Marketing Music: Can You Say ‘Baby Boomer’? : It’s taken some innovative techniques to sell musical culture to the nation’s younger audiences

Six friends were having dinner one night, recalls Laurel Shanks, when they started talking classical music over the spaghetti and red wine. “Some of us knew absolutely nothing about it but enjoyed listening to it, while others were born and bred with it but didn’t share that interest with most of our other friends,” Shanks says. “It wasn’t exactly something I talked about on a first date.”

But Shanks, a 32-year-old executive at Apple One, did keep talking about it with her pals, and the six of them soon launched Fanfare, a new Los Angeles Philharmonic support group. “We knew there was an audience of people in our generation, called the Philharmonic and found out they even had a file full of people like us that didn’t fit into existing support groups,” says Shanks. “They were very pleased to have us.”

You bet they were. Fanfare, launched in 1984, and the Symphony Club, a year-old New York Philharmonic organization, both woo the nation’s most highly courted consumers: the 76 million adults born between 1946 and 1965 who pack trendy eateries, movie theaters and Springsteen concerts.

“When you talk with orchestra managers around the country, they all say their audiences are aging,” says George Boomer, whose market research firm recently surveyed Los Angeles Philharmonic subscribers on assorted issues. “They say they are competing with the mortality tables.”

What they’re also saying is that boomers--who represent almost one-third of the nation’s population--had better start penciling in more symphony concerts along with work-outs, movies and trips to the zoo. At least half the subscribers to both the Los Angeles and New York philharmonics are over 55--the latest Los Angeles Philharmonic survey found 43.5% over 65--and behind the boomers come generations with less classical music exposure at home as well as at school.

The Baby Boom generation clearly needs some prodding, however. Pressed for time and awash in leisure-time options for what little time they do have, boomers are often entirely unfamiliar with classical music. And given today’s advanced audio technology, even the already convinced are too often opting for Mahler at home rather than dressing up and driving halfway across town to a concert that may not be substantially better than what they’d hear at home.

It’s a hard sell, say experts. “They’ve been too exposed to visual stimuli,” says Christine Harris, marketing director of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. “They’re used to getting their news in a minute and commercials in 15 seconds. What makes us think they’re ready to listen to a 60-minute Bruckner symphony?”

Classic Entertainment

Bach, Beethoven and Brahms may endure through the ages, but radio stations, record companies and orchestra managers are learning that their marketing and other non-musical activities should be more contemporary. According to Peter Cleary, president of Concert Music Broadcasting, which sells radio time for classical stations, successful broadcasters are “presenting the music as an entertainment medium and not like castor oil that you should take because it’s good for you.”

Call him a Philistine or call him a prophet, but Cleary is no lone voice in the wilderness. Record companies peddle classical CDs with titles like “Stress Busters,” (“Music for a Stress-Less World”) and “Dinner Classics,” which include both recipes and menu suggestions along with the French, Italian and Sunday brunch music. KUSC-FM, now the major full-time classical station in town since KFAC changed formats in September, samples Canadian announcer Jurgen Gothe’s afternoon chatter and what one executive calls “user-friendly programming.”

Orchestras around the country are simply doing what people who sell soap, sheets and classical radio are doing: mass merchandising. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra bills itself as “Baltimore’s Other Major League Team” and aims for younger concert-goers with ad copy like “if you think your sound system is good, wait until you hear ours.” And the Colorado Symphony tries to make it on its own and hires rock promoter Barry Fey.

According to “Americans and the Arts,” a Harris poll released in 1988, leisure time dropped 37% since 1973 and 8% since 1984. More people are buying classical music on records, tapes or CDs, and attendance is up for movies and art museums. But fewer people are going less often to theater, opera and concerts.

The Harris survey found that the number of people attending live classical music concerts was 55 million in 1987, down from 59 million in 1984. Adding in a drop in attendance from 2.5 performances a year to two, Harris computes a “significant net loss” in attendance of 26%.

At the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where subscriber ages are rising and subscriber attendance dropping, Philharmonic executive vice president and managing director Ernest Fleischmann plans multilingual TV spots, possible concerts in black churches and “a very sophisticated marketing and publicity plan to regain ground we’ve lost over the last three years and to build toward the arrival of a new music director (Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen) and the opening of Disney Hall.”

