?
And then the time after that, on Life's a Pitch: How much are writers expected to be publicists, or public relations figures, for their publications? Is it their job to sell papers, or the online equivalent?
[If someone's already doing this, stop me now; or, at least, post a comment and tell us all.]
Perhaps it's just me, but everywhere I turn in this city there's an all-you-can-eat special. I blame/credit The Recession/People Getting Fatter.
Would an all-you-can-see card work for concert presenters? I'm not sure how pricing for something like that could be figured out, but I do like the idea of paying for a card at the beginning of the season, getting week-of or day-of e mails when performances haven't sold out, and then sitting in the available seats for...what would seem like "free!", since I had already paid for the all-you-can-see card months ago. Perhaps I could add a ticket for a friend for $5 or $10 as well, like I do for MoMA admission with my membership.
When faced with a buffet situation, I find myself trying new things; sure, put it on the plate, if I don't like it, it's not like I ordered it for my whole meal. This is why an all-you-can-see card would work best at venues with diversified programming like (le) poisson rouge and Joe's Pub. I might not buy a full-price ticket to see an artist I'm totally unfamiliar with, but I will go if I'm still available that night and can get into the concert with my card. Sure, put it on the plate!
I fully admit this idea is full of holes, but nobody likes empty seats, and having a group of people who have invested some funds in your organization and who you can get in touch with week-of/day-of just might be a better solution than papering the house.
Perhaps it's just me, but everywhere I turn in this city there's an all-you-can-eat special. I blame/credit The Recession/People Getting Fatter.
Would an all-you-can-see card work for concert presenters? I'm not sure how pricing for something like that could be figured out, but I do like the idea of paying for a card at the beginning of the season, getting week-of or day-of e mails when performances haven't sold out, and then sitting in the available seats for...what would seem like "free!", since I had already paid for the all-you-can-see card months ago. Perhaps I could add a ticket for a friend for $5 or $10 as well, like I do for MoMA admission with my membership.When faced with a buffet situation, I find myself trying new things; sure, put it on the plate, if I don't like it, it's not like I ordered it for my whole meal. This is why an all-you-can-see card would work best at venues with diversified programming like (le) poisson rouge and Joe's Pub. I might not buy a full-price ticket to see an artist I'm totally unfamiliar with, but I will go if I'm still available that night and can get into the concert with my card. Sure, put it on the plate!
I fully admit this idea is full of holes, but nobody likes empty seats, and having a group of people who have invested some funds in your organization and who you can get in touch with week-of/day-of just might be a better solution than papering the house.
I've always wondered how products get placement within other products' ads. For example, 30 Rock is in featured in both Netflix and Hulu ads:
The iPod print and television ads not surprisingly drive me nuts: how do they choose which artists' songs and cover art to feature on the Nano, etc. screens in their ads? I've certainly never seen a classical album featured...
Which is why I was pleasantly surprised and impressed to see pianist Simone Dinnerstein's new album cover on the eMusic subway and MetroNorth ads:
I asked her publicist if she or Telarc pitched that and she said no: apparently, the folks at eMusic are just Dinnerstein fans! Fair enough. I would not be surprised if that's how a lot of these things happened, pitching and paying be damned!
Which is why I was pleasantly surprised and impressed to see pianist Simone Dinnerstein's new album cover on the eMusic subway and MetroNorth ads:
I asked her publicist if she or Telarc pitched that and she said no: apparently, the folks at eMusic are just Dinnerstein fans! Fair enough. I would not be surprised if that's how a lot of these things happened, pitching and paying be damned!
New York City subway stations are, in theory, prime for marketing because they're unavoidable; most of us need them to get from point A to point B, multiple times each day. That said, beyond standing and waiting for trains to come, people aren't paying attention to their surroundings when walking from outside-to-train-to-train-to-outside. Consequently, ads in subway stations have to be extreme enough to warrant stopping one's sprint-walk, pausing one's iPod, and possibly missing the next train.
Two friends and multiple strangers e mailed and directed me to the corridor between the Port Authority and Times Square subway stations. Apparently, there were ads for the HBO show Big Love there that I had to see. (It appears I have become predictable in my advanced age.) Here they are, and they are perhaps even more exciting than a program about polygamy (though let's not say things we can't take back):
There are about 15 large photographs of regular people - not characters from the show - walking in generic city streets. Some have white headphones and the word "listen" above them. The tag line for this season of Big Love is "Everyone Has Something to Hide", so the idea is to get passersby to plug in their headphones and hear the poster peoples' secrets.
If this poster technology is out there, why aren't music promoters utilizing it? Wouldn't the best way to advertise performances be to give people the opportunity hear what the music you're presenting sounds like? Obviously, both the poster production and the ad space here are expensive, but so are bus banners (Metropolitan Opera) and the inside back cover of Time Out NY (Carnegie Hall). It would really be amazing if The Met displayed posters with audio jacks for each production of their upcoming season in that same Times Square/Port Authority corridor space. Then, people could stop and listen to an audio sample from each opera, and perhaps also hear a public service announcement of sorts from some of the leading artists ("Hi, I'm Plácido Domingo and I'll be starring in The Metropolitan Opera's production of Simon Boccanegra this season. Simon Boccanegra is a story about..."). Similarly, if presenters with posters outside their venues advertising upcoming concerts could have visiting artists record concert invitations (and maybe combine those with music clips), crowds might cluster around the posters and generate excitement/rubber necker-type buzz about the venue.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York, with the help of superior creative force The Happy Corp Global, recently attempted to solve their Tourist Problem: tourists visit the museum in droves, but locals do not. Two days ago, in an act which both the MTA and The Happy Corp are calling "Station Domination", MoMA installed 50 permanent collection prints in the existing ad units at the Atlantic/Pacific subway station in Brooklyn. The idea is to turn walking through that subway station into a walking-through-MoMA's-galleries-type experience. Said experience comes complete with audio guides - my personal favorite part of the campaign: the germy public phones that probably haven't been used since 1999 now have a toll-free number people can call for information on selected permanent collection pieces. Presumably, similar audio program notes could be available by toll-free number if it The Met, Carnegie Hall, or The New York Philharmonic dominated a station. Photos of the MoMA ad installation can be found here, and I'm sad to report that my non-Matisse-filled little Harlem stop really pales in comparison now.
