Orchestras, young people don’t care about cheap tickets

A few years ago, I was on an industry panel thing at a music college alongside the CEO of an orchestra. One of the questions from a student to this CEO was “when I come to your concerts, I rarely see any other young people. What are you doing to attract young people to your concerts?”

Straight away, the CEO replied with an answer that could be copy and pasted by any other orchestra or concert hall in the world straight into their funding applications. “We’re actually doing lots to try and bring in young people to our concerts. We have a great under 30s scheme to provide discounted tickets to make sure concerts are as accessible to young people as possible”.

Here’s the thing. Cheap ticket schemes for young people do not work.

Three big questions to answer then:

Why do we think they work and why does everyone do them?
Why don’t they work?
What could work instead?

(Also, the term “young people” is exceptionally broad and one I usually don’t like to use, but being all encompassing I’m going to keep using it for this blog)

So, why do we think they work and why does everyone do them? Many of you reading this may know of examples, articles, or even work in organisations where “under 30s schemes” etc have had a bump in ticket sales for young people. Although many will put this down to making tickets cheaper, this is in fact a “false positive”.

These schemes are usually the only time that orchestras and venues will communicate with young people in a way that speaks to them. On top of that, they’re usually accompanied by a huge marketing push. Take Wigmore Hall’s under 35’s scheme in partnership with Classic FM for example. Is the success of this scheme because tickets are only £5, or is it because they partnered with the largest classical music radio station in the UK who also have one of the largest social media followings of any UK radio station to promote attendance?

On top of this, those schemes are only a temporary fix. As soon as the cost goes up again, none of the underlying issues that have put young people off coming to concerts have been fixed and attendance drops again.

If the success of these schemes came down to cost being the barrier to making concerts accessible to young people, we’d expect to see queues into concerts like Black Friday, with halls being packed. This simply isn’t the case. The increased communication and marketing push create a false positive that the scheme has worked.

The only reason the whole industry does these schemes is because it’s all we’ve ever known. They’re simple, unimaginative, and don’t take much effort. More importantly, the bump we get from the false positive is enough to make us feel good that we’ve done something to improve things and it gives us something we can write on our funding applications. Conventional wisdom only leads to conventional results… and 99% of classical music organisations think conventionally.

Cheap ticket schemes don’t work. The reasons behind this are more varied than that blanket statement suggests. For example, although the cost is now accessible, the environment often is not.

However, the reason I want to focus on is the one if find most interesting… cost is NOT a limiting factor for young people.

Let’s take a Saturday concert and what could be on offer for you to do with your hard-earned cash as a young person in London…

£5.00– classical music concert
£5.10 – 1 pint of Stella in a Wetherspoons
£5.29 – McDonalds medium size meal
£9.99 – Vue cinema
£13.50 – Crazy golf
£16.99 – Dominoes takeaway medium pizza
£26.50 – London Zoo
£80.00 – Premier league football match

And this is all before we look at staying in options like Netflix or that the cost of new Xbox games now is £60 and upwards. Cost isn’t the limiting factor for purchasing decisions that we think it and it is rarely the driver of the purchasing decision.

Young people are not looking for value for money… they are looking for value for time.

There are now so many demands on people’s time of all ages. All people, but especially those 16-35 are now looking to get the most out of their time which involves maximising their experience.

Way back in 2016, the Association of British Orchestras conference had a fascinating session on “Behavioural Economics” by Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of the Ogilvy group (its founder David Ogilvy is often referred to as the “Father of Advertising”). As this is 6 years ago, I’m definitely going to misremember this story, but this one example has always stood out for me…

Customers were complaining that the Eurostar was too slow. There was a plan to spend, lets say, £10 million to upgrade the track so the train could go faster and make the journey 30 minutes shorter. But this was in fact looking at the problem the incorrectly. The problem wasn’t the length of the journey, it was the experience and customers were bored.

So instead of spending £10 million to make the train go faster, you could spend £1 million to install free WIFI and people wouldn’t mind the length of the journey. Or you could even spend £5 million to employ supermodels to hand out free champagne and customers would want the train to go slower!

Orchestras are looking at the problem of “why aren’t young people attending concerts” incorrectly. If instead of making tickets cheaper, they added value to the experience this would not only would this be more successful in attracting them to concert, but young people may in fact pay more.

So, what could work instead of young person schemes and what could “adding value” look like?

There’s so much potential for what this could look like and it’s something where your can imagination run wild. But I think I’ve boied it down to 5 different areas. Community, shareability, products, services, and entertainment.

As someone who loves rugby, England games at Twickenham stadium are a great example of what this looks like for a different industry. In the compound outside the stadium there’s live music, ex international players coaching junior tag rugby, champagne tent, street food, and rugby skill tests for you to try your hand at. Inside the stadium there are restaurants, bars, and live social media interaction on screens going round the whole stadium where your posts can be shown. At the end of the day, people still put the performance on a stage by elite players first, there’s just a lot more value for time.

So, some simple and actionable suggestions for classical music:

Under 35’s get a free drink with their tickets (probably cheaper than discounting tickets too!)
Partnering with restaurants for dinner and concert deals
Pre-concert “pbone area” where you can try a plastic brass instrument for the first time
Social media calls to action to allow relationships to continue after the event
Box deals for groups of friends
Post-concert meet the players
Young professionals networking event
Pre-concert speed dating.
Red carpet area and other Instagram spots for social media photos – like this that I saw at Dubai Opera House:

Adding value to concerts and improving the experience does not take anything away from or diminish the performance or the art. However, it does add to the importance of the event as a whole, remove further barriers that would make it inaccessible to some, and provide significant value for time both for young people and those of all ages. With so much potential to create something exciting, it’s time to ditch the unimaginative cheap ticket schemes that don’t work and start experimenting to create something interesting that does.

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