“You can’t just sit back and bemoan and bewail the dying of cultural entertainment,” says Santa Monica-based futurist Roger Selbert. “The marketplace is changing, segmenting and fragmenting, and every successful business in the ‘90s will have to target its markets and provide them with what they’re looking for. That includes orchestras. The good wanted product brings out the wallets. If a product has got the right stuff and is hot, people will line up around the block.”

Packaging That Sells

To get those lines, orchestras can alter their programming, packaging or both and thus far the emphasis appears to be on packaging. There are singles events at the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Pacific Symphony Orchestra and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Symphony musicians eschew tuxes for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s new Saturday morning “Casual Concerts” series, and most major orchestras have some sort of informal, pre-concert lecture.

Writes Time Magazine music critic Michael Walsh in his recent book, “Who’s Afraid of Classical Music?”: “The dreadful snootiness and narrow-mindedness that has so damaged classical music’s image in this century is finally on the wane.”

Consider what’s happened in radio, for instance. The number of classical radio stations has held pretty steady at about 40 for several years, with new stations in new markets making up for the loss of stations like KFAC. At least 10 million people a week listen to classical music on commercial or public radio, says Cleary, “and that number is growing. Classical stations are making more money now than they ever made.”

His firm was the majority shareholder in Ovation Magazine, a slick radio log and features package that ceased publication in mid-September, and Cleary warns against confusing Ovation’s fate with the audience it serves. “The book went through three different owners in its nine years but was never able to sustain itself financially,” says Cleary. “Only a fraction of the people who listen to classical music on the radio were enthused to the degree they needed to know what was playing at any given time.”

And don’t confuse the changes at KFAC with the broader picture either, he continues. “The turmoil over KFAC and the ‘death of classical music’ because somebody paid $55 million for a radio station and had to change the format to justify that purchase price has absolutely nothing to do with the health of the format. There isn’t a classical radio station in the country that could ever generate enough money to justify that purchase price.”

Classical music is staying competitive now in the public sector as well, says Craig Oliver, president of the Public Radio Program Directors Assn. in Silver Spring, Md.: “There are only so many people who are going to listen to radio, and, if you want more listeners, you have to take them away from somewhere else. Classical music may be an art form but radio is an entertainment medium.”

At popular WUNC public radio in Chapel Hill, N.C., program director Craig Curtis says: “We compete with rockers, beautiful music and every other format. We’re here to do sports, traffic, weather and stocks, just like everybody else. By simply rattling off composition dates and opus numbers, and not providing other standard information, we’re forcing them to go elsewhere.”

It’s a matter of survival. “I am not some mad-dog radio programmer who has no familiarity with music,” says Curtis, a trained musician who played horn professionally for several years. “Fine arts radio is full of people like me who haven’t figured out they’re doing radio. They’re on some crusade, and nobody will listen to that. So by serving this audience in a professional radio-driven manner, we in fact reach more people than traditional radio formats will. But that doesn’t mean we play ‘Bolero’ 10 times a day.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with “Bolero” (perhaps better-known, and a major recording hit, as the score from the film “10”).”We laugh at people who enjoy Pachelbel’s Canon, which is considered non-serious by classical music lovers,” says KUSC’s general manager Wallace Smith, “and we alienate people who might simply take the next step and enjoy Mozart.”

At New York’s WNCN, meanwhile, you won’t hear any opera, avant-garde or atonal music. “No rock station plays all the records it gets, so why should we?” asks director of programming and operations Mario Mazza. “We’re tailoring a much more specific sound and feel. We sound like a contemporary radio station that happens to be playing classical music.”

Calling itself “104 WNCN, The New Wave in Classical Radio,”--as well as the nation’s most listened to classical FM station--WNCN plays several works in a row without interruption, gives away tickets to Mets games and movies as well as classical concerts, and even has a “104 Phantom” who prowls New York on a Harley-Davidson handing out cash ($104 at a time, of course). WNCN reports its listeners’ average age is 43.1, compared with an audience at KUSC that Smith says is primarily over 60 and the norm for traditional classical music stations.