It's important to note that both these subway ad initiatives received high-profile and widespread press coverage. New York Times features can be found here for the Big Love ads and here for the MoMA ads. Wouldn't it be nice to see some performing arts coverage in other sections of the paper every so often?
Two friends and multiple strangers e mailed and directed me to the corridor between the Port Authority and Times Square subway stations. Apparently, there were ads for the HBO show Big Love there that I had to see. (It appears I have become predictable in my advanced age.) Here they are, and they are perhaps even more exciting than a program about polygamy (though let's not say things we can't take back):
There are about 15 large photographs of regular people - not characters from the show - walking in generic city streets. Some have white headphones and the word "listen" above them. The tag line for this season of Big Love is "Everyone Has Something to Hide", so the idea is to get passersby to plug in their headphones and hear the poster peoples' secrets.If this poster technology is out there, why aren't music promoters utilizing it? Wouldn't the best way to advertise performances be to give people the opportunity hear what the music you're presenting sounds like? Obviously, both the poster production and the ad space here are expensive, but so are bus banners (Metropolitan Opera) and the inside back cover of Time Out NY (Carnegie Hall). It would really be amazing if The Met displayed posters with audio jacks for each production of their upcoming season in that same Times Square/Port Authority corridor space. Then, people could stop and listen to an audio sample from each opera, and perhaps also hear a public service announcement of sorts from some of the leading artists ("Hi, I'm Plácido Domingo and I'll be starring in The Metropolitan Opera's production of Simon Boccanegra this season. Simon Boccanegra is a story about..."). Similarly, if presenters with posters outside their venues advertising upcoming concerts could have visiting artists record concert invitations (and maybe combine those with music clips), crowds might cluster around the posters and generate excitement/rubber necker-type buzz about the venue.The Museum of Modern Art in New York, with the help of superior creative force The Happy Corp Global, recently attempted to solve their Tourist Problem: tourists visit the museum in droves, but locals do not. Two days ago, in an act which both the MTA and The Happy Corp are calling "Station Domination", MoMA installed 50 permanent collection prints in the existing ad units at the Atlantic/Pacific subway station in Brooklyn. The idea is to turn walking through that subway station into a walking-through-MoMA's-galleries-type experience. Said experience comes complete with audio guides - my personal favorite part of the campaign: the germy public phones that probably haven't been used since 1999 now have a toll-free number people can call for information on selected permanent collection pieces. Presumably, similar audio program notes could be available by toll-free number if it The Met, Carnegie Hall, or The New York Philharmonic dominated a station. Photos of the MoMA ad installation can be found here, and I'm sad to report that my non-Matisse-filled little Harlem stop really pales in comparison now.
It's important to note that both these subway ad initiatives received high-profile and widespread press coverage. New York Times features can be found here for the Big Love ads and here for the MoMA ads. Wouldn't it be nice to see some performing arts coverage in other sections of the paper every so often?
I received an e mail from a woman at the UK-based management company Harrison Parrott this morning, and this was under her title/phone number/address in her auto signature:
I'm wondering if it will come across as arrogant if I add artists' news items to my auto signature. It might be a bit much from a publicist (or, is that where it's actually most appropriate?), but it certainly works for a management company, and would be fitting for an orchestra or presenting organization as well.
It's a war out there! Get exposure where you can!
News Flash: The BBC Symphony Orchestra have just announced Oliver Knussen as their new Artist in Association, the three-year appointment consolidating his long relationship with them as a composer and conductor. Full press release >> More news >>I assume everyone at Harrison Parrott changes their signature as news about their artists comes in, and I think that's fantastic. IMG Artists, my former place of employ, has news items right on their homepage, which is also useful, CAMI has a press release section, which is not as useful, and Opus 3 Artists (formerly ICM) has a column of news items on their homepage. Opus 3 is the big winner of the three, because they offer the option to subscribe to an RSS Feed of their news posts.
I'm wondering if it will come across as arrogant if I add artists' news items to my auto signature. It might be a bit much from a publicist (or, is that where it's actually most appropriate?), but it certainly works for a management company, and would be fitting for an orchestra or presenting organization as well.
It's a war out there! Get exposure where you can!
I went to buy tickets to So Percussion on the Joe's Pub website, and this was the show description:
Price: $12
- 9:30 PM - March 12
Show Description
A one-year New York Magazine subscription, a $9.97 value, will be included with your ticket purchase for this show! Feel free to click here for more information.
Brooklyn-based percussion quartet, So Percussion, who Billboard calls "astonishing and entrancing" and the New York Times calls "brilliant", will be performing selections from their ongoing project City Music, an exploration of urban environments and sonic meditations.
Since their acclaimed album Amid the Noise in 2006, the renowned chamber ensemble has been carving out a new niche with original music.
Hold a tick: aren't MAGAZINES supposed to tell us about CONCERTS, and not the other way around?? Is New York Magazine going to preview or list this concert as well? Are they going to mention the promotion in their listing? I'm a publicist with a blog, so I'm certainly in no position to judge role-reversals, but we live in strange times, my friends, strange times indeed.
(Via You've Cott Mail)
Anthony Tommasini, chief classical music critic for The New York Times, is answering your questions until Friday the 13th! E mail him at askthetimes@nytimes.com. There's a nice healthy bio before the Q&A; it would be great to have bios for all the critics in the arts section, I think, so readers (and publicists) can learn where the journalists are coming from in their reviews/features without having to comb through Wikipedia like I do obsessively.
This bit from his bio is interesting in light of the earlier discussion we had here:
The unwashed masses have put forth three great marketing/PR queries so far: the first, from Ryan Tracy, is why treat classical music so sensitively in reviews, and the second, from Cyrus E. Pace, is who is responsible for educating folks about classical music. The third is why do critics only review the first performance, from Marilyn Kane.
Anthony Tommasini, chief classical music critic for The New York Times, is answering your questions until Friday the 13th! E mail him at askthetimes@nytimes.com. There's a nice healthy bio before the Q&A; it would be great to have bios for all the critics in the arts section, I think, so readers (and publicists) can learn where the journalists are coming from in their reviews/features without having to comb through Wikipedia like I do obsessively.
