This morning, bright and early again, was a presentation for Artistic Administrators, conductors, and musicians of the big research project that’s being featured at the conference this year. This was a truly fascinating session – the results of a study of nine orchestras by Oliver Wyman, the world’s third largest business consulting firm, about how to get first-time single ticket buyers to start coming back. The presentation contained a huge amount of information and I have not had time to assimilate it all. Plus the presenter skipped over a lot (because of time constraints) to focus on repertoire issues.
The PowerPoint presentation will be available on the League’s website in a few days. I will summarize my notes once I can actually see the slides up close and will probably turn this into an article, rather than include it on the blog, because the information is so compelling.
One sore point – one issue the study addresses is which solo instruments these first-timers prefer. The results are not surprising: piano, violin, cello, horn, trumpet, clarinet, flute, viola. The problem is that it was presented as a horizontal bar graph, and the line next to viola was so short, I had to ask if this was supposed to be a viola joke!
