New is different than young

Sugar, you couldn't be more wrong about musical taste becoming ossified by in one's 40s. I'm in my 50s and, in the past 10 years, went from loving underground hip hop to downtempo electronica to, now, blues (which I hated when I was in my 20s).

There's also a big problem in the "soap for the long term" premise.

Advertisers do not want people with brand loyalty. Seriously, this is a big misunderstanding of capitalism. advertisers don't want people to settle on ANYTHING for the long term. They want you to settle on what they tell you ... and they will consciously decide to label as obsolete the same thing they were pushing as the newest thing ever six months after its introduction. Been working in marketing for way too long to think that they want you to settle on anything for the long term. They want fickle. Capitalism (and advertising) is about eternal dissatisfaction -- keeping the customer constantly disgruntled and looking for something better. It is not at all about settling on anything for the long term. What they want is fickle and insecure -- product loyalty is absolutely not their objective, especially when you have megacorporations that sell competing brands.

Again, all of this is moot since music is its own product, greatly unlike television where the shows are nothing but bland carriers for the advertisements, which are the real product.

"However, I do believe after a certain age (maybe around 40?) you are pretty set in your musical ways. I know this isn't based on any scientific fact, but it seems that people really start to develop their personal tastes in high school and especially college, and that's what they stick with for a while."

I'd like to see data on this ... I've also seen that people over 40 tend to get so jaded with popular culture that that's when they start casting around looking for things off the beaten path. This really does need some hard data ...

I agree that 'newer' doesn't have to only mean 'younger.' However, I do believe after a certain age (maybe around 40?) you are pretty set in your musical ways. I know this isn't based on any scientific fact, but it seems that people really start to develop their personal tastes in high school and especially college, and that's what they stick with for a while. People change a lot during their 20s too. It's around those times that they explore new musical genres..lots of things change, their style and appearance, for example. So while new doesn't have to only mean 'young,' I can see how one would want to target younger audiences, since (in my view) they are more likely to be more open to different things since they are in that stage in life.

On that note, did you see that the LA Phil has a student/senior rush ticket program? Looks like they are going for both ends of the spectrum. Good for them!

Good points here. And the question remains: even when you have a young audience, what do you do with it? For example, I attended the fall 2009 San Francisco Symphony gala (starring Lang Lang, MTT, etc.), and I couldn't believe the amount of Gen Y-ers -- drunk Gen Y-ers, I should say -- at the concert. (I'm 27, by the way, and had a glass as well.)

I turned to a young woman sitting next to me and commented on the youthful audience. After she hiccuped, she said, "If you think they're here for the music, you're wrong."

OK. So, it's a status thing. I get it. And I got it when intermission looked a hell of a lot like prom night.

Still this was a golden opportunity to snag those Marina kids. But this phenomenon hasn't happened again, and probably won't until the the next gala.

Maybe it's a free champagne thing?

Thank you for addressing the (to me) elephant in the room.Which is the mistake presenters make in insisting on gearing their marketing toward the younger "hip" audience. One could miss 70% percent of the potential audience (and dollars) that way. I have been to conferences (which shall remain nameless) where the only music showcased was for the under 30 crowd and I for one (over 30 musician) found little that I would spend money to see, and as far as classical there was none at all. This was explained to me as the need to bring in a younger audience, but seemed to me like "throwing out the baby with the bath water". Hope the discussion spreads!

Just to clarify, my previous comment on this post was an attempt at a joke. Looking at it again, it went awry.

I think the classical music industry needs to worry first about having an exciting, invigorating, rigorous product to sell before it worries about to whom it should be sold. If you have a good product, and you do decent marketing, people will find their way there. There are lots of people expending a tremendous amount of effort in the classical music industry, but there is also a lot of decision-making (especially in programming and interpretation) that simply seems lazy, or inherited from an earlier era and never reexamined. Marketing classical music will be a lot easier once those decisions are rethought (or reaffirmed, as appropriate - even a vigorous reaffirmation is more engaging than a simple acceptance of the way things have been).

Now I'm worried I may have gone from making a bad joke to being incoherent. Such is the way of Internet commenting.

Judd,

I understand the soap analogy you're making, but I wonder whether it really works. Is classical music really the same as soap? Your need for soap remains pretty constant throughout your life, but your need for classical music isn't necessarily so consistent (although it might be). It's possible that it's just something most people come to later in life. Until that question is satisfactorily resolved I'm not sure the comparison can be fairly made.

I really like Amanda's point about trying to reach all ages at once: as an ensemble director observed to me recently, the audience for classical music conforms to the age demographic of wider society far more accurately than does the audience for rock or pop.

The point I was trying to make was not that orchestras are using Madison Avenue techniques for determining their target market, but that the same logic applies, distinct from that mentality. The big difference is that the "culture providers" (those who deliver the cultural product) and the "advertisers" (those who stand to benefit from the audience's attention) are distinct in the case of the TV shows, but the same in the case of classical music. NBC wants younger viewers because they buy soap for the long term. The NY Phil wants younger audience members because they buy the NY Phil for the long term. Classical music organizations aren't delivering eyeballs to advertisers, they are building a subscription and donation base. But if younger people yield a greater long-term return - in whatever metric you want (attendance, donations, etc.) - organizations ignore that at their own peril. That's the "Conan" argument, but it's a long-term strategy, not a short-term one.

At the same time, if you ignore the "Leno" demographic, that's as problematic in classical music as it is on TV, and for similar reasons.

