Bach to Byte in Seattle

Seattle held a technology-classical music summit recently and longtime Seattle music critic Melinda Bargreen wrote up a review that I think has general interest for other communities.  It also adds to the thread we’ve been discussing.  To keep it easier to read, I’m going to print it here in full text after the fold, not as a quote.

By Melinda Bargreen

“Only connect.”

E.M. Forster’s famous dictum, from his novel “Howard’s End,” emerged as the mantra for Seattle’s “Bach to Byte” conference on the future of classical music and technology. The second in a series of Classical Summits created by Seattle arts administrator Jennifer McCausland, this one brought together in Benaroya Hall’s Founders Room a stellar cast of panelists and presenters, including some of the world’s top producers and administrators in classical music, dance and opera: Pamela Rosenberg, Intendant (general director) of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra; Speight Jenkins, general director of Seattle Opera; D. David Brown, executive director of Pacific Northwest Ballet; and Gerard Schwarz, Seattle Symphony music director.

On the technology side: Christina Calio (director of music and entertainment marketing for Microsoft’s music brand Zune), Matthew Bruno (director of business development, Microsoft), Elizabeth Coppinger (vice president of video services, RealNetworks); Margo Drakos (CEO of InstantEncore.com, a music and networking site); Forrest Gibson (IT director of Experience Music Project, Seattle); Marty Ronish (executive producer of multi-media company Sweet Bird Classics); and Ben London (executive director of the Recording Academy, Pacific Northwest Chapter). They joined radio experts Dean Sven Carlson (producer of the international radio show Fusion) and Bryan Lowe (program director of KING-FM, who led KING to become one of the first stations in the world to stream music online).

The conference came at a time of considerable upheaval. The recording industry is, to put it mildly, struggling, with many experts declaring that the CD is already obsolete; the ground is shifting beneath the feet of musicians and technologists with respect to the dissemination of music online and the requirements of copyright law. Several countries are changing their anti-piracy laws at a time when many free-internet proponents are declaring that the development of a “celestial jukebox” (free Internet streaming of all music, all the time) is inevitable.

So is technology the friend, or the foe, of classical music? Will it halt the slide toward marginalization that great music has taken in past 15 or 20 years, in the wake of the pop-music and celebrity juggernaut? Will it enable classical music to reach millions of new listeners – or will it do so by ripping off the people who compose, perform and produce music, by disseminating it for free?

The Bach to Byte conference didn’t answer all those questions; no conference could. But over and over again, the technology experts had the same advice to the arts groups: Use the Internet, and its many varied features, to connect not only with your potential audiences, but to link those potential listeners together in a community.

Everyone seems hungry for community these days, from the Second Life virtual-reality participants to Facebook and MySpace members, Twitter followers, and YouTube aficionados. People want a connection with the classics that extends beyond going to the performances into being part of an online community, according to Microsoft’s Matthew Bruno: “They want a connection that lasts.” How to make that connection was the subject of most of the rest of the conference.

Keynote speaker Pamela Rosenberg, representing what has been called the greatest orchestra on the planet, talked about her concern that their art form has been so marginalized that it is “irrelevant for 98% of society. But it is important for the civic and mental health of society, and we need to create a future for it.” That future, for an orchestra that already sells out 96% of all its concerts in Berlin, is a massive outreach into the online world with the Digital Concert Hall – an innovation that allows paying listeners to stream live performances into their home computers (and television screens). Subscribers also have access to archived concerts, so they can hear a whole season’s worth of repertoire.

The Digital Concert Hall, Rosenberg explained, originated before her tenure – in 2005, when a sold-out Taipei concert by the Berlin Philharmonic was simulcast onto a screen outside, and 40,000 people were watching, “screaming like teeny-boppers,” as Rosenberg put it. How to bring more Berlin concerts to Asia and other regions where the company only infrequently tours? Live streaming was the answer.

With a grant from Deutsche Bank in 2007, the Berliners had the money to buy equipment – including five cameras so discreet that most audience members have no idea they’re there — and put the legal structures in place. The orchestra plays 90-95 concerts a year in Berlin, and another 40 on the road. In Berlin, each program is repeated three times; the third one streams, and the others are filmed to cover any technical problems. The grant also allowed for behind-the-scenes filmed features, an educational program with “a huge amount of interactive programming for kids,” and all the program books for the orchestra’s 127-year history to be put online.

It’s expensive. The Berlin Phil needs at least 7,000 takers to break even, which is why streaming a single concert will cost you €10, or €149 for a full season. (That’s about $13.60 for a concert, $202.72 for a season.) The orchestra has worked out a payment agreement that Rosenberg calls “very reasonable,” and guest conductors and soloists get 20 cents a hit (25 cents a hit when listener levels hit 5,000). So far, they have 4,000-5,000 single ticket buyers, which Rosenberg feels is “very disappointing. We thought the world would be waiting for us, and the world doesn’t know we’re here.” It’s going to take three years, she believes, to build a worldwide community.

Because a worldwide advertising campaign would be too expensive, the Berliners are looking for like-minded partners – like “Die Zeit,” a serious weekly newspaper, and the Friends of the Salzburg Easter Festival (which the Berlin Phil plays annually). The orchestra has already established its own YouTube channel and a Facebook page. Thus far, “China has ignored us completely,” Rosenberg reports – but perhaps the orchestra’s projected visit there next year will stir up interest in the Digital Concert Hall.

