Today, I want to speak specifically to the role of social media in the classical music industry.<\/p>\n
There are a lot of reasons one might start a blog. I had thought through a lot of them for a long time before I finally launched Vftp in earnest. In the end, I started the blog for a simple reason- I hoped it would help my orchestra at the time (the Oregon East Symphony) sell more tickets.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n After nine years and 1400+ blog posts, if I were to measure the success of this blog in terms of what it has done to sell tickets and build audiences, I would have to reluctantly conclude that it has been an abject failure.<\/p>\n Fortunately, it has<\/em> been successful and rewarding beyond my wildest dreams in other ways, and I\u2019m grateful that the fear of empty seats back then gave me the push I needed. I may have started blogging to sell tickets, but I kept<\/em> blogging because I found it (and still find it) empowering to have a forum in which I can say some of what I believe about life and music without needing to ask permission, seek consensus or pay for the privilege. Here I have only my professional judgement to stop me writing or saying anything. I don\u2019t have to worry about how many copies a magazine might sell or whether a publisher likes me. I can write about what interests me and let the chips fall where they may. This explains why I don\u2019t think a conductor\u2019s blog is going to sell many concert tickets- someone in town who is keen enough on Schumann\u2019s orchestral music to read a blog about his use of Klangfarbenmelodie<\/em><\/a> is almost certainly already coming to my next Schumann concert.<\/p>\n These days, blogging is on the wane, but just about every orchestra, conductor and soloist seems to have a Facebook profile and a Twitter feed. For several years, now, we\u2019ve all been trying to build audiences using social media. Social media may have its rewards, but as an audience building tool, I fear it basically stinks.<\/p>\n The band played on, but who was listening?<\/p><\/div>\n The reason it stinks is to be found in the uneasy pairing of those two words- \u201csocial\u201d and \u201cmedia.\u201d Concerts are very social things. Where else in life do people come together in so potent a way as at an event where the performers and the audience are all breathing the same air, living the same moment, in the pursuit of a transcendent artistic experience? It stands to reason that people who want to come to such a social event must want that sense of shared occasion. They must crave not only music but human contact. Given that, is it a bit odd that we put so much stock in the idea of building audiences for concerts by reaching out not<\/em><\/strong> to people whose actions demonstrate that they want to engage with other people and with music (if only we knew where to find them), but by reaching out to people who, in their engagement with social media (rather than society) seem to want to engage with a computer screen? I read an essay from an orchestral marketing expert last year that made a simple point- that the essence of good marketing is finding out what people want and convincing them you\u2019ve got it. It\u2019s not unreasonable to conclude that people who spend enough time on Twitter to track the tweets of all the various orchestras out there are really more interested in Twitter than in going to concerts. They want to be on their computers. I can give them more tweets, but I probably can\u2019t sell them a concert ticket.<\/p>\n Of course, people do engage with musicians through social media, and some of them do come to concerts, but this brings me back to my example of Bobby\u2019s Klangfarbenmelodie<\/em>– most of those folks re-tweeting your gig were coming to it already, or\u2026.. worse yet\u2026..<\/p>\n Also in the industry.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s go back to where we started.<\/p>\n Social: \u201cpeople with whom I share interests, beliefs or background. \u201cMy friends, colleagues and buddies. People I am connected to<\/p>\n Media: \u201clarge-scale technological systems for disseminating ideas, information and entertainment to the general public.\u201d<\/p>\n When I get on \u201csocial media\u201d these days (and that same anxiety about audience building that got me blogging keeps me on FB and Twitter way too much of the time), I\u2019m more and more struck that the social media universe is an amazingly small group of people. Look at the comments on Norman Lebrecht\u2019s blog- for all the huge readership he seems to have, 99% of the comments on that blog seem to come from a pretty consistent group of less than 50 different people. You see the same names and pseudonym\u2019s in other blogs, forums, chat rooms and even Amazon reviews. Mahler may still be the most popular classical composer in terms of average ticket sales, but if one looks at who is on the Mahlerlist email list, the FB Mahler pages and who has commented and read my Mahler series here, it\u2019s a tiny number of people who are really that interested. It\u2019s friends, colleagues and buddies. \u201cSocial media\u201d is too \u201csocial\u201d to be effective as \u201cmedia.\u201d We end up just talking to our friends, colleagues and buddies, preaching to the choir, facing inward. I often find myself at musically wonderful concerts absolutely shocked by the incredibly high percentage of the audience who are also musicians. I did a fantastic concert in New York (population c. 7 million) last year that was well publicized but drew only about 70 people (that\u2019s a 1 in 100,000 success rate) and a good 50 % of the attendees were musicians. I\u2019m all for supporting each other, and I love going to concerts, but the social media era seems to have turned the music business into a giant metaphorical…. well, I’d rather not say.\u00a0It\u2019s a fine line between playing for<\/em><\/strong> ourselves and playing with<\/em><\/strong> ourselves.<\/p>\n We reach for social media as a way of connecting with our audience because the media have largely let us down. I\u2019ve been pretty lucky with the MSM considering I\u2019ve had a rather modest career- my work has made it into the New York Times, been on All Things Considered (NPR\u2019s evening news programme for a general audience), the BBC and several of the London papers. Millions of people will have at least had the chance to see my name and hear nice things about what I do.<\/p>\n So why am I still wasting time blogging, tweeting and FB\u2019ing? Why am I not famous? And rich? Especially rich?!?! Surely a bit of favourable coverage in the actual \u201cmedia media\u201d should give one enough name recognition to sell out concerts everywhere you go for the next ten years? Sadly, the media has the capacity to reach beyond our circle of friends, family and buddies to huge, huge, huge numbers of people, but it doesn\u2019t seem to have the power to make those numerous strangers care very much about what we do. Why?