This bit from his bio is interesting in light of the earlier discussion we had here:
He started out his professional life teaching music at the college level and performing as a pianist, including lots of chamber music and vocal accompanying. "As a critic, I still think of myself as a kind of teacher," Mr. Tommasini said. "And, having been a performer, I know how hard it is, which makes me, I hope, a more sensitive critic. I've been there.Perhaps I'll e mail in and ask my question: do journalists expect artists to read their reviews and then learn from their criticism?
The unwashed masses have put forth three great marketing/PR queries so far: the first, from Ryan Tracy, is why treat classical music so sensitively in reviews, and the second, from Cyrus E. Pace, is who is responsible for educating folks about classical music. The third is why do critics only review the first performance, from Marilyn Kane.
Why treat classical music sensitively? And why use an affinity of experience to sensitively shade criticism of current practitioners? Couldn't this open up critics to apology and punch-pulling when artists aren't quite up to snuff?I love that the Times is doing this, and that readers are asking questions about serious industry issues. I realize it's incredibly time-consuming, but it would be fantastic to have a different Times classical (rock, fine art, dance...) critic answer a reader question every week in Arts + Leisure. That way, both the critics and the art forms would become - or at least be perceived as - more accessible. Should it happen, here's mine for Roberta Smith: In reviewing a museum exhibition, is it the art critic's responsibility to review the actual works of art, to review a curator's work in designing an exhibition within a space, or to review the museum/gallery space itself?
[Excerpt, entire answer can be found here.]Now, in no way do I want to suggest that a critic should be an enabling voice for a musician who isn't quite "up to snuff," as you put it. But the general level of music-making in America is very high. The training at conservatories and universities has never been better. Obviously, the truly great performers are rare and miraculous. But it's amazing to me how seldom I hear performances of really sub-par quality.
Yet, there is a larger issue here, as I see it. I do think that there has been too much emphasis in classical music on performance over content. In earlier centuries it was composers who towered over the field. Starting in the 20th century, though, virtuoso performers, especially superstar conductors, seemed to claim most of the attention and the power. I am as thrilled by a great violinist or a remarkable soprano as anyone else. Still, I think that balance has been lost and we must devote more attention to music itself. One of my mantras in writing about that challenge facing major orchestras is that American orchestras should think a little less about how they play and a little more about what they play and why they play it. The whole notion of the "Big Five" American orchestras has been questioned in recent decades, and that's fine by me. When I see a conductor who has galvanized an orchestra and its home city, like Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, I want to cheer, because the priorities seem so right. Salonen's programs are diverse and exciting, with lots of new and recent music. Audiences are energized. I think the musicians and music-lovers in Los Angeles are having far too much fun to care a bit about whether their orchestra, on a technical level, makes the cut of the top five, the top 10 or whatever.
I stand pleasantly surprised by the Grammy live pre-telecast. It worked without a hitch and looked lovely. Here's our girl:
The presenter said he gets "1 minute" for the classical awards every year. He also said that this kind of music "is your friend when times are hard" (I....guess?) and to "grab Hilary" if you have any questions at all about classical music. Thanks dude: I'm the one who's going to end up fielding those.
The presenter said he gets "1 minute" for the classical awards every year. He also said that this kind of music "is your friend when times are hard" (I....guess?) and to "grab Hilary" if you have any questions at all about classical music. Thanks dude: I'm the one who's going to end up fielding those.
Each week, I'll post an interview
with someone far more knowledgeable than myself on specific
marketing and publicity subjects. This week, Goldstar CEO and co-founder Jim McCarthy on sitting in half-full audiences, going genre-less and why you don't actually gotta having a gimmick.
Jim McCarthy is the CEO and co-founder of Goldstar and the Editor of Live 2.0. He's a decade-long veteran of the Internet and e-commerce business, starting with GeoCities way back when "myspace" was something you told somebody you needed when you wanted to break up with them. This winter and spring, Jim will be speaking on the subject of Live 2.0 and the future of the live entertainment business at the TED conference and at SXSW. He lives in Pasadena, California and can be easily enticed to happy hour.
Why the broad focus? Sports, comedy, classical, dance, museums... Do you find that if someone is always looking for, say, comedy shows on the weekends, he/she might see a classical listing on your site and be intrigued, or do people mostly stay within their, let's say "pre-determined" genres of interest?
I think it's easy when you're on the inside of creating the shows to think in genres, but consumers don't think that way to nearly the degree some people imagine. Consumers don't typically ask "What comedy show should I go see?" Instead, they ask "What should I do on Saturday night?" Also, people switch back and forth among category types all the time. Just because someone is a fan of, say, ballet, it doesn't mean they wouldn't want to see the Yankees. The probably do have an interest in that. Because we came to this business as consumers rather than as producers of shows, that's just the way we did it. It only seemed natural to us to give people the broadest selection we could.
Do you work exclusively with venues/promoters, or can individual performers create accounts?
In some cases, performers work with us directly, but of course, they have to have the ability to authorize the sale of tickets on behalf of the show. Sometimes, the performer and "the show" are one and the same, so that makes it easy!
The copy on the site seems to be in a consistent voice. Does Goldstar edit listings?
Yes, we do, and thank you for noticing the consistency in the voice! We have an editorial staff who writes the copy with input from our venue/producer partners, and its goal is to communicate to Goldstar members in a way that works for them, and I think they're pretty good at it.
Generally speaking, we're trying to talk to our members as we would if we were a friend of theirs who was telling them about a show. Sometimes, again, when you're on the inside of developing a show, you tend to forget what's really going to ring a ticket buyer's bell. They may not care, for example, that it's the West Coast premiere of your play, which is something that actually gets suggested sometimes as a selling point. In fact, I can tell you with certainty that consumers care very little about that kind of thing. You, as the producer, might care, but for the most part, it's irrelevant to the ticket buyer. On the other hand, if the show has a cast member with a familiar face from "Frasier" or "Crash", telling people that is very helpful. Or if the title doesn't reveal much about the content, it helps to explain that it's the story of when Einstein met Picasso in a bar. It gives the customer something to begin to form an idea around. Movies do that with trailers; live shows need as much help as possible in this area.
