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Potential Classical Audience

  • Thread starter Laurence Glavin
  • Start date

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Laurence Glavin

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On another thread, some bozo noted that Symphony Hall only has 2600-or-so seats. Ahem...the Boston Symphony Orchestra alone runs three or four concerts a week, therefore playing before close to 10,000 unduplicated people during those performances. An entity called Celebrity Series rents Symphony Hall numerous times a season, bringing in people who may not attend Boston Symphony concerts; the Celebrity Series does offer orchestras from other locales and some of the audience members may be from the BSO cohort. But they also offer chamber music and recitalists, opera singers and choruses. Around the corner, it's not unusual fror Jordan Hall to be filled the same afternoon or night there's an event in Symphony Hall. I go to classical concerts and operas all over Metropolitan Boston when the weather permits, and I can be at a well-attended event at Cambridge's Sanders Theater or Longy School of Music's Pickman Hall, when I know there's a corrrsponding event in Boston at the two halls I just mentioned.
 
Laurence Glavin said:
On another thread, some bozo noted that Symphony Hall only has 2600-or-so seats. Ahem...the Boston Symphony Orchestra alone runs three or four concerts a week, therefore playing before close to 10,000 unduplicated people during those performances.
Click to expand...

Before you start Glavinating and calling other people names, that person rightly pointed out that no Boston station could operate on an AQH (at their peak listening) of 2600 people.

Using your numbers, no station could operate with a weekly cume of 10,000 people either.

The business model for live music and broadcasting are on two different scales.
 
The fact is, I hadn't even completed the list of performing venues. In about a week-and-a-half, weather-permitting, I expect to be going to the Tsai Performance Center at BU for their continuing Beethoven-string-quartet series. Tiny Lasell Junior College in Newton has a concert hall and I've been there. Tufts U in Medford has a respectable performance center and I've been there. St. Mark's private high school in Southborough has a decent concert hall and I've been there. Brimmer and May school in Brookline has a decent auditorium for recitals and I've been there. The hall where the Concord, Mass orchestra performs is a bit undersized for an orchestra paying a Prokofiev symphony, but I've been there. In most cases, the concerts taking place in these places and others aren't always the most heavily-publicized, but many seats ARE filled because of the desire of a significant segment of the public to hear this music performed LIVE. And it's not just the blockbuster pieces played by world-class entities (Beethoven's Ninth Symphony by the BSO, eg), but Beethoven's 9th string quartet or 9th violin sonata by local musicians. From time to time, I read about a decline in concert attendance in cities that are cores of similar Metro areas, but I can attest that Bostonians turn out in fairly large numbers all over the map. The people who traipsed out on a cold winter night last Tuesday simply for a FORUM probably represented a small percentage of those who will likely buy tickets for musical events in the next few weeks. (BTW, concertgoers ALSO support similar arts organizations in town; I went to the Huntington Theater's play "All My Sons" by Arthur Miller Saturday night to a full house. You just can't keep people around here close to their dwellings even with a below-zero windchill!)
 
There must have as many complaints when WKLB and WCRB switched frequencies several years ago. 102.5 had coverage much like WGBH.
 
I don't expect to pinpoint EVERY concert in the Boston area, but on a Friday night with a fierce wind-chill and just-short-of-the-lowest-air-temperature this late fall and early winter, the following observations were made by reviewers: at The Boston Musical Intelligencer, David Patterson wrote about a concert by Emanuel Ax (whose 'ax' is the piano) "Emanuel Ax, the seasoned pianist of international acclaim, played in Jordan Hall Friday evening January 8th before a capacity audience"; Boston Globe critic David Weininger wrote: (referring to Mr. Ax) "His well-filled Jordan Hall recital on Friday was devoted to the music of Chopin and Schumann." Yikes...a near-sellout with no music by Beethoven!
 
Do you have anything to support the idea of concert-goers as a viable radio audience? What are their favorite stations today, and why? Has any research been done to suggest concert-goers want to hear music on the radio? It might turn out that a station like WBUR is what they prefer.

Somewhere in the world someone has probably taken up my idea of soliciting recordings from local (or not-so-local) musicians and ensembles for an Internet stream. Yet no one I've talked to has expressed any interest in it.
 
At their peak of popularity, the Grateful Dead would consistently and immediately sell out six nights in a row in huge arenas like the old Boston Garden. Could an all-Grateful Dead major market commercial terrestrial radio station have survived, even then? Very doubtful!

Even the largest concert venues contain only a very small fraction of the numbers that it takes to comprise a viable audience for a major market radio station.
 
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