It may not have the biggest budget, a large-scale media team, or a world-dominating brand, but it has low-key been consistently putting out THE BEST social media content in the industry…

New figures from RAJAR (Radio Join Audience Research) show the audience figures for Classic FM, BBC Radio 3, and Magic Classical…

I regularly get adverts from orchestras and other classical media accounts when I go on social media. Over the last year, I’ve been bombarded by a new trend. A type of advert that is truly, astonishingly terrible.

I’m not talking about something complex where the strategy behind the advert isn’t working. I’m talking about bad adverts that create broken posts that would never be clicked on. They are as effective as the orchestra setting its marketing budget on fire. These, are terrible Instagram story adverts.

Now, Instagram stories are a great way to engage with your existing audience, connect to new people, and push events as they have the feature to include a link. But to be effective, these need to be engaging, interesting, and bespoke. As people consume Instagram adverts at speed, they also need to hook people’s attention. The adverts I’m talking about are far from this. Take a look…

I’ve had my eye on the Philharmonia’s Virtual Reality projects for a while now. Starting back in 2014, these immersive installations allow for audiences to turn up, put on a headset, and be transported inside an orchestra. These installations have been round the world, reaching 30,000 people at events ranging from the Rio Olympics, to SXSW, to WIRED Japan.

So, back in September, the Philharmonia had a new installation at the Southbank Centre featuring a new 360 video for their Nordic Soundscapes series, I thought it was about time to go and experience it and see what all the fuss is about.

I’ll confess, despite this being digital, innovative, and all about bringing in new audiences, I’ve always been a sceptic. VR headsets are expensive, creating bespoke software is complicated, and you’re asking people to leave their house and come to you instead of meeting them where they are. Surely it would be better to focus on creating digital content that gets to people’s phones?

Well, the good news is… I was wrong.

For a long time, X/Twitter has been a vital part of arts organisations’ marketing and social media strategies. What made early Twitter great, made it the perfect place for “event” based organisations. Instant, heavily focussed on news, updates, connecting organisations and customers, and interacting about shared experiences, it provided something unique that Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube could not.

X/Twitter also become something of cultural significance that other social media channels could only dream of. During the 2010s, there was a trend for news channels just to read out people’s tweets on air and claim them as news (see the 2016 USA election for the epitome of this). Even if you weren’t on X/Twitter, you knew that it was important.

Update 4/10/24 - BBC Radio 3’s Instagram is now back - but it’s still not being used: https://www.instagram.com/bbcradio3/

BBC Radio 3 isn’t exactly famous for being at the cutting edge of social media. However, under the radar this month, BBC Radio 3 has deleted its Instagram account entirely… and it’s more confusing than you think. 

Despite starting Instagram early, it had stopped using its account in 2014. Then, as the world went online during the COVID pandemic in 2020, Radio 3 deleted all their previous posts and replaced them with a single message saying:

"We're not updating our Instagram account at the moment but please join us on Twitter and Facebook - just search for 'BBC Radio 3'".

Season launches should be one of the most interesting announcements an orchestra makes each year. I’ve long been fascinated by why orchestras haven’t made the most of this opportunity and how they could do it better (Season launches are boring… but they don’t have to be)

This year there have been two that have stood out as something special amongst the mass copy-pasting of “we are delighted to announce our 24/25 season”.

So, this year I thought I would do something a little different and celebrate the good, while doing a mini breakdown of what makes them special.

I’ve recently been rewatching “Fever Pitch: The Rise of the Premier League”. I was struck by just how many similarities there were to the world of orchestras. Both facing the challenges of live attendance, unlocking the true value of their product, and bringing about change in a world where the core fans don’t want it.

I was at a conference this year and heard an industry leader say something at the end of a talk on the future of classical music that is my number one pet peeve.

“Of course, digital will never replace live concerts”

I’ve heard countless variations of this, all said in a self-congratulatory tone as some incredibly profound point that pats us all on the back for doing something special. A mic drop moment to rapturous applause. And yet, it is totally reductive.