Fairly recently, I noted on this blog that Joe's Pub in NYC had added comment fields to their event listings. Have the Goldstar comments sections gotten good responses? Helped sales? Are you ultimately hoping to replace or at least seriously compete with sites like Yelp or CitySearch, or is that apples and oranges?
We were the first company in the world to have online reviews for live entertainment, and we have far more than anyone else. We have hundreds of thousands of reviews and ratings, just for shows on our site and just by people who actually went. As a comparison, search for reviews of "Fuerzabruta" on Yelp and then search on Goldstar. There are 49 reviews on Yelp and and 541 on ours. Not only that, but we have reviews on hundreds of shows that don't hit their radar screen.
So Goldstar is the worldwide leader in real-time, unedited user reviews and ratings for live entertainment, and it's one of the things our members like most about the site. Having said that, we're not trying to do what Yelp or Citysearch are doing. We're about helping our members get out to live entertainment more; they are media companies with an advertising-based business model. It is true, though, that a lot of people use Goldstar as a guide in a simliar way, but I'm not going to compete with Yelp and Citysearch for the restaurant biz or in the business of selling banners to advertisers at $1 CPM. They can have that to themselves!
Obviously, every venue is different, but in your opinion, at what point should a presenter discount their tickets?
Here's what I suggest to every venue partner who will put up with listening to me on this topic: From a sales point of view, there's only one number you should be concerned with - revenue per seat. That is, take all the money you make from a given show and divide it by the number of seats you have available to sell.
So for example, and to keep the math easy so I don't mess up, imagine you have 100 seats in your venue. Imagine that you sell 50 of them at $20 each. That's $1000, or $1000 divided by $100 or $10 per seat. Now, if you sold another 50 at $10 per seat, you'd have $1500 in total revenue divided by the same 100 seats or $15 per seat. Some people go by average ticket sold, so they'd see that as a drop because now they have all these $10 seats mixed in with the $20, but in reality, what they've forgotten to do is add in all the $0 seats for the ones they didn't sell.
So my advice is to evaluate how you're going to maximize revenue per seat and raise or lower prices accordingly. Having said that, if you're going to discount, you should do it through a channel, like Goldstar or others because it protects the integrity of your prices to your core buyers. In Goldstar's case, not only is it a channel, but it's a channel that is overwhelmingly people who are new to what you're doing. Last year, we learned that 85% of the time, Goldstar members do not have a specific show in mind when they come to the site, so if you are a venue or producer are on the site, you're going to be reaching a new customer in all likelihood.
To shift the subject slightly, sometimes I'm amazed that people who hesitate to discount in channels are the very first ones to blast their core buyers with a discount. If you're giving your core buyers discounts often enough, that's not a discount; it's a reduction in your price.
Finally, I'd say don't be shy about having a strategy that includes discounts as early as possible because the effect of not having people come to your venue is tremendous. If we were in the business of selling iPods, we could take whatever we don't sell today and sell it tomorrow, but our inventory is expiring. You can't sell Tuesday's ticket on Wednesday. Not only that, but the benefits of having somebody there as opposed to not there are obvious: word of mouth, secondary sources of revenue like food and beverage or merchandise, not to mention simply the opportunity to reach that person with what you're doing and draw them into your permanent fan base.
By the way, I give a 90 minute seminar on that Revenue Per Seat thing, and if any of our venue partners or organizations they belong to would like to hear it, all I ask in exchange if that you take me to dinner afterwards. :) Seriously, they should contact us about that and we can work out a date because this is very important for people in the industry to understand.
There's this purse store in Tribeca - Cleo & Patek - in which the bags are always 60% off. You walk in and the woman says, "The price on the tag is not the price. Everything is on sale." I fall for it time and time again, and I'm starting to suspect that the "real" prices are actually the "sale" prices...or vice versa. Psychologically speaking, do you think presenters should mark up and then "discount" tickets as soon as they go on sale?
For my taste, that example is a little gimmicky. Actually, it's a lot gimmicky. Consumers are smarter than ever [Not me! I've bought two clutches and a wallet from that store.] and so when you tell them what something's "real" value is, they're not just going to take it as gospel because you said it.
I can't tell you how much time we spend making sure that the "full" price we put on our site is the legitimate full price that people are really paying at the venue for a ticket. It's a bad idea to try those kinds of shenanigans with consumers because it erodes their trust in you very quickly, and I wouldn't recommend it at all. Going back to what I said earlier, venues need to manage their Revenue per Seat, so they should be looking for the combination of prices that does that.
I'll tell you another thing that I'm not a fan of: pretending things are sold out that aren't sold out. At a conference in NYC last year that I will not name, one of the keynote speakers was a "marketing expert" on Broadway and touring Broadway shows. The thrust of his whole presentation, believe it or not, was that your goal as a marketer was to create "perceived demand". In other words, if you make people think somebody wants your tickets, then those people will want your tickets.
Well, guess what. That only works if people really do want your tickets! You might manage to stimulate your already-committed base to action by putting part of the house on sale and then "selling out" and then putting another part on sale, but that's it. My counterpoint to this whole way of thinking is that if everyone took the energy they put into trying to generate this phony-baloney "perceived demand" and tried instead to generate ACTUAL demand, everyone would be much better off. This involves getting to know your customers better, innovating to serve their needs and generally quite a bit of blood, sweat and tears, so often, people don't do it enough.
Papering houses: sometimes necessity or avoidable circumstance?
I suppose it's a necessity at some point if you haven't prepared from a marketing point of view or if there's simply no interest in the marketplace in what you're doing.
We have an interesting strategy in this area. We have a program called Quick Start, which is a way for shows in the first couple weeks of their run to put lots of comp tickets on our site. Our members love it, and they pay a small fee per ticket for these 'comps.' Because they have a small investment, about 85% of people who buy comps on our site show up, whereas the traditional ratio of papering is just the inverse of that: you give away 10 tickets in Times Square for every one person who walks through the door. Not just that, but by packing your preview or first couple weeks, you activate word of mouth and end up with lots of reviews and ratings on the Goldstar site. Good reviews tend to help sell the show and raise the profile of the event on our site. Then, hopefully, we've helped create a market for the rest of that show's run and comps aren't necessary anymore.
When you go to performances and see half-empty houses, does it just annoy the heck out of you? Last time you sat in the audience of a half-empty show, what was the first thing that came to your mind?
