I first heard about Lincoln Center’s Tully Scope Festival, which opens tonight at 6 p.m. with a free concert in the lobby, when I received their v. attractive brochure in the mail. Here it is, modeled Quite Professionally on the floor of my apartment:
Similar to their winning multimedia treatment of the White Light Festival this fall, Lincoln Center created a microsite for Tully Scope. This is especially useful because the proper Lincoln Center site is a bear to deal with. The driving force behind Tully Scope appears to be the hall itself and the diverse music-making that has been and will be presented there. This is a clever way to (re)draw attention to the physical space after the buzz around its (re)opening in 2009. (Never Forget The Great Outlet Take-Down of December 2009.) The microsite copy reads:
EXPERIENCE ALICE TULLY HALL
Tully Scope takes
place within the perfect festival setting that is the transformed Alice
Tully Hall. From its signature sweeping glass Broadway façade and
lively bar and café to its visually rich interiors and the critically
acclaimed acoustics of the Starr Theater, Tully is the place to sip a
cocktail, mingle with fellow New Yorkers, and hear the sort of
world-class performances one expects from Lincoln Center.
Again like the White Light Festival (which I blogged about here), Tully Scope has an abundance of video material to preview the concerts, as well as an audio playlist of the groups and works being performed on the festival (also in its inaugural year, the Ecstatic Music Festival does the same). Tully Scope even has a nice little custom intro to their video feature. I would include an example here, but all their videos–from White Light,
too–auto-load when embedded on a third party site, which is just about
the most annoying thing. Check out the great videos on their site, though.
The ticket scheme is also new – one I’ve not heard of a presenter doing before:
BUY 2×, 3×, 4× . . . TICKETS $20
Whether you’re
a newcomer or an avid concertgoer, we invite you to explore both
familiar and new musical passions. Purchase one full-price ticket to a
Tully Scope event and you’ll be able to buy tickets to all other
festival events for just $20–and to extend your concert experience,
enjoy a post-performance drink on us. We look forward to seeing you
again (and again!) at our newest musical destination–Tully Scope.
While two other new festivals launching this year–the aforementioned Ecstatic Music Festival and the Spring for Music Festival in May, which I’m working on–are offering $25 tickets for all seats to all concerts (Ecstatic has a subscription program, too: $20 each for 4 or more concerts), Tully Scope has you buy one full price ticket and then any other one for $20. This is interesting, because it’s not exactly undervaluing (insert air quotes as you see fit) say, an Emanuel Ax ticket (that would go for $30-$100, I would guess, at Carnegie or the Philharmonic), but it’s also not just using existing ticket buyers to fill concerts that just aren’t selling well. That is, there doesn’t seem to be a “buy one, get one of lesser or equal value” situation going on, here. I also like that this encourages audiences to experience The Festival (“You wish to go to the Festival? The ~Festival~? The King’s Festival?”) in its entirety. I remember reading a, wait for it–Bon Jovi…or was it Bruce Springsteen?–interview on the back page of Time Out New York in which Bruce or Bon said that he was often sad that his kids didn’t understand the concept of buying a full album; “kids these days” would go into iTunes and buy the tracks they liked, ignoring the fact that the artist put together something meant to be heard as a whole.
Additionally, the Tully Scope pricing structure is essentially taking the preview concept I blogged about last week to a new level: if you liked one concert and now trust our taste, try another one; it’s (mostly) on us.
There are few things more irritating than a venue being criticized for good marketing. “Damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” my mother would say. After all the success of the White Light Festival, the New York Times critics TOOK IT TO THE BLOGOSPHERE to decide whether the concept was a Spiritual Pursuit or Marketing Scheme. Who the Sigur Ros cares, I say, so long as tickets are sold to great concerts. Why must we always be forced to deal with fantastic marketing for terrible products (e.g. I don’t know – Mountain Dew?) and terrible marketing for fantastic products (e.g. classical music)? And if you’re going to criticize Jane Moss for being too personal about it all, then let’s not ever again complain about cookie-cutter season planning, agreed? Agreed.