Perspective: The Grammy Awards

The award given on a show that has a viewership of less than .1 percent of the world's population.

So, Greg Sandow says the Classical Grammys don’t matter.  Ok, but my retort is that on the whole, the Grammys don’t matter.

Let’s put aside the issue that the Grammys are an awards ceremony for the American Recording Industry, which, on the whole, is a tiny blip on the recording industries in the world.

The 2012 Grammys were viewed by 46 million–a record breaking viewership (note that approximately 82 million watched the event at least in part).

The U.S. population is approximately 313 million, so 46 million viewers is (rounded up to the nearest percent) approximately 15 percent of the U.S. population.  The population of the world is approximately 6.996 billion.  So the viewership of the Grammys is less than .1 percent (.006) of the world’s population.

Less than .1 percent of the worlds population watched the U.S. Grammys.  Sandow states (on his facebook page) ‎”The Grammys don’t resonate — even though forty million people watched? That’s an extraordinary notion.“  Well, at .1 percent viewership, it would be an extraordinary notion to say the Grammys resonate!

Economies of Scale and Orchestras

As quantity of production increases from Q to Q2, the average cost of each unit decreases from C to C1

A recent post by Drew McManus at Adaptistration reminded me of a brief argument I had with Greg Sandow at his blog.  In my previous post I talked about one way to increase performance or earned revenue through Price Discrimination for Orchestra Tickets.  Another way to increase performance revenue as well as lower costs is by changing the scale of the operations.

This is commonly referred to as Economies of Scale, and no, this has nothing to do with reducing pay or cutting back a season to lower costs.  The reduced costs comes about as the result of increased production, thus lowering cost per unit.  As the Investopedia defines it:

The increase in efficiency of production as the number of goods being produced increases. Typically, a company that achieves economies of scale lowers the average cost per unit through increased production since fixed costs are shared over an increased number of goods.

Price Discrimination for Orchestra Tickets

One of the benefits from being the composer for a production is the comp tickets! These were from Chicago's Commedia Beauregard's production of "A Klingon Christmas Carol" winter 2011

Drew McManus (of Adaptistration.com)had a fascinating post about Placebo Pricing (also see his follow-up post) that was the subject of a blogpost by Joe Patti (of Butts in The Seats) which might be a technique that could be used by Orchestras to generate more ticket sales.  Lisa Hirsh has been blogging up a storm about some of the issues of ticket pricing from the audience standpoint.

Back in 2004, McManus reported on a new pricing strategy being used by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Nashville Symphony in their tsoundcheck and Sound Check programs.  Simply put, the programs offerred a lower ticket price for folks under 30.  While I’ve not heard much about how the Nashville program has worked (or even if it is still in place), there has been much news and blogging about the young age of the TSO’s audience.  There has even been some wonderful audience testimonies–see this one at McManus’ follow up (again, in 2004) to the above post, and this recent comment at Greg Sandow’s blog.

The lingering question to all this reduced pricing for tickets issue is, as McManus states in his Placebo Pricing post: “In the end, the devil is certainly in the details; not the least of which being what to do about reduced earned income from lower ticket revenue” and as Sandow states in his recent post about the TSO: “Some classical music institutions attract a young audience by lowering ticket prices, but then they need funding to offset the loss from selling tickets at a cheaper price” and even I’ve said as much over at Eric Edberg’s blog: “And in the end, since these tickets are actually cheaper, that means pound for pound it will take more of these tickets to make the difference from a normal subscriber or ticket buyer at standard prices.“

Develop your unique voice, the branding will follow!

The Wired Cello in the Age of Electronic Encryption

Greg Sandow has been posting a number of blogposts about Branding, but a comment made on his facebook page¹ by Frances-Marie Uitti really get’s it right!

Instead of studying how to brand oneself, why not take the time to find an original voice? Branding will happen all by itself.

As I replied:

thank you so much for saying that Frances-Marie Uitti –coming from one of the most unique voices in new music and the cello world, it means much more! <—so says the cellist dressed as a Klingon, and knows a bit about unique ways of branding…

Worrying about your Brand before you have a unique voice is putting the cart before the horse.  And if a cellist ever had a unique voice, then Frances-Marie Uitti certainly fits the bill.  Ever since I discovered her work back in the mid 90s I frequently did presentations about her and other cellists that are doing interesting work² at the Chello Shed³.

‘Lost Girl’ and a lesson in Music Economics and Ethics

The cast of Lost Girl

So I’ve been watching Lost Girl¹ which is a Canadian supernatural crime drama that recently premiered on SyFy.  The series follows a Succubus, Bo, as she negotiates her way around the newly discovered (to her) Fae world while she remians unaligned (the Fae are divided between the “Light Fae” and the “Dark Fae” who have an uneasy peace between them due to the actions of the “Blood King“–yeah, I know, way too much backstory to relate in a blog post–read the links above for more info).