Yes, it does. How'd you guess?
The last time I was in a place like that, the first thing that I thought was, "they didn't manage their revenue per seat very well on this one, did they?" The second thing I thought was "We could probably have sold half of that mezzanine for them."
The third thing I thought is that I should probably learn to compartmentalize my work life and my personal life a little better.
In your opinion, what are the three biggest mistakes performing arts organizations make in marketing (or not marketing) their performances?
1. They don't take into account the way marketing has changed. I've literally heard people say they were about to send out 5000 post cards for their show and so they were going to wait to see what happened after those hit before they figured out the rest of their marketing plan. Well, let's do the math on that: 5000 post cards get delivered, but maybe 20% get read. That's 1000 post cards. If 10% of the people who read it are interested, that's 100 post cards, and if 10% of those people actually remember how to buy the tickets and actually go through with a purchase, that's 10 customers buying a couple tickets each.
The simple fact is that most traditional advertising is overwhelmingly ineffective now. Even "traditional" web advertising has dropped to levels of responsiveness (or unresponsiveness) that we would have been startled by back in '98 or '99. If you're counting on some kind of media buy to solve your marketing problems, you're going to have a hard time hitting your goals, so you have to do something else.
2. They separate the art from the marketing. In the past, it might have been ok to have the "art" over here and the "marketing" over there, but in a Live 2.0 world, You Are Your Marketing. To say that differently, since advertising really doesn't work anymore, the show itself has to communicate what makes it special and worth seeing and what was once the marketing department is now responsible for running the conversation about the show. You can't do that in silos the way you could when marketing's job was to create pretty postcards or print ads or web banners about whatever show the creative people happened to come up with.
3. They worry about the wrong things from a business point of view. Ultimately, any performing arts organization should care about two things when it comes to selling tickets: getting as many people as possible to see the show and getting as much money as possible. All too often, though, they get wrapped up in issues that are secondary or even counter-productive like average ticket price. Well, you don't put average ticket price in the bank; you put dollars in the bank. Not only that, but when keeping your average ticket price up* also keeps people out of your venue, you have to stop and ask yourself why you're doing it.
*BTW, people who manage average ticket price almost never count the zeroes from unsold seats, which makes it inaccurate anyway.
Final question: Can you please put Billy Elliot on Broadway up on Goldstar so I can afford to go see it?
It's already been moved to the top of my priority list!
Jim McCarthy is the CEO and co-founder of Goldstar and the Editor of Live 2.0. He's a decade-long veteran of the Internet and e-commerce business, starting with GeoCities way back when "myspace" was something you told somebody you needed when you wanted to break up with them. This winter and spring, Jim will be speaking on the subject of Live 2.0 and the future of the live entertainment business at the TED conference and at SXSW. He lives in Pasadena, California and can be easily enticed to happy hour.Why the broad focus? Sports, comedy, classical, dance, museums... Do you find that if someone is always looking for, say, comedy shows on the weekends, he/she might see a classical listing on your site and be intrigued, or do people mostly stay within their, let's say "pre-determined" genres of interest?
I think it's easy when you're on the inside of creating the shows to think in genres, but consumers don't think that way to nearly the degree some people imagine. Consumers don't typically ask "What comedy show should I go see?" Instead, they ask "What should I do on Saturday night?" Also, people switch back and forth among category types all the time. Just because someone is a fan of, say, ballet, it doesn't mean they wouldn't want to see the Yankees. The probably do have an interest in that. Because we came to this business as consumers rather than as producers of shows, that's just the way we did it. It only seemed natural to us to give people the broadest selection we could.
Do you work exclusively with venues/promoters, or can individual performers create accounts?
In some cases, performers work with us directly, but of course, they have to have the ability to authorize the sale of tickets on behalf of the show. Sometimes, the performer and "the show" are one and the same, so that makes it easy!
The copy on the site seems to be in a consistent voice. Does Goldstar edit listings?
Yes, we do, and thank you for noticing the consistency in the voice! We have an editorial staff who writes the copy with input from our venue/producer partners, and its goal is to communicate to Goldstar members in a way that works for them, and I think they're pretty good at it.
Generally speaking, we're trying to talk to our members as we would if we were a friend of theirs who was telling them about a show. Sometimes, again, when you're on the inside of developing a show, you tend to forget what's really going to ring a ticket buyer's bell. They may not care, for example, that it's the West Coast premiere of your play, which is something that actually gets suggested sometimes as a selling point. In fact, I can tell you with certainty that consumers care very little about that kind of thing. You, as the producer, might care, but for the most part, it's irrelevant to the ticket buyer. On the other hand, if the show has a cast member with a familiar face from "Frasier" or "Crash", telling people that is very helpful. Or if the title doesn't reveal much about the content, it helps to explain that it's the story of when Einstein met Picasso in a bar. It gives the customer something to begin to form an idea around. Movies do that with trailers; live shows need as much help as possible in this area.
Fairly recently, I noted on this blog that Joe's Pub in NYC had added comment fields to their event listings. Have the Goldstar comments sections gotten good responses? Helped sales? Are you ultimately hoping to replace or at least seriously compete with sites like Yelp or CitySearch, or is that apples and oranges?
We were the first company in the world to have online reviews for live entertainment, and we have far more than anyone else. We have hundreds of thousands of reviews and ratings, just for shows on our site and just by people who actually went. As a comparison, search for reviews of "Fuerzabruta" on Yelp and then search on Goldstar. There are 49 reviews on Yelp and and 541 on ours. Not only that, but we have reviews on hundreds of shows that don't hit their radar screen.
So Goldstar is the worldwide leader in real-time, unedited user reviews and ratings for live entertainment, and it's one of the things our members like most about the site. Having said that, we're not trying to do what Yelp or Citysearch are doing. We're about helping our members get out to live entertainment more; they are media companies with an advertising-based business model. It is true, though, that a lot of people use Goldstar as a guide in a simliar way, but I'm not going to compete with Yelp and Citysearch for the restaurant biz or in the business of selling banners to advertisers at $1 CPM. They can have that to themselves!
Obviously, every venue is different, but in your opinion, at what point should a presenter discount their tickets?
Here's what I suggest to every venue partner who will put up with listening to me on this topic: From a sales point of view, there's only one number you should be concerned with - revenue per seat. That is, take all the money you make from a given show and divide it by the number of seats you have available to sell.