There’s a problem in the classical music industry. One that impacts organisations’ strategies, output, and how they connect to audiences. It affects all, regardless of their size or location, and yet it’s something that is rarely spoken of. This problem is digital illiteracy in arts leaders.

If we’re being honest, when it comes to marketing in the classical music industry we all look and sound the same. Whether it’s the same copy-and-paste “delighted to announce” text, unimaginative event posters, or slide show season announcement videos, very little differentiates us from each other.

I was once working with an orchestra on a big digital project and as part of it, we managed to arrange for a bit of a rebrand at no extra cost. The orchestra had made a strong commitment to accessibility, and the designers pointed out that the existing brand colours were not accessible and could be improved easily. However, the orchestra decided not to change them because they had previously spent money on a focus group to choose the old colours.

Despite being presented with a better option at zero extra cost that helped them achieve their goals, they refused to change and stuck with their bad decision. Why? One answer is the “Sunk Cost Fallacy”.

Taylor Swift is a cultural phenomenon. Whether it’s her plane journey to the Superbowl overshadowing the game itself, or the economic impact of her Eras Tour on cities being so significant that she’s mentioned as a specific factor in a recent Fed report in the U.S.A, she is impossible to miss. But where did all this incredible attention from fans, audiences, and pretty much everyone come from?

There is a phrase that we hear over and over again in our industry. Something that we come back to whenever we face hardship, when audiences decline, or even when we have an opportunity to share a message with the masses.

“Music education will save classical music”.

A narrative that the problems we face in the concert hall are due to cuts in music education, and that more funding in music education is what is required to build future audiences. “How else will young people come to classical concerts if they aren’t exposed to it at school and educated in it?”

The thing is… music education will not save classical music.

Facebook and Instagram’s owner Meta has unveiled its long-awaited competitor to Twitter. Already boasting millions of sign-ups in the first few hours and being backed by the world’s largest social media company, it will be hard to ignore. But what does this mean for people and organisations in the classical music world?

We’re going to get to the bigger problem by the end of this blog, but first, here’s a scenario for you.

Imagine that your run an orchestra… and make it a big one. You have a concert coming up and you decide to task your entire marketing team to come up with a print campaign, to advertise at bus stops all over the city.

The company that owns the advertising spaces at bus stops tells you the exact dimensions you would need for your poster. As well as telling you the specific size, this also tells you that they the poster should vertical.

But you already knew that the poster at a bus stop should be vertical. You’ve walked past countless bus stops over the years and seen the advertising there. And not just in your city, you’ve been all over the world and seen this.

You even walk past a bus stop on your way to work. As your marketing team are organising the campaign you stop to look at the advertising there, picturing your orchestra filling the display board.

So, it then comes as a shock when it comes to launch day of your big advertising campaign, you walk past the bus stop on your way to work to admire the new poster and you see this…

There has been a lot of talk about AI in the news recently, with Chat GPT, Bing AI, and Google Bard all being released to the public. This got thinking about what AI could do in the classical music industry, so I decided to set Chat GPT a task…

“Program a season for an orchestra of 30 concerts. Each concert should be about 90 minutes long and contain multiple pieces, ideally with thematic links between the pieces”

This year I was at a pre-concert drinks thing for an orchestra. While I was there, I overheard this conversation between a donor and the CEO of the orchestra that went something like this…

I was chatting with an orchestra about ways they could attract new audiences and become more accessible. The orchestra’s concert dress was very traditional, full white tie and tails for the men, so I suggested that like other orchestras they should switch to something just as smart but less elitist and outdated.

“Oh, we actually thought about doing that, so we did a survey of our audience to ask them what we should do. They told us they like the tails, so we didn’t change”.

As 2021/2022 seasons come to an end, we reach a moment of realisation. Classical music audiences are vanishing… and they’re not coming back.