“When I speak with orchestra groups, I’m not telling them to change the music,” Mazza says. “Mozart is Mozart, and Brahms is Brahms. But I am saying and they’re realizing that what may have worked in attracting subscribers in the past is not necessarily applicable for the future.”

Record Firms Too

The classical record business, which has averaged about 5% of total recording industry grosses, is also scrambling for new listeners. People who were replacing their LPs with CDs pretty much finished doing it, says BMG Classics president Gunter Hensler. Aside from a few “technically inclined” listeners, he adds, the CD revolution didn’t really bring in many new people.

Classical record companies continue to push “cross-over” records by such musicians as flutist James Galway, but they’re also repackaging the classics yet again. BMG Classics, for instance, is marketing “Stress Busters,” compilations of “soothing” music like Pachelbel’s Canon in D for Strings and Continuo, Handel’s “Water” Music and plenty of Bach and Mozart. They came out a year ago, and, says Hensler, are “doing very well.”

So are similar offerings over at CBS Masterworks, where that firm’s vice president of marketing Harold Fein says the hot end of the market these days is for musical novices--people “who want to get involved and don’t know much about the music.” They buy compilations of composers’ greatest hits--the best of Tchaikovsky, say, or Mozart, “and if they like it they might be encouraged to go out and buy others.”

Again, the idea is repackaging to the boomer market. First came “conceptual” records like “Sweet Dreams,” which consisted of music “for putting the baby to bed.” Then came digital packages that introduced new technologies rather than artist or repertoire.

Now come CBS’ “Dinner Classics,” which combine French or Viennese music with menus and recipes from Martha Stewart. Aimed directly at baby boomers--who, reads a press release, “are rediscovering the pleasure of entertaining at home”--the music is selected to “enhance a meal, yet never be intrusive.”

The Sunday Brunch album, for instance, includes Baroque music along with a suggested menu of smoked salmon on black bread, sticky buns and more. Sold in bookstores and department stores as well as record stores, “they’re selling like hot cakes,” Fein quips.

Targeting an Audience

“One of the problems of arts organizations is they tend to try to sell to others their view of the symphony experience,” says Alan Andreason, chair of the marketing department at Cal State Long Beach. “They like to talk about the skills of the orchestra and quality of the conductor, program elements that appeal to them rather than understanding what might interest a particular target audience or what might be keeping a target audience from coming.”

Not in Milwaukee. First came an “Evening with Amadeus,” building on the popularity of that film. Adapting a script performed with the Baltimore Symphony by F. Murray Abraham, the symphony brought in fellow “Amadeus” actor Tom Hulce. It was, says marketing chief Harris, “wildly successful” and was followed by “Cinema Classics,” which offered slides from films adapting classical music in their scores along with music and discussion.

“I don’t want to turn the concert hall into a television studio, (but) people are looking for more production value in their entertainment,” says Harris. “It has to be bigger and brighter. There’s a whole environment we have to introduce them to, not just the music, and I think it will be a long road with a lot of experimenting.”

Enter Louis Spisto, former director of marketing for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and today executive director of the Santa Ana-based Pacific Symphony. Spisto boosted subscriptions with a “take the music cure” campaign in Pittsburgh for stress-weary executives--”the premise was that music can soothe your aching nerves,” he says--and kicked off a much-copied singles series called “Smart Set,” which combined orchestra concerts with food and dancing in elegant Heinz Hall.

In Pittsburgh today, says corporate marketing and audience development manager Molly Silver, “Smart Set” members make up half the audience on Thursday nights. (There were also two marriages, including one violinist in the orchestra who met his wife at a “Smart Set” event.) They use health club lists, singles magazine ads, even letters from board members to younger executives at their firms. The next step, hints Silver, could be baby-sitting services and children’s activities.

Not that everyone likes the idea of turning the concert hall into a singles bar. For one thing, Silver concedes that singles are a “fickle audience”; 50% drop off each year. The San Francisco Symphony tried the idea in the early ‘80s, then dropped it entirely after a few years; the music was too dispensable and people didn’t come back, says marketing director Margo Hackett.

