Can arts organizations survive the longest-running disruption in history? Opera Australia has cracked the code
If we’re honest, classical music marketers are attempting the impossible: selling an expensive product that few people are familiar with—and even fewer people think they need—which anyone can find for free online.
It wasn’t always like this. A little over a century ago, classical music was king—both on the concert stage and in the front parlor. Music education was considered an essential part of a well-rounded upbringing, and the parlor piano was central to domestic life. Classical music marketing strategies in the 19th century centered around selling culture and refinement: when the New York Philharmonic was founded, they invited their patrons to experience the “enjoyment of the highest intellectual character” and the “refinement of the human heart.” Journalists extolled classical music as an essential ingredient of culture and civic life: “The finer the kind of music made or heard together, the finer the society.”
Since the early 20th century, live music performance has been battling the “longest-running disruption” in history.
The arrival of the phonograph in the late nineteenth century sparked what Clayton Christensen has called “the longest-running disruption” in history. Music, for the first time, became recordable, portable, and infinitely more accessible. Suddenly, patrons didn’t have to pay for a ticket to hear their favorite classical music and by 1915, Americans were spending tens of millions each year on phonographs and records. Recording artists became international celebrities—as did many conductors.
Next came television. NBC created an opera company in 1949 that produced operas (sung in English) for primetime television. In 1958, CBS began broadcasting Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic. NBC Opera Theatre was phased out in 1964—operas performed live in studio couldn’t compete with the high production values of the new Hollywood-produced drama series. Leonard Bernstein’s televised concerts ended in 1972.
But the disruption of live performance accelerated even more rapidly with the onset of the 21st century as LPs, cassettes, and CDs were replaced by MP3 downloads, YouTube, and streaming services. With the world’s music instantly available, and often for free, the landscape changed forever. The options were endless, and audiences splintered as they migrated toward their preferred genres and streaming platforms.
Today, classical music ticket sales have declined by nearly 50%—a trend that began, not surprisingly, around the same time that music went digital. Marketers find themselves struggling to attract audiences in a complex market that is oversaturated by options. Consumers have a much broader view of what constitutes culture; classical music now shares its pedestal with TV/film, food/drink experiences, street fairs, music festivals, and more. The result? The majority of consumers are simply not familiar with the classical music world.
31% of Americans enjoy listening to classical music. So why are less than 10% attending live performances?
But here’s the conundrum: a Primephonic study found that 31% of Americans enjoy listening to classical music. This number was confirmed by MIDiA’s 2018 study (which also reveals that classical music is the fourth most preferred music genre.) So why are less than 10% of Americans attending live performances? And how can we convince the other 21% that a live performance is better than a Youtube recording or a Spotify playlist?
One thing is clear: the traditional egocentric approach of lauding the “transcendent music,” the “virtuosic soloist,” and the “charismatic conductor,” is no longer working for the majority of consumers. Why? They just don’t see classical music as relevant to their lives. Yet nearly every classical music organization’s website, social media feed, and Youtube channel ignores its audiences and features its musicians and conductors, positioning classical music as the epitome of refinement. It’s an old approach that used to work, when audiences received classical music education in school, had fewer options vying for their attention, and defined culture in more narrow terms.
Jobs to Be Done theory has sparked incredible growth for businesses worldwide but is largely untapped in the culture sector.
The good news? Business theory offers a solution. Jobs to Be Done theory, in particular, holds exciting implications for cultural organizations who are seeking new ways to build their audiences. Based on a seemingly simple concept that centers on the customer’s perspective, this powerful approach has sparked incredible growth for businesses worldwide and, while largely untapped in the culture sector, has proven highly successful for a handful of performing arts organizations.
Opera Australia, for instance, increased their sales revenue 28% in eight years and became the only major, year-round opera company whose ticket sales provide more than 50% of its income—an impressive feat when industry-wide trends continue to show a steady decline. How’d they do it? They shifted to a customer-centric approach and turned their attention to their audiences—talking with them directly, listening with openness to their feedback. The lessons they learned can be distilled into three key questions that all classical music marketers should revisit regularly.
1) What’s the best place to advertise that will allow us to meet customers where they are in the process of seeking a solution for their Job to Be Done?
Producing opera is expensive. Lowering the ticket price isn’t a viable solution. (But even if it was, offering cheap tickets will not fill seats in the long term—it’s more likely to decrease the value of the performance in consumer’s minds.) In fact, Opera Australia employs a strategy called dynamic pricing—raising the prices of tickets for performances that are in high demand. As Clayton Christensen wrote in Competing Against Luck, “If [the customer] believes that [your product] “fulfills their Job to Be Done, they’ll stop shopping around—and gladly pay a premium price for the solution that best solves their job.”
