Classical music pundits have no shortage of ideas for saving classical music. More social media, cheaper tickets, shorter concerts, more contemporary repertoire, young musicians on Instagram, concerts in bars, movie scores, video game scores, new donor programs, new audience initiatives, new branding. Some of these are good ideas and a few of them demonstrably work.
My concern is that we keep trying them without being particularly clear about what problem we are trying to solve.
If an orchestra discounts tickets and attendance goes up, have we solved an affordability problem or temporarily bought an audience? If a clip gets 100,000 views on TikTok, have we created 100,000 future concertgoers? If we program more contemporary music, have we changed how someone who has never heard a live orchestra feels about walking into the hall?
Those distinctions are important because the problems underneath are structural. Audience development is difficult, donor populations are aging, and the economics of producing live music get harder every year. Many of the institutions built to support this art form were designed for a world that no longer exists.
I started thinking about this through something unrelated. Shirzad Chamine’s Positive Intelligence work uses factor analysis to get underneath the enormous number of ways human beings undermine themselves, reducing them to ten recurring “Saboteurs” and five corresponding Sage powers. He uses color as the analogy: we see millions of colors, but they reduce to a small number of primary components.
Factor analysis looks across many observed variables and identifies a smaller number of underlying factors that explain why those variables move together. I am using the idea loosely, but the discipline behind it is useful. Instead of asking how to sell more tickets, raise more money, or make concerts feel more relevant, what if we asked what underlying conditions are producing all of those problems at once?
If I were attempting that exercise for classical music, I would start with five factors.
FACTOR 1. Formation
We spend an enormous amount of money trying to convince adults to consume something they were never taught how to consume.
Classical music is unusual that way. Understanding it is not a prerequisite to enjoying it, but familiarity makes an enormous difference. Knowing what an orchestra is, recognizing instruments, understanding why Beethoven matters, having played in an ensemble, or simply having heard this music repeatedly as a child all lower the barrier to becoming an adult listener. Research from the National Endowment for the Arts has found childhood arts education to be a reliably strong predictor of adult participation in the arts.
I think we also need to distinguish between exposure and formation. Taking a fourth grader to hear an orchestra once is exposure. It may be memorable and worthwhile, but formation happens through repetition and participation: playing an instrument, singing in a choir, learning how to listen to a piece, having a teacher explain why something is interesting, going to concerts with your parents, performing badly in a middle-school band and eventually getting a little better. Those experiences create familiarity, and familiarity eventually creates ownership. Classical music stops feeling like something that belongs to somebody else.
That changes how I think about audience development. We usually begin audience development when somebody is 35 and Facebook tells us they might like Mahler. The real work may have needed to begin when that person was eight.
And it’s right there where the structural problem shows up. Formation has an extraordinarily long return on investment. An orchestra can spend $50,000 on marketing this season and count the tickets it sells next month. Spend the same $50,000 teaching elementary school students about music and the payoff may not arrive for twenty years, at which point some of those children will buy tickets from a different orchestra, donate to a different arts organization, join a community chorus, send their own children to lessons, or simply become adults who believe this music is worth preserving. No individual institution captures much of that return, which is precisely why no individual institution can or should be expected to fund it alone.
We have spent decades expecting orchestras, conservatories, schools, foundations, and individual teaching artists to solve pieces of this problem independently. Formation might be better understood as shared infrastructure for the entire field: school partnerships, youth ensembles, instruments in kids’ hands, digital music education, family concerts, and simple opportunities to sing and play. The goal is larger than getting a child into the hall next Saturday. It is producing a generation for whom this music is part of their cultural vocabulary. So that after they are officially in the workforce, when, hopefully, they have some disposable income, they will not balk at the social media ad serving up tickets to their local orchestra. If we want ticket buyers, musicians, board members, and donors thirty years from now, this is where the work begins.
FACTOR 2. Belonging
Classical music has spent years talking about accessibility as though accessibility mostly means price.
Price matters. But I am increasingly convinced that a $20 ticket does very little for someone who walks past the hall thinking, “that place isn’t for people like me.” Consider what that person is actually weighing. What do I wear? When do I clap? Am I supposed to know this music already? Will I understand what is happening? Who else will be there? Can I bring a drink to my seat? Why is everyone whispering? Individually these sound minor. Collectively they create an enormous wall, and the factor underneath them is belonging.
The field has done important work around representation and repertoire, and that work should continue. Belonging extends well past who composed the piece and who is standing on the stage, though. It shows up in how someone enters the building, how we talk about the music, whether questions are welcomed, whether there is any social experience attached to the performance, whether newcomers see people like themselves in the audience, and whether an institution behaves like a private club issuing invitations or a public institution that genuinely belongs to its community. A free ticket removes a financial barrier and does nothing else.