So for example, and to keep the math easy so I don't mess up, imagine you have 100 seats in your venue. Imagine that you sell 50 of them at $20 each. That's $1000, or $1000 divided by $100 or $10 per seat. Now, if you sold another 50 at $10 per seat, you'd have $1500 in total revenue divided by the same 100 seats or $15 per seat. Some people go by average ticket sold, so they'd see that as a drop because now they have all these $10 seats mixed in with the $20, but in reality, what they've forgotten to do is add in all the $0 seats for the ones they didn't sell.
So my advice is to evaluate how you're going to maximize revenue per seat and raise or lower prices accordingly. Having said that, if you're going to discount, you should do it through a channel, like Goldstar or others because it protects the integrity of your prices to your core buyers. In Goldstar's case, not only is it a channel, but it's a channel that is overwhelmingly people who are new to what you're doing. Last year, we learned that 85% of the time, Goldstar members do not have a specific show in mind when they come to the site, so if you are a venue or producer are on the site, you're going to be reaching a new customer in all likelihood.
To shift the subject slightly, sometimes I'm amazed that people who hesitate to discount in channels are the very first ones to blast their core buyers with a discount. If you're giving your core buyers discounts often enough, that's not a discount; it's a reduction in your price.
Finally, I'd say don't be shy about having a strategy that includes discounts as early as possible because the effect of not having people come to your venue is tremendous. If we were in the business of selling iPods, we could take whatever we don't sell today and sell it tomorrow, but our inventory is expiring. You can't sell Tuesday's ticket on Wednesday. Not only that, but the benefits of having somebody there as opposed to not there are obvious: word of mouth, secondary sources of revenue like food and beverage or merchandise, not to mention simply the opportunity to reach that person with what you're doing and draw them into your permanent fan base.
By the way, I give a 90 minute seminar on that Revenue Per Seat thing, and if any of our venue partners or organizations they belong to would like to hear it, all I ask in exchange if that you take me to dinner afterwards. :) Seriously, they should contact us about that and we can work out a date because this is very important for people in the industry to understand.
There's this purse store in Tribeca - Cleo & Patek - in which the bags are always 60% off. You walk in and the woman says, "The price on the tag is not the price. Everything is on sale." I fall for it time and time again, and I'm starting to suspect that the "real" prices are actually the "sale" prices...or vice versa. Psychologically speaking, do you think presenters should mark up and then "discount" tickets as soon as they go on sale?
For my taste, that example is a little gimmicky. Actually, it's a lot gimmicky. Consumers are smarter than ever [Not me! I've bought two clutches and a wallet from that store.] and so when you tell them what something's "real" value is, they're not just going to take it as gospel because you said it.
I can't tell you how much time we spend making sure that the "full" price we put on our site is the legitimate full price that people are really paying at the venue for a ticket. It's a bad idea to try those kinds of shenanigans with consumers because it erodes their trust in you very quickly, and I wouldn't recommend it at all. Going back to what I said earlier, venues need to manage their Revenue per Seat, so they should be looking for the combination of prices that does that.
I'll tell you another thing that I'm not a fan of: pretending things are sold out that aren't sold out. At a conference in NYC last year that I will not name, one of the keynote speakers was a "marketing expert" on Broadway and touring Broadway shows. The thrust of his whole presentation, believe it or not, was that your goal as a marketer was to create "perceived demand". In other words, if you make people think somebody wants your tickets, then those people will want your tickets.
Well, guess what. That only works if people really do want your tickets! You might manage to stimulate your already-committed base to action by putting part of the house on sale and then "selling out" and then putting another part on sale, but that's it. My counterpoint to this whole way of thinking is that if everyone took the energy they put into trying to generate this phony-baloney "perceived demand" and tried instead to generate ACTUAL demand, everyone would be much better off. This involves getting to know your customers better, innovating to serve their needs and generally quite a bit of blood, sweat and tears, so often, people don't do it enough.
Papering houses: sometimes necessity or avoidable circumstance?
I suppose it's a necessity at some point if you haven't prepared from a marketing point of view or if there's simply no interest in the marketplace in what you're doing.
We have an interesting strategy in this area. We have a program called Quick Start, which is a way for shows in the first couple weeks of their run to put lots of comp tickets on our site. Our members love it, and they pay a small fee per ticket for these 'comps.' Because they have a small investment, about 85% of people who buy comps on our site show up, whereas the traditional ratio of papering is just the inverse of that: you give away 10 tickets in Times Square for every one person who walks through the door. Not just that, but by packing your preview or first couple weeks, you activate word of mouth and end up with lots of reviews and ratings on the Goldstar site. Good reviews tend to help sell the show and raise the profile of the event on our site. Then, hopefully, we've helped create a market for the rest of that show's run and comps aren't necessary anymore.
When you go to performances and see half-empty houses, does it just annoy the heck out of you? Last time you sat in the audience of a half-empty show, what was the first thing that came to your mind?
Yes, it does. How'd you guess?
The last time I was in a place like that, the first thing that I thought was, "they didn't manage their revenue per seat very well on this one, did they?" The second thing I thought was "We could probably have sold half of that mezzanine for them."
The third thing I thought is that I should probably learn to compartmentalize my work life and my personal life a little better.
In your opinion, what are the three biggest mistakes performing arts organizations make in marketing (or not marketing) their performances?
1. They don't take into account the way marketing has changed. I've literally heard people say they were about to send out 5000 post cards for their show and so they were going to wait to see what happened after those hit before they figured out the rest of their marketing plan. Well, let's do the math on that: 5000 post cards get delivered, but maybe 20% get read. That's 1000 post cards. If 10% of the people who read it are interested, that's 100 post cards, and if 10% of those people actually remember how to buy the tickets and actually go through with a purchase, that's 10 customers buying a couple tickets each.
The simple fact is that most traditional advertising is overwhelmingly ineffective now. Even "traditional" web advertising has dropped to levels of responsiveness (or unresponsiveness) that we would have been startled by back in '98 or '99. If you're counting on some kind of media buy to solve your marketing problems, you're going to have a hard time hitting your goals, so you have to do something else.
