In my last blog, I posed a question about marketing new concert music and solicited comments. This blog reviews that question and aggregates the comments, with a few ideas of my own added.
I recently attended the League of American Orchestras conference in Dallas. Amidst many meetings and speeches, I noticed one recurring comment regarding new orchestral music. That theme? Tickets sales for concerts featuring living composers were consistently lower than those featuring composers of the past. This statement was made as a matter of fact on multiple occasions by multiple managers and executives of orchestras, and I have no doubt it is backed up by empirical evidence.
In my last post, I talked about some basic business ideas I thought composers should consider. That included defining your target customer, the customer’s “pains”, your product, and your competition. If you have not read that post, it is worth reading here.
This post is a continuation of that thought. Here, I will discuss four mistakes commonly made by composers, along with some suggested course corrections. (more…)
I thought I’d take a break from Orchestration this week and talk a little bit about business. Basically, I often get asked… “OK. Now that I know all this great stuff, how do I make money at it?” I’ll just offer some thoughts on that.
This is basically a business exercise. It’s about providing a product/service to a customer… So we’ll be thinking along those lines.
This post, I’ll offer some questions I think you should ask yourself so that you can formulate a concrete game plan. In the next post, I’ll mention some common mistakes I see over and over again.
Question #1 – Who is your customer?
It’s surprising how many musicians just ignore this one. Ignoring it is typically something along the lines of, “I’ll just write great music and the rest will take care of itself.” (more…)
© 2013
The views expressed herein are those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily represent the views of Berklee College of Music.