What’s more essential than offering a “palatable” price is meeting the right customers in the right place at the right time, says Jobs to Be Done guru Bob Moesta, who defines the customer’s buying timeline in six stages. Unless your marketing is reaching customers when they’re in the active looking stage, he says, it won’t cause a customer to take the leap. Opera Australia tapped into this concept by successfully placing advertisements in what might initially appear to be unlikely channels through which to gain opera customers:
For the tourist who wants to see the best that Sydney has to offer, OA now advertises on Expedia and Trip Advisor.
For the romantic looking for a way to impress their date on Valentine’s Day or New Year’s Eve, OA now advertises dinner-and-a-show packages on Groupon (for an additional fee you can even propose on stage!)
For the adult children who are tired of ordering flowers for Mom’s birthday every year, OA now advertises on Red Balloon, a site that provides unique gift ideas. (There’s even an option for a fully costumed walk-on role!)
For companies looking to build a rich experience for business conference delegates, OA now advertises on Business Events Sydney, a company that markets Sydney as a destination for conventions and conferences.
2) How do we alleviate the anxieties that the uninitiated have about our product?
In Demand Side Sales 101, Bob Moesta maintains that a product won’t sell until the customer’s anxieties or hesitations about the product are dwarfed by how well the product helps them “solve” their “job to be done.” Millennial audiences share a number of anxieties that act as roadblocks to attending a classical music performance, which performing arts organizations should be actively working to alleviate:
What should I wear?
Are the other concert-goers going to be snobs?
Am I going to feel dumb/uncouth?
Will I be bored all night?
When do I clap?
Will I have to sit silently, just listening, for hours?
How long is this concert/opera anyway?
Will I have to turn off my phone? How am I going to Instagram/Tweet my experience?
What if I don’t have anyone to go with?
Is it really worth the cost?
Overcoming the anxieties that first-timers have about the classical music experience requires flexibility and trust—the willingness to reconsider the traditions of the past and the confidence that your core audiences won’t turn on you when you begin to tailor the concert experience to the younger generation. (When the California Symphony addressed several of these anxieties by eliminating certain expectations around audience etiquette, ticket sales soared. Their core audiences did not wrinkle their noses and cancel their subscriptions—quite the opposite, reports executive director Aubrey Bergauer.)
Opera Australia tackled the perception problem by creating digital media that centered around familiar, relatable, and engaging content and utilized colloquial, customer-centric language. “If you talk the way your customer thinks,” says Bob Moesta, “selling becomes easy.” Here are three great examples of digital content designed to build connection and rapport from Opera Australia’s Youtube channel:
Opera Australia also thought carefully about how to augment the entire audience experience to ensure that attendees felt they were getting their money’s worth—they worked to create an experience around the product (opera) that far surpassed the experience of watching an opera video on Youtube.
This approach produced a dual benefit: fun, interactive elements enriched the customer experience while also providing shareable content—enlisting unwitting audiences to market for the opera company on social media. These add-on experiences include:
Photographers taking photos of audience members and posting them on social media the next day
Lobby displays of opera props and costumes where guests can play/pose for photos
Actors in costume roaming the lobby to interact with/pose with guests
Displaying a map of the world and inviting guests to mark their hometown with a sticker
Offering waltz lessons before performances of The Merry Widow
The list goes on and on—the opportunities for innovation here are endless
3) How do we convince our target audiences that our offerings, out of all that’s out there, will serve them best?
The first step toward engendering trust in potential audiences is becoming obsessed with the customer. The organization’s website, social media feed, video content must all be framed from the customer’s perspective. When a customer feels that an organization empathizes with them and deeply understands their world, they are much more likely to consider that organization’s product or service as a solution for their needs.
Opera Australia’s obsessively customer-centric digital content stands out in stark contrast to traditional classical music marketing. Rather than showing endless footage of the opera singers, conductor, and orchestra, Opera Australia’s ads feature real customers moving through the entire audience experience—walking through the city towards the opera house in date-night attire, sharing drinks and/or dinner before the show, taking their seats with anticipation as the theater darkens:
Opera Australia clearly understands the basic tenet of Jobs to Be Done theory: their customers are “hiring” them to help solve a Job to Be Done—and often, that “job” has nothing to do with the opera itself. Just like the elderly man who’s buying a drill not just to buy a drill, but to hang a shelf on which to display family photos because he misses his adult children, ticket buyers always have deeper motivations, even if they don’t recognize it themselves.
Opera Australia has cracked the code. They took the spotlight off themselves and put the customer at the center of their marketing. They alleviated customer anxieties wherever possible, advertised where they knew customers would be actively seeking solutions, and created digital content that caused their target audiences to say “They get me!” If more orchestras and opera companies began to follow their lead, the classical music industry would have a shot at transforming the world’s longest-running disruption from an existential threat into a historic opportunity.