2. They separate the art from the marketing. In the past, it might have been ok to have the "art" over here and the "marketing" over there, but in a Live 2.0 world, You Are Your Marketing. To say that differently, since advertising really doesn't work anymore, the show itself has to communicate what makes it special and worth seeing and what was once the marketing department is now responsible for running the conversation about the show. You can't do that in silos the way you could when marketing's job was to create pretty postcards or print ads or web banners about whatever show the creative people happened to come up with.
3. They worry about the wrong things from a business point of view. Ultimately, any performing arts organization should care about two things when it comes to selling tickets: getting as many people as possible to see the show and getting as much money as possible. All too often, though, they get wrapped up in issues that are secondary or even counter-productive like average ticket price. Well, you don't put average ticket price in the bank; you put dollars in the bank. Not only that, but when keeping your average ticket price up* also keeps people out of your venue, you have to stop and ask yourself why you're doing it.
*BTW, people who manage average ticket price almost never count the zeroes from unsold seats, which makes it inaccurate anyway.
Final question: Can you please put Billy Elliot on Broadway up on Goldstar so I can afford to go see it?
It's already been moved to the top of my priority list!
Further to my post about e-programs, look at this 09-10 e-season brochure from The London Philharmonic Orchestra! You can flip through it online, download as a PDF, and/or e mail it to a friend. Having spent 20 minutes playing around with it this morning, I can officially say it's the first orchestra season brochure I've read cover-to-cover -- or, perhaps more accurately, page 1/68 - 68/68 -- in years, if not ever. And it cost zero dollars ($0) for them to get it to me. Thanks to Ronen for the link.
As someone who has been known to Photoshop a few images in her day, I have to brush-tool draw your attention to La Cieca's top-notch Aretha Franklin Inauguration Hat/George Man-of work:
This is excellent, excellent Photoshopping.
This is excellent, excellent Photoshopping.
The (now not so) new Carnegie Hall programs are fantastic. I've been meaning to write this since seeing Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Orpheus there in October, but my scanner has been on the fritz. I was reminded how much I liked said programs, however, on Sunday night at the Kurtag recital (um...go Steelers?) and promptly repaired my scanner for this purpose.
Such nice bright colors in the calendar section! Gives the hall the opportunity to highlight specific concerts in an aesthetically pleasing fashion without using wasteful and noisy program inserts. The blocks of color are clean and distracting in a good way. There are few things worse than venues trying to be cool with their marketing materials and, in doing so, losing sight of their established brand. The new calendar pages are still very "Carnegie" just...a bit more fun than the standard black, white and re(a)d all over.. Another great improvement is the inclusion of big artist photos above the bios; MUCH better than the tiny thumbnail treatment artist photos used to get:
On Sunday, I also noticed a page I'd not seen before: "From Where I Sat", billed as a "Carnegie Hall Recollection". February's re-collector is Glenn D. Lowry from MOMA, who talks about the energy contrast between pre-concert buzzing and the hush just before the first notes. The quote is only a couple paragraphs, but it's nice to think about folks from around the city coming to Carnegie and then reflecting in print. I hope they choose people completely outside of the arts in the future, too.
I, personally, always save my programs. I put them in a basket, and then in ziplock bags when the basket overflows, and then bring them to my mom's house in Connecticut en masse whenever I visit. Some unsuspecting future relative will someday discover how many performances "crazy great-aunt Amanda" actually went to. Every time I leave a concert, though, there are used programs lingering on the floor and on seats, not to mention boxes of untouched programs by the doors. In the interest of saving some trees and shekels, should presenters do away with printed programs?
At the point of purchase, ask if the patron would like to be e mailed the program. Get his/her e mail address. (Two birds, one click.) Advertisers will like this because they will now be able to get click-through reports from these e-programs. Patrons can print out the pages they want (most likely the actual list of pieces) and bring them to the concert. If they print the whole thing, fine: it's not your paper and printing costs! At the same time - and they've been doing this in England, at least with West End shows, as long as I can remember - charge $1-$2 for printed programs, and tack that charge onto the ticket price. "Would you like to add a program?", click. Print a handful of extras for walk-ups, and have the single pages with the list of pieces available at the box office just in case. Press and artist comps, of course, always get free programs included with their tickets.
While you're at it, announce that your house is "Going Green!" and get some local press for your troubles.
Such nice bright colors in the calendar section! Gives the hall the opportunity to highlight specific concerts in an aesthetically pleasing fashion without using wasteful and noisy program inserts. The blocks of color are clean and distracting in a good way. There are few things worse than venues trying to be cool with their marketing materials and, in doing so, losing sight of their established brand. The new calendar pages are still very "Carnegie" just...a bit more fun than the standard black, white and re(a)d all over.. Another great improvement is the inclusion of big artist photos above the bios; MUCH better than the tiny thumbnail treatment artist photos used to get:On Sunday, I also noticed a page I'd not seen before: "From Where I Sat", billed as a "Carnegie Hall Recollection". February's re-collector is Glenn D. Lowry from MOMA, who talks about the energy contrast between pre-concert buzzing and the hush just before the first notes. The quote is only a couple paragraphs, but it's nice to think about folks from around the city coming to Carnegie and then reflecting in print. I hope they choose people completely outside of the arts in the future, too. I, personally, always save my programs. I put them in a basket, and then in ziplock bags when the basket overflows, and then bring them to my mom's house in Connecticut en masse whenever I visit. Some unsuspecting future relative will someday discover how many performances "crazy great-aunt Amanda" actually went to. Every time I leave a concert, though, there are used programs lingering on the floor and on seats, not to mention boxes of untouched programs by the doors. In the interest of saving some trees and shekels, should presenters do away with printed programs?
At the point of purchase, ask if the patron would like to be e mailed the program. Get his/her e mail address. (Two birds, one click.) Advertisers will like this because they will now be able to get click-through reports from these e-programs. Patrons can print out the pages they want (most likely the actual list of pieces) and bring them to the concert. If they print the whole thing, fine: it's not your paper and printing costs! At the same time - and they've been doing this in England, at least with West End shows, as long as I can remember - charge $1-$2 for printed programs, and tack that charge onto the ticket price. "Would you like to add a program?", click. Print a handful of extras for walk-ups, and have the single pages with the list of pieces available at the box office just in case. Press and artist comps, of course, always get free programs included with their tickets.