Such things as open seating on Sundays and a Classical Gourmet Club offering discounts at area restaurants helped boost Seattle Symphony Orchestra subscriptions, particularly to younger people. Subscriptions are still climbing--and the median age dropping--but marketing director Marianne Lewis cautions that you can’t peg the changes to any one thing. “The orchestra’s improved, our financial situation is good, and we get good press. All those factors sell tickets. All we do know is that we are making the most effective marketing use of the excellent product we have.”

Phone, Mail Sales

Backing up promotions are phone telemarketing and direct mail. In addition to mailings to upscale Architectural Digest readers, for instance, the L.A. Philharmonic this year added J. Crew catalogue lists to reach younger audiences. One thing that this year’s subscriber questionnaire revealed, adds publicity director Norma Flynn, is a “significant” interest from the computer and engineering communities. Next year, she says, they’ll try to buy mailing lists to reach more of them.

Both the Philharmonic and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra jazzed up their images this season with slick, upbeat and colorful brochures focusing on their musicians. The Philharmonic mailing, which went to 800,000 potential ticket buyers, used photographs of orchestra members at local landmarks such as Dodger Stadium. Their goal, says marketing director David Brown: to humanize the orchestra and to place the orchestra within the community.

While it is unclear whether or not the Philharmonic will present singles programs--”David Brown may be considering them, I’m not,” Fleischmann says in one conversation--they are clearly hustling as many new groups as possible. Philharmonic marketing and development executives met earlier this month with the Philharmonic Men’s Committee, for instance, to start a ticket sales program among members’ business associates and friends.

Most arts organizations also do some sort of cross-marketing with other arts groups. The Philharmonic is cross-marketing its New Music “Green Umbrella” series, which takes place at the Japan America Theatre, with the nearby Museum of Contemporary Art. And a Music Center support group called In the Wings will sell about 3,300 tickets this year to events at the Philharmonic and the Music Center’s other resident companies.

In the Wings has no figures that show people who buy their single ticket “Sampler Series” later go on to become subscribers, but the group’s president, attorney Mary Quillin, did indeed go on to become a Philharmonic subscriber. Increased single ticket sales, which represent about a third of the Philharmonic audience, have also helped offset a decline in subscriptions, says a spokesman.

At New York’s Central Opera Service, the research arm of the Metropolitan Opera, executive director Maria F. Rich attributes a good chunk of this year’s increased attendance to single ticket buyers for contemporary opera by artists such as composer Philip Glass; often young, they decide the opera house presenting such opera is adventurous and come back. Says Glass: “I’m signing programs backstage for people the age of my children.”

Rare anymore is the concert-goer who can show up every Friday night without fail. Statistics indicate that concert-goers are going less often than they used to, and orchestras are responding. The Philharmonic, for instance, has gradually cut back the number of concerts on its longest series offering, and marketing director Brown says shorter series sell out first.

Times changed. “It used to be that when your kids grew up, you didn’t have to get a baby-sitter and you weren’t exhausted all the time and you reached a time in your life where you had discretionary income not going to family vacations or shoes,” says Margo Hackett, marketing director for the San Francisco Symphony. “Now, even before the kids grow up, women are re-entering the work force and the time issue changes. And that is affecting all of us in the arts.”

They’re battling the busy ‘80s, a time of two-career families, working mothers and overbooked single people. “Things like jogging that used to be leisure-time pursuits are now defined as commitments,” says Santa Monica-based futurist Roger Selbert. “Leisure time is time when you don’t have to do anything, and there’s so much less of it that when we actually do get some, we veg out and become couch potatoes.”

At the Philharmonic, adds Fleischmann, they’re also battling “some disaffection or disappointment” with performances the last three years. “We don’t believe that’s necessarily because the music audience is decreasing,” Fleischmann says. “There wasn’t the same enthusiasm for Previn as music director as there was for Giulini or Mehta, and that affected audiences as much as anything in a city where personalities are so important.”

But, according to Brown, if people come two years, they tend to subscribe forever; the renewal rate after the second year is 85% to 90%. “My job is to get them in to hear the product just once,” says George Sebastian, marketing director at the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. “Then the product has to stand on its own.”

Public Untrained

A 1985 National Endowment for the Arts survey found that 84% never studied visual arts appreciation and that 80% never studied music appreciation. “We now have a full generation or more who could be well educated but have no exposure to classical music or to theater, dance or drama,” says Katherine French, chief executive officer of the American Symphony Orchestra League. “So the burden is on the orchestra to enhance the listening experience and help these people derive greater understanding.”

