April 2, 2007 | Read Time: 1 minute
How much does it cost to take in a night of live Beethoven or Bach music? The answer seems to be “more and more.”
Henry Fogel, president of the American Symphony Orchestra League, writes in his blog On The Record, that symphony ticket prices “have escalated at rates well beyond inflation” over the past 3 decades. Ticket sales, meanwhile, have tended to decline, especially in the 1990s through 2003.
Mr. Fogel, however, also sees as a positive trend “bubbling up in the world of symphony orchestras”: a tendency for some nonprofit ensembles to re-examine their ticket-pricing policies and come up with innovative ways to make Beethoven and Bach cost less.
Mr. Fogel notes that the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra recently decided to price every single subscription ticket no higher than $25 (a financial move helped, in part, by a grant from the PNC Foundation).
The Dallas Symphony Orchestra now makes its subscriptions work in the same way as gym memberships, he writes. Patrons purchase an enrollment card and pay a flat fee to attend as many concerts they want each month. The Fort Wayne Philharmonic, meanwhile, had a “72-hour sale” promoted at shopping malls when all tickets were $20.
“They had hoped to sell 600 tickets, and instead sold 1,534,” Mr. Fogel writes of the Fort Wayne effort. “We’re probably early in this trend to draw meaningful conclusions from it, but it is definitely a trend worth watching.”
Could such innovative pricing approaches help other cultural organizations? Click on the comment link just below this posting.