While you're at it, announce that your house is "Going Green!" and get some local press for your troubles.
I was just (remortgaging the house I don't have and) buying flowers online, and this popped up:
I'm always "chatting" with Verizon reps, too. Sometimes they suggest I call the 800-number with my question, but often they're quite useful online, and I don't have to listen to hold music.
I'd love to see a presenter box office live chat option. "Need help picking the perfect concert? Let one of our experts help you. CHAT NOW." That way, venues could have trained box office representatives who work from home. Call them "experts", too - not "representatives" - because they usually are, and it's more encouraging to the buyer that way.
The Detroit Symphony Orchestra used to have a Leonard Slatkin hologram on their homepage. I don't know where he wandered off to, but it would be fun to have an orchestra's music director be the equivalent of the blonde 1-800-Flowers gal above: the icon of a music director helping you personally choose tickets to the orchestra's concerts. You'd have to clarify that it wasn't actually Slatkin responding, for our more oblivious friends, but I think it would be a nice image. "It's my 81-year-old grandmother's birthday on Sunday, Alan Gilbert Hologram Man: what concert can I take the whole family to see?"
Pittsburgh Opera (congratulations to you on your big win yesterday, by the way) has The Opera Lady and The Metropolitan Opera has Ask Figaro: both great, but not live.
I'd love to see a presenter box office live chat option. "Need help picking the perfect concert? Let one of our experts help you. CHAT NOW." That way, venues could have trained box office representatives who work from home. Call them "experts", too - not "representatives" - because they usually are, and it's more encouraging to the buyer that way.
The Detroit Symphony Orchestra used to have a Leonard Slatkin hologram on their homepage. I don't know where he wandered off to, but it would be fun to have an orchestra's music director be the equivalent of the blonde 1-800-Flowers gal above: the icon of a music director helping you personally choose tickets to the orchestra's concerts. You'd have to clarify that it wasn't actually Slatkin responding, for our more oblivious friends, but I think it would be a nice image. "It's my 81-year-old grandmother's birthday on Sunday, Alan Gilbert Hologram Man: what concert can I take the whole family to see?"
Pittsburgh Opera (congratulations to you on your big win yesterday, by the way) has The Opera Lady and The Metropolitan Opera has Ask Figaro: both great, but not live.
A journalist friend forwarded me the following press release, and it is funny stuff:
Pittsburgh, PA, January 29...The trash-talking has already begun. Pittsburgh Opera and Arizona Opera (with locations in Phoenix and Tucson) have embraced the mortal combat of the Super Bowl with a fervor befitting, well, opera.
"Everyone knows how passionate Pittsburghers are about the Steelers. It goes without saying that we had to find a way to show our true devotion to our team," said Christopher Hahn, Pittsburgh Opera General Director, who today threw down the gauntlet at the feet of Arizona Opera Artistic Director Joel Revzen. Hahn and Revzen agreed on the terms of a nonmonetary wager after heated negotiations as to the losing company's specific type of embarrassment, degree of embarrassment, and required public demonstration of said embarrassment. If the Arizona Cardinals lose in the Super Bowl, Arizona Opera's artistic director and board chair must wear Steelers jerseys, and their senior staff must wave Terrible Towels for a poster-sized photo that will be displayed prominently for the entire run of the company's next production. If the Steelers lose, the same conditions apply, but Hahn has not ordered a Larry Fitzgerald jersey yet.
"Our Terrible Tree has been on display since late December," said Hahn. "I believe this demonstrates our superior commitment to team spirit and gives us a distinct advantage, aside from the facts that we have not one, but two fight songs, and the NFL has used the aria 'Celeste Aida' in its Steelers merchandise TV commercials. Plus, Bill Hillgrove, the 'Voice of the Steelers,' has recorded our pre-opera announcements. I'd like to see Arizona Opera beat those odds." The Terrible Tree is decorated with Steelers paraphernalia and at least one Terrible Towel, and has made the rounds on Facebook and Myspace.
The Pittsburgh Opera-Arizona Opera wager will be settled late Sunday night by a victory in Super Bowl XLIII.
The cliché press release tone and serious quotes from the general director are just great. To the victor, send in pictures!
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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
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Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture
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rock culture approximately
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Laura Collins-Hughes on arts, culture and coverage
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Richard Kessler on arts education
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Douglas McLennan's blog
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Dalouge Smith advocates for the Arts
Dalouge Smith advocates for the Arts
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Art from the American Outback
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For immediate release: the arts are marketable
For immediate release: the arts are marketable
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No genre is the new genre
No genre is the new genre
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David Jays on theatre and dance
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Paul Levy measures the Angles
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Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture
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John Rockwell on the arts
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Jan Herman - arts, media & culture with 'tude
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Apollinaire Scherr talks about dance
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Tobi Tobias on dance et al...
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Howard Mandel's freelance Urban Improvisation
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Focus on New Orleans. Jazz and Other Sounds
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Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...
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Jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology
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Martha Bayles on Film...
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Fresh ideas on building arts communities
The Future of Classical Music?
Greg Sandow performs a book-in-progress
Greg Sandow performs a book-in-progress
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Exploring Orchestras w/ Henry Fogel
Exploring Orchestras w/ Henry Fogel
Overflow
Harvey Sachs on music, and various digressions
Harvey Sachs on music, and various digressions
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Bruce Brubaker on all things Piano
Bruce Brubaker on all things Piano
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Kyle Gann on music after the fact
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Greg Sandow on the future of Classical Music
Greg Sandow on the future of Classical Music
Slipped Disc
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Norman Lebrecht on Shifting Sound Worlds
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Jerome Weeks on Books
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Scott McLemee on books, ideas & trash-culture ephemera
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Wendy Rosenfield: covering drama, onstage and off
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Chloe Veltman on how culture will save the world
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Public Art, Public Space
Public Art, Public Space
Another Bouncing Ball
Regina Hackett takes her Art To Go
Regina Hackett takes her Art To Go
Artopia
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John Perreault's art diary
CultureGrrl
Lee Rosenbaum's Cultural Commentary
Lee Rosenbaum's Cultural Commentary
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Tyler Green's modern & contemporary art blog
Tyler Green's modern & contemporary art blog