Arts education dried up at home as well as at school. “In how many families do people sit down and play music on a Sunday afternoon?” French asks. “When the Star-Spangled Banner gets sung, you notice it gets weaker and weaker every year. It isn’t a political statement. People just aren’t used to singing anymore.”

So what mom, dad and the schools didn’t do, symphony orchestras are trying to do. Better to add some extracurricular education to the program than to simply move the Hollywood Bowl’s fireworks, movie music and pops concerts indoors.

The L.A. Philharmonic’s “Upbeat Live” pre-concert lectures, begun in 1984, attract hundreds of concert-goers to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion before concerts. Subscribers responding to Philharmonic surveys give the program “nothing but rave reviews,” says market researcher George Boomer.

Concerts like the Philadelphia Orchestra’s “Come and Meet the Music” are popping up all over the country, teaching adult audiences the same sorts of things that Leonard Bernstein taught generations of schoolchildren on TV. The Saint Louis Symphony recently sent new subscribers paperback copies of Aaron Copland’s “What to Listen For in Music,” and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra prepares a handbook for subscribers including the entire season’s program notes.

“People who are comfortable in their professional lives don’t want to be treated like idiots or feel uncomfortable listening to stuff they don’t know about,” says sociologist Judith Huggins Balfe, an expert on baby boomers and the arts. And opera executive Rich lauds the supertitles in English now in use by most opera companies. “People everywhere say it makes opera so much easier to listen to and watch.”

Buyers Become Donors

Given the precarious financial position of so many orchestras, and declining government and other funding, audience development takes on greater urgency. While box-office revenues come nowhere near paying expenses, today’s single ticket buyer may be tomorrow’s donor, board member or finance chairman.

Since one of the things audiences complain about is drive time--which explains the high proportion of self-employed and retired Philharmonic subscribers, says market researcher Boomer--orchestras are also trying to take the music to the people. Now in the “preliminary planning stages” in San Francisco, for example, is a program tentatively called “New Ears” that would bring orchestra musicians into corporations for concerts.

Look what mobility has done for the Da Camera Society’s popular “Chamber Music in Historic Sites” program here. From its initial 1973 season, when it presented three concerts in one location, it jumped to 62 concerts in 37 sites this season. Their whole philosophy, says public relations manager Robin Moore, “is to bring music out of the rarefied existence of the concert hall and take it into unusual and unexpected places.”

Besides its New Music series at the Japan America Theatre and its Chamber Music Society season at the University of Judaism’s Gindi Auditorium, the Philharmonic may try and do more at UCLA, says Fleischmann. He says other possibilities include resuming concerts in black churches--half classical, half gospel choir programs done during the Mehta regime--and perhaps more marathon-style programming.

Orchestras are also looking to groups that haven’t traditionally attended their concerts. The Los Angeles Philharmonic formed a Community Advisory Committee last May headed by Cal State president Dr. James Rosser, and Rosser says the multi-ethnic board’s hope is to one day see an orchestra and audience as diverse as that committee. Multilingual spots in Spanish, Chinese and Japanese are due to air on local television and radio in January.

Next come future concert-goers. In addition to programs for young people at the Music Center, Hollywood Bowl and in the schools, the Philharmonic has 120 student representatives on 15 high school and 13 college campuses, all of them trying to interest their peers in the symphony. A similar program in San Francisco produces 8% of that orchestra’s subscribers.

While orchestra executives emphasize that they can only augment, not replace, school music programs, education is a major concern. Fleischmann estimates Philharmonic educational costs “at $2 to $3 million, or roughly 10% of our budget, and it’s expanding. It is a long-term effort and involves a lot of work in the schools to make kids feel what we felt when we were growing up: that the arts are a normal, natural, necessary part of our everyday lives.”

DENVER’S GRAND EXPERIMENT

Barry Fey switches from promoting concerts by the Who, the Stones, U2 and the Monsters of Rock heavy metal groups to the Colorado Symphony. Page 64.

Times Staff Writer David Colker contributed to this article.