FACTOR 3. Economics
This one is well-known. Economists William Baumol and William Bowen studied performing arts organizations in the 1960s and described what we now call cost disease: a Beethoven symphony requires roughly the same number of musicians and roughly the same rehearsal and performance hours today as it did a century ago. Technology has made marketing, accounting, and ticketing more efficient, but it cannot turn Mahler’s Fifth into a five-person operation.
Meanwhile salaries, benefits, facilities, insurance, technology, and every other cost surrounding the performance keep rising. The revenue side has hard ceilings: a finite number of seats, a finite number of performances musicians can reasonably give, and a limit to what audiences will pay. This is why contributed revenue has always been structural rather than supplemental in this field. Philanthropy is a component of the business model, not a cushion on top of it.
Which means the conversation about financial sustainability needs to get more candid than it usually is. Some organizations need larger endowments. Some need smaller fixed-cost structures. Some need to share administrative infrastructure with peer institutions. Some need fewer performances, or different venues. And some markets simply cannot support the number or scale of organizations currently operating in them. Those are harder conversations than launching another young-professionals giving circle, and they sit much closer to the actual economics.
FACTOR 4. Attention
Classical music organizations often think they are competing with one another. They are more often competing with Netflix, the NFL, YouTube, restaurants, podcasts, gaming, and every other available use of a person’s time.
That competition has changed radically. Someone can sit on a couch and instantly reach virtually every piece of music ever recorded, watch the Berlin Philharmonic on their television, or hear one of the great Goldberg Variations recordings while walking the dog. Usually for free! Against that backdrop, “come downtown at eight on Tuesday, sit in this specific chair, don’t talk, and listen to this specific program for two hours” is a tough sell.
I don’t think that makes the concert less valuable. It may make it more distinctive. Live performance has things a streaming service cannot reproduce: eighty musicians breathing together before the opening chord, the physical force of an orchestra at full volume in an acoustically superior setting, a great soloist doing something almost superhuman twenty feet away, and the silence shared with two thousand other people after the final note and before the rousing applause. That really is the product. The more ubiquitous digital entertainment becomes, the more valuable communal physical experience becomes, and the field should get much better at explaining why being in the room is different than listening to this on your computer speakers.
FACTOR 5. Fragmentation
Every orchestra is developing its own audience. Every conservatory is building its own educational programs. Every presenter is maintaining its own mailing list. Every organization is raising money from many of the same donors. Then we wonder why changing the trajectory of an entire field feels impossible.
Imagine if every professional sport had to independently teach children the rules, develop youth leagues, build a national fan base, and convince television networks it deserved to exist. Sports rest on enormous shared infrastructure. Classical music rests on much less.
Some of the most important investments over the next decade may therefore be ones no single orchestra can justify on its own: shared educational platforms, shared audience data, national digital discovery tools, cross-institution marketing, and clearer pathways from learning an instrument to attending a concert to joining a community ensemble to becoming a donor. The field needs infrastructure that produces listeners, participants, and advocates before any of those people ever enter an individual institution’s CRM.
Formation is the clearest example. Every orchestra benefits when a child learns to love this music. Every conservatory benefits when more children learn instruments. Every chamber group benefits when more adults understand what they do. Yet we keep funding those activities institution by institution even though the benefits accrue across the whole field. That is a collective-action problem, and the field should start treating it like one.
Diagnose first
The appeal of Chamine’s framework is the attempt to reduce hundreds of visible behaviors to a much smaller number of underlying patterns, because once you understand the pattern you can choose an intervention built for it.
Classical music could use some of that discipline. Social media may be exactly right if the problem is discovery. Discounted tickets work when price is genuinely the barrier. A relaxed concert format helps with belonging. A school partnership strengthens formation. A merger or shared-services agreement addresses economics. To factor analysts like Chamine, when we confuse the intervention with the diagnosis, we never get the long-term results we claim to seek, only the occasional short-term win.
For decades these institutions have become remarkably good at treating whatever problem is directly in front of them. There is an empty seat, so market harder. There is a deficit, so raise more money. Subscribers are aging, so start a young-professionals program. A community feels disconnected, so program a community concert. Every one of those decisions can be perfectly reasonable, and if the underlying factors keep moving in the wrong direction we will be solving the same problems again next year. I mean, we already do this. Just look at the session descriptions for the national arts service organizations’ annual conferences from the past twenty years. They are all the same. We keep talking about the same problems and serving up a few “bright spot” organizations and leaders who happen to be getting a handful more short-term wins than everyone else in the field.
So before approving the next audience initiative, fundraising strategy, or digital campaign, I would ask one additional question: which of these five factors are we trying to move, and how will we know in ten years whether we moved it?