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.

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.

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…

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.

It’s that time of year again. Orchestras, opera houses, venues, and concert seasons are launching their seasons for next year. This is probably the closest we’ve been to “normal” season launches since the pandemic. And yet despite what should be the most exciting and interesting thing these organisations announce all year, I’m struck with just how boring, formulaic, an unoriginal they all are.

The digital age, social media, and smart phones have changed so much of the world we live in and how we interact with it. This creates a particular challenge for all of us in the arts when people now want to interact and engage with art in a totally different way to what we’re used to and the format we’ve created.