Orchestras should learn from Taylor Swift and embrace phones
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?
Taylor Swift has one of, if not THE most loyal and engaged online audiences in the world. And this is no accident. It comes from how she encourages and empowers her fans (“Swifties”) to use their phones in concerts and engage with social media, and it’s time the classical music world took notice.
While some artists are asking for audiences to lock their phones away for concerts, Taylor has taken the opposite approach for the Eras Tour. The entire spectacle is designed to be captured on phones and shared on social media, and boy is it working.
For her Eras Tour concert at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, the phone network AT&T announced that data usage on their network alone reached a staggering 28.9 terabytes! This is the most data that AT&T has moved at any stadium for any event in 2023.
The Verge calculated that 1 TB is 200,000 photos or 400 hours of video… Which means 5.78 million photos or nearly 462 days of video!!! From one concert!!! On just one phone network!!!
Taylor Swift’s recent performance in Melbourne “literally broke the internet” with the demand for fans to post their content during the show.
AND THIS IS ALL FREE!!! Just imagine what the reach of that social media content would be, and then how much it would cost to try and reach them with paid advertising.
(The Verge has an amazing deep dive on this here)
The desire from her audience to capture and share content online has led to what The Verge has called an “Eras Tour photography arms race”, with fans now creating content about the camera gear they used to create Taylor Swift concert content! Not only can fans use phones in concerts, but they can bring cameras in too! (So long as they don’t have a removable lens)
Swifites’ ability to make content at scale during concerts has made the Eras Tour the must-see event of the year. Impossible to ignore and vital not to miss out on.
Empowering fans to connect with the digital world where they communicate and interact has allowed Taylor Swift to become a global powerhouse, building a loyal and engaged audience who not only are incredible customers but are also her greatest ambassadors.
Side note - usually when we talk about digital and social we tend to assume it’s “for young people” and Gen Z. However, this isn’t the case as all of society is online and interacting there in some way. For Taylor Swift, Business Insider reported that 45% of her US fans are millennials, and 23 % are Baby Boomers.
Looking at the incredible benefits of this approach, is it time for classical music to embrace phones and social media in concerts? We’re seeing orchestras across the world come under increasing financial pressure, and with fewer resources for market departments, we need to find cheaper ways of reaching people. Going back to the 28.9 TB of data, equalling 5.78 million photos or nearly 462 days of video… the advertising cost of this would be eye-watering, but all of this reach is totally free and doesn’t require resources from the organisation.
We’re already seeing some great examples of classical music organisations embracing this. I’ve previously written about the potential for orchestras to embrace Instagram traps “can orchestras follow art museums and embrace "Instagram traps"?”. But there are also other ways to achieve this without having to create a specific Instagram trap.
The Royal Opera House’s social media has been an industry leader for years now. They’ve been asking audience members to share their experience of coming to performances, and then reposting them on ROH’s social media accounts - giving the fans an incentive to keep posting. This type of social proof content is so much more powerful than regular promotional content as users see an unbiased account of the experience where the content isn’t trying to sell anything.
The ROH has now started to go further. They’re now empowering social media influencers to create content at performances, documenting the experience of attending and… hold your breath… even filming small clips inside the concert itself for the curtain calls! Posting these as collaborative posts allows ROH to showcase the experience of attending in a more authentic way, without content overtly selling anything. It also allows them to connect to new and engaged audiences who are already fans of the influencer.
The knock-on effect of both these approaches is that some of the people who see these posts will want to create similar content, choosing to come to concerts, create photos and videos, and then market their experience to new people without ROH having to do anything. Like the Eras Tour, it becomes a “must not miss” event and ROH ends up with an infinite marketing machine, totally for free!
In this situation, we haven’t even spoken about using phones and filming during performances. Taylor Swift will undoubtedly have bigger copyright issues than any orchestra in the world (see Universal removing all their music from TikTok, including Taylor Swift), but she has embraced this approach for the significant benefits it brings. My own experiences of running live social media during concerts, including with New World Symphony in Miami, resulted in increased engagement, wider reach, and surprisingly no complaints from audiences (the key here is setting expectations in advance). One instance included audience members connecting through the content they posted and then going for dinner before the next concert!
Empowering audiences to use their phones is perfect for the world classical music now finds itself in. Customers are looking for more authentic marketing and social media content, and marketing teams have diminishing resources, making this approach a win-win. It’s time for orchestras to learn from Taylor Swift and embrace phones.
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