Besides the format and branding aspects of the OAE example, there’s their structure. They’re a chamber orchestra, with greater portability and flexibility than most symphony orchestras; looking at their terrific web site, it seems their personnel varies from 14 to 40 depending on programming (and speaking of programming,The Night Shift leans toward audience-friendly Baroque, right?). Also, The Night Shift does not appear to be subscription-based; this plus their smaller, more malleable structure allows them to be nimble and adjustable — they can fit easily into small venues, and can charge low prices.

There are some examples of innovative concert formats in the US as well — New World Symphony comes to mind.

But this gets us back to Do. What’s your goal? Do you want to break the mold, do stuff differently and see what happens? There’s certainly a need for that — just make sure you measure and evaluate based on facts, not anecdotes. Find out who the audience really is, ask them what they thought, take their input to heart, and use it grow. (It might be interesting to find out OAE’s process for creating The Night Shift brand — did they solicit any customer input as they built it?)

Or is your goal to maximize the number of under-somethings attending your concerts? This may lead you towards a very different set of options, The Night Shift being one of several you’d want to consider.

Returning to your original post, this isn’t a zero-sum game — only attract newbies or only attract more of the same. I admire what the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is doing, if I read your numbers right, they get about 4,000 people a year for their Night Shift concerts. They’re a great example of one way to go. Here’s another: 36% of the New York Philharmonic’s classical single ticket buyers are under the age of 35 — that’s more than 45,000 people a year. Another 15,000 are between 35 and 44. So that’s half the single ticket buyers — 60,000 concertgoers — under the age of 45, annually. And the proportion of the audience under 45 has grown 50% in the last ten years. Just sayin’.

Point is, we shouldn’t miss the opportunities to do better with the concerts we already have, even as we shop for that new car.

Which then raises the question of how that could be done. And a related, very important question — has anyone actually done it?

I’d suggest two candidates. Red, An Orchestra, which during the last decade gave concerts in Cleveland, drawing (or so some of their people told me) 1000 people in their 20s and 20s. I’m going to assume that many of these were repeat customers. Hard to believe they’d draw 1000 new people to concert after concert, or even 500 new people. They collapsed for financial reasons. They must have had a huge hole in their financing, since all it took was one cancelled concert (because of a snowstorm), and they were gone. Which does raise the question of whether their operation was sustainable — whether simply putting on the concerts, and branding and marketing them, cost more than Red could afford, no matter how many people they drew.

Still — 1000 people at each concert (if what I was told was true). I think I can guess how they did it. The concerts were buzz-worthy events. First because of the programming, which included a lot of new music, artfully chosen. One concert, I remember, had a Haydn symphony, and then — depicting the era that Haydn lived in — Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King, a music/theater extravaganza. Anyone who saw that, assuming the performances were halfway decent, would go away buzzing about it.

Second secret: branding. The color red was featured. People, I’m told, wore red to the concerts. So the organization, it seems to me, created a distinct identity that younger people identified with. What they did beyond that — email contact, whatever (social media wasn’t a factor back then) — I don’t know.

My other example would be the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s Night Shift. Late-night concerts separately branded for a young audience. Seems to work brilliantly, if I’m to believe what I’m told by OAE people I’ve emailed with, or talked to. They do four big Night Shift concerts each season, with an audience of 1000, and several smaller events in clubs. I spoke to one of their top-ranking people, and he stressed branding. Said he didn’t think they could have drawn a young audience with the usual orchestra branding. They needed to speak the cultural language of the people they wanted to reach.

One key to that, as I’ve said here before, was to recruit eight people from their young audience to represent them in brochures, advertisements, marketing, publicity. The point was that these people should be different from each other, striking in many different ways, and nothing like the established classical audience.

They’ve also got videos on their website introducing the Night Shift, which just shine with what seems like a genuine club vibe. Their programming stays pretty much what it is outside the Night Shift (they’re a period instrument group, though they’re expanding now into new music). Though they add pop and jazz musicians, who play in the club nights before the OAE musicians. They pick these people carefully, discuss them in detail on the Night Shift website, so it’s not generic pop/jazz. It’s strongly curated programming.

All of this speaks the cultural language (to use that term again) of the people they want to attract. So if I were asked for some best practices, in attracting — and holding — a young audience, I’d start with this: Speak its language, visually and otherwise. Enter the world of the people you want to draw. Instead of trying to get them to enter yours.

I gather the OAE thinks of this as a separate product line. Since they’re British, they depend less on donations than a US orchestra would, so I don’t know if the Night Shift audience would be likely to donate. Or if that’s an issue.

American orchestras would of course be more intensely interested in donations. And in the long-term sustainability of a Night Shift-like project. But I can’t believe any large American orchestra wouldn’t be thrilled to have young people thronging to 10 late-night events each season, including four large-scale concerts. If nothing else, it’s an investment in the future, and, maybe, a demonstration that there might just be one (with the financial model yet to be worked out).

I think you’ve laid out some good potential markets and pointed out where learning more about these markets — through objective, clear-eyed, unbiased research as well as,in some cases, piloting — can be very useful in growing the future audiences we absolutely need. I also agree that we need to deal with the realities of lower attendance frequency among the new audiences we are now attracting.

The only thing I’d add is that we also need to do a better job of keeping and deepening relationships with these new attenders, or all the efforts to attract them will be for naught.

One compelling reason to work on this is donations, as you pointed out. First-timers donate at a very low rate, but get them to come back for two more concerts and the rate of donation increases fourfold.

I also agree that “What we don’t want to do is ask so many questions in advance that we don’t proceed, and stare at a serious problem, knowing that it’s there, but not taking action.” But I don’t think that’s the usual problem. The problem is orchestras don’t ask the right questions at the right time and apply what they learn strategically, i.e. they don’t learn about their target audiences before creating programs for them, with the result that the programs under-achieve and the orchestras retreat. The failure is not in asking too many questions, but not asking enough.