<\/p>\n Allow me a bit of self-quotation: \u201cConcerts are very social things\u2026 Given that, is it a bit odd that we put so much stock in the idea of building audiences for concerts by reaching out not to people whose actions demonstrate that they want to engage with other people and with music, but by reaching out to people who, by their engagement with social media (rather than society) seem to want to engage with\u2026\u201d Whether it\u2019s a computer screen, a newspaper or a TV\u2026 people engage with the media<\/em><\/strong> because they want \u201cideas, information and entertainment.\u201d The media is not where you any sane person goes looking for \u201can event where the performers and the audience are all breathing the same air, living the same moment in the pursuit of a transcendent artistic experience?\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s been said many times that the key to audience building is education. That was the hope behind the origin of this blog. It\u2019s no accident that the most popular recreational activity in society (sports) is supported by the most astounding educational infrastructure in the history of humanity. We think of sports broadcasting as entertainment, but the watching a game on television with all the color commentary, instant replay and telestrating can be an incredible education in the technical minutiae of a sport. I would bet that by the age of 10, 90% of boys (and a huge proportion of girls) in the USA know the incredibly technical rules for pass interference, holding and intentional grounding in American football. A football novice who askes just about any random chap on Main Street, USA \u201cwhat the deal was with Franco Harris and the \u201cImmaculate Reception<\/a>,\u201d\u201d (a single play lasting about three seconds that took place over 42 years ago) will get a five minute lecture on what constitutes possession of the football, how long possession must be maintained for it to be established, and so on. Any particularly exciting or controversial moment in sport will be repeated, slowed down, freeze-framed, isolated, diagrammed, explained, argued over and over and over. Imagine watching the Proms on TV taking a moment from that night\u2019s concert and subjecting it to that kind of technical and analytical scrutiny. In fact, a blog post like this one about a single chord in a Mahler symphony<\/a> grows very much out of the kind of fascination with technical minutiae that is the lifeblood of sports journalism. A short review (or preview) in a mainstream newspaper is a wonderful thing, but when you think of the scale of investment that is made in educating people to be engaged audiences for sport, it\u2019s a bit optimistic to hope that 100,000 Londoners will run out and buy a Hans G\u00e1l CD just because they paged past a 100-word review of it in the Sunday paper (much as we appreciate the coverage!!!!). That review presumes the same level of cozy pre-existing interest in classical as one of my blog posts, where every week, broadcasters and newspapers are spending millions and millions to educate and engage sports fans.<\/p>\n To the extent that we make \u201cmedia\u201d \u201csocial\u201d by re-tweeting the MSM stories we find interesting, we\u2019re making it more inward facing. An orchestra can take something printed in a paper with circulation of 500,000 and Re-Tweet it but all that does is take something available to the general public and try to make it the topic of conversation for your friends, colleagues and buddies. It seems to me that to make the media work for the arts, we would need it to be MORE \u201cmedia media\u201d and less \u201csocial media.\u201d We need more space, more detail, more \u201cideas, information and entertainment\u201d about<\/em><\/strong> music to reach \u201cthe general public.\u201d Frankly, I have no idea how we make this happen.<\/p>\n On the flip side- we need social engagement to be more social and less dependent on technology. This has been very much on my mind since joining the ESO. My last principal conductorship, at the Oregon East Symphony, lasted nine years, and started with me teaching at the nearby university. When I gave my last concert there, I looked out in the audience knew about 90% of the people I saw. Some I knew well, some I\u2019d just seen around town, but there was recognition. That\u2019s not something one can cultivate on Facebook. Joining the ESO, based in Worcester and performing across the Midlands and in London, while I live in Cardiff, I\u2019ve felt an urgent<\/em><\/strong> need to get to know who the actual<\/em><\/strong> people in these communities are. \u00a0How can I be \u201creaching out not to people whose actions demonstrate that they want to engage with other people and with music\u201d when the pressure is to spend my whole life facing inward, \u201ctalking\u201d via social media to those who, \u201cin their engagement with social media (rather than society) seem to want to engage with a computer screen?\u201d Frankly, we depend on social media in large part because we\u2019ve lost faith in the very existence<\/em><\/strong> of society and community. Our towns and cities have become atomized and anonym-ized. My work situation is not unusual- tonight I travelled 3+ hours from Cardiff to Manchester (then back) for rehearsal, and the chap who took me to the train station afterwards had spent his day working in Cambridge- 3 + hours in the other direction. These days, many of us travel or commute for work, which is where we see most of the people we encounter, then we come home to the comfort of our screens. Many of us don\u2019t know our neighbors, so we seek a sense of belonging online. \u201cSocial media\u201d is to \u201csociety\u201d as \u201cfast food\u201d is to \u201cfood.\u201d It is a substitute, not a replacement. The more time we spend on social media, the more we worry that society may no longer exist, the more we fear we\u2019ve sleep-walked into a dystopian world of screens and strangers. What place does music have in such a world?<\/p>\n I\u2019m convinced that at this moment in our history, it is a matter of existential urgency for this art form, and our culture, that we start facing outward<\/em><\/strong>, start re-weaving the fabric of society and community. We must start engaging with real<\/em><\/strong> people in the real<\/em><\/strong> world.<\/p>\n Now, if I could just find some.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n _________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n![\"The](\"http:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/carneige-hallWEB-1024x551.jpg\")
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