Judd, I don't necessarily think that younger viewers ARE more "gullible" or whatever, but that they are most definitely being marketed to with that in mind by advertisers. Advertisers are hardcore cynics, and they do feel this way, and it informs their messages even if they think it doesn't.

It's a dangerous thing for an entire cultural movement to either make those assumptions (especially if they aren't aware that they are there) both because they are insulting and because a model that promises to deliver paying eyeballs to advertisers probably isn't the right one for an entire cultural movement to use.

(I'm also not persuaded of the "the brand of soap you use now is the one you use at 60" idea, though ... mostly because until today's 18 year olds have aged to 60, we won't know if it's true any longer. Long-tail effects make it infinitely easier to shift niches in a lot of ways that were not possible prior to that sort of niche-specific marketing.)

Janis, as I understand it, younger viewers are better not because they are more "gullible" but because they have not yet made the product and lifestyle choices that will stick with them for the rest of their lives. It seems that the soap you choose at 18 is often the soap you're using at 60, strangely enough. Since buying soap can seem to some of us like a largely arbitrary act of looking at a Wall of Product and choosing the most appealing ingredient or purity-percentage or color, spending ad dollars to subliminally get young people to like your color or attribute is a really good move, because that's 30+ years of soap purchases. Also, young people have more disposable income than do older people, in many cases, because of the absence of dependents and the presence of family support, educational loans, lower cost of living, etc., so they are more likely to go to movies, etc.

Amanda, I'd be curious to know why you think it's important to get young people to hear classical music (though I'm sure you've written about this before and I just didn't catch it). From what I've heard, time and time again, the rationale from the perspective of Arts Admins is EXACTLY the same as for the good people at Lever or IvoryCorp or whatever it may be - a young person who decides that going to the orchestra is Something They Do is going to be Doing that for a long, long time. When they get older, they will also be likely to fork over their year-end surplus to that orchestra, and when they die, they might bequeath something extra, as well. And, if we want to be less cynical about it, they will also get their friends to come, inculcate love-of-orchestras as a value in their kids, etc. So it's a great investment, for the same reasons that the soap people might think so. Again, it's not about being gullible, it's about having not yet made the decisions in your life about how to spend resources - time and money. A Gen X-er who's already made the "decision" to be a fan of REO Speedwagon - or KRS-One, or Dolly Parton, or Cecil Taylor (this is a suddenly-weird list!) - is much less likely to have consistent brand loyalty to the NY Phil, and that makes the achievement of getting them into a single concert much less valuable.

None of this is to say, of course, that it's a small achievement to get older audience members. And, in fact, the Leno-esque backlash against the over-emphasis on younger audiences is something that one sees on comment boards, etc., all the time. Orchestral administrators and other core-classical admins have a nearly-impossible game to play - satisfy the older demographic while building a new audience. It's like Big Tent politics, and the older listeners are the taken-for-granted political base, often gently alienated by the outreach efforts of the Party. But perhaps less alienated than one might think....

I love nothing more than getting my dad and other relatives to fall in love with the artists whose albums we release and shows we present. For my own music, it's absolutely as personally meaningful to find older listeners drawn to my musical voice as it is to have peers and even younger fans. The point I'm making in this excessively-long comment is just that the rationale for TV executives and arts administrators are more similar than it might seem. And in the arts, it does not seem to be quite the either/or game that has gone down in the Late Night TV arena.

"Younger viewers, they said, were better viewers. They were more susceptible to advertising blandishments. They were more likely to decide on a product and maintain loyalty to it for life. And they were harder to reach and therefore more desirable."

I'm disturbed by this quote and the what it implies: TV likes younger viewers, despite their short attention span, because they are more gullible.

That's sort of it in a nutshell -- they are more malleable and can be persuaded to buy cheap junk (advertisements) and will maintain product loyalty. That adds up to "not too bright and timid." That doesn't square up with the "smart, edgy hipster" image that they attach to the coveted younger viewer.

What do the advertisers actually think of the people they are pursuing?

Are older viewers square, or just less impulsive (and smarter) and less likely to lust after the newest gadget if they're shown an advertisement for it?

I'm using a lot of loaded terms in this comment, I know. But this is a loaded-term sort of discussion, and I hope I'm using them in a way that sort of rips the bandaid off of the underlying assumptions beneath them. Those assumptions are that the mass media like younger viewers because they can be BS-ed more easily. Not because they're cool, edgy, hip, smart, or ironic. They fork over money for cheap plastic gadgets more quickly, and once they use one gadget, they are fearful of switching to a new one. That's it.

I mean, TV doesn't care who watches. Advertisers do. The classical world has to find another way to connect with audiences than to take that model of assuming that the most coveted audience is the one with the shortest attention span and the biggest appetite for trendy gadgets. Younger viewers and listeners are of course incredibly important to the classical world ... but not for those reasons. You may be pursuing the same younger audience that the mass media do, but as God is your witness, don't do it for the same reasons or using the same methods.

FTR, I'm Generation X pretty firmly. I'm in a weird space regarding classical music though, since I was raised in an Italian-American family that pretty much was soaked in classical and opera for my entire youth. I didn't even know outside music existed all that much in the 1970s. The 70s for me are Beethoven, Beverly Sills, and Virgil Fox. My nonclassical vernacular is 80s stadium rock, and I still have a hard time telling the difference between the types; it's all highly melodic and virtuosic instrumental music with a huge voice in the front.

I always thought this blog was too cool for me. Now I know for sure. Godspeed!