How to build community, not only for the Berlin Philharmonic’s simulcasts but also for the classical groups in general, was the subject of all that followed Rosenberg’s keynote speech. Here are a few of the major points made by panelists:

— Start a dialogue with listeners and fans whenever possible. Take a leaf out of the book of rock bands, whose members blog on tour, and users are back every day to read the latest posts. Let audience members write reviews on the Opera or Ballet or Symphony websites; welcome the audience members as peers instead of talking at them.

— Focus on “three screens in the cloud” – TV, phone and PC all available to you in the sky so you don’t have to carry them. Example: Netflix is in your PC, your TV/VCR, on the phone you’re watching on the bus, in your Xbox at home, and the movie you’re watching on one device picks up where you stopped when you activate another device. People want your content wherever they are, so examine ways to provide that content and connect with them.

— People have “pretty much abandoned the idea they will make money off the CD.” Listeners want to stream audio, and the younger ones, in particular, don’t want to pay for it.

— But nonetheless, in 2007 12% of the music sold on iTunes was classical, while only 3% of CDs were. There is a willingness to pay among classical fans; in the teen market, that willingness is very low.

— It might be possible to hook fans by offering a free day of content. It takes time on the Internet to build community (as the Berlin Philharmonic is discovering). You have to try everything to see what works: YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and put content out there. Find online communities that reach the people you want to reach, like parenting sites, for instance. People need to see your offer over and over.

— People find music in two ways: radio, and their friends. They’re more willing to trust friends than professionals or experts.

— Radio provides opportunities for classical groups, like KING-FM’s Opera Channel and Symphonic Favorites, to record features and interviews and other content that add value to the concert experience. It’s also possible to produce short (one-minute) audio features that arts organizations can send to their friends – and ask them to pass on to their own email lists to “do the marketing for you.”

— Give your audience the tools to promote you and harness technology to build a fan base. Give audience members an inexpensive card to download the concert when they get home; they become your on-line fan, and alerts go out to everyone who is a fan of, say, Stravinsky, or your guest soloist, or the arts organization itself.

— Re-engineer your website so people can buy and print their own tickets at home, making it easier for them to attend. Use the website as a way to deepen the experience for your audience; put up user-generated content as well as featured and interviews from the artists and the company.

— If you have a record label, ask them to set up a subsidiary site for you that you will maintain. Seattle Symphony’s executive director Tom Philion observed that orchestras can reach the vast world of gamers by performing music from games; the word about the upcoming concert quickly spreads through the world of gaming sites.

— Seattle Opera’s administrative director Kelly Tweeddale noted that an ongoing site called ProjectAudience.org is just getting started: a collaborative, community-level audience development project for the cultural sector, jointly led by Seattle’s ArtsFund and the Phoenix Alliance for Audience. You can participate, or monitor its progress.

— A small dance company filmed its dress rehearsal and put it on MySpace, and its audience for the performance trebled. Use the web for this kind of advance promotion.

— The Metropolitan Opera’s live streaming into movie theaters has reached new audiences, with 920,000 attending last season – more than attended the actual performances at the Met. Of course, not every company can afford to do live streaming into movie theaters (some sources say the Met can’t, either).

— The YouTube Symphony, which got 15 million hits in the past month, was designed not by a symphony or other arts organization but by a young project manager at Google getting his MBA. His experience of the world is different. Stars like Lang Lang are using Twitter and virtual-reality site Second Life to reach fans who wouldn’t respond to standard classical sites. People want to participate; they want to be together online without being in the same room. “One of these days you’ll get there,” said media lawyer Kelly Jo MacArthur of Second Life, adding that she hoped her audience would not feel “threatened by any of these Internet developments.”

The conference’s final panel brought together Rosenberg, Schwarz and Jenkins for a discussion on how they use technology and where they might go from here. Jenkins explained that Seattle Opera has streamed worldwide via KING-FM since 1998, and has heard from listeners as far away as Cairo. A three-minute informative clip on the company’s website was used by the national service organization OperaAmerica. Thus far, Jenkins has filmed KING-FM Opera Channel features on a total of 16 different operas, also streamed worldwide.

Do phenomena like Lang Lang and the YouTube Symphony really create more audiences for classical music generally, or (as in the case of the Three Tenors) just a greater appetite for the specific performer? All the panelists thought the latter.

Regarding the issue of free streaming of musical content, all were equally firm. As Jenkins put it, “Our passion is music, but it’s also our livelihood. We spend our lives creating intellectual property, and it can’t all be for free. Whenever Seattle Opera material has been used [without authorization] on the Internet, we’ve stopped it every time. The Metropolitan Opera moves instantly and with great power to stop the same thing.”

Gerard Schwarz agreed, but noted the immense power of annual TV broadcasts of the Mostly Mozart Festival (which he ran for 20 years) to sell tickets – even to the show that people got to see free on their own television sets. One year when the TV broadcast ran at the end of the season, no tickets were sold. “I would have given that away,” says Schwarz of the broadcast, “because ticket sales are where we make our living.” Public TV broadcasts of Seattle Symphony concerts have sold “tons of tickets,” Schwarz reports.

Do the Met simulcasts in movie theaters really increase opera audiences? Jenkins says that in every American survey of this phenomenon, the same results are found: people who attend are either opera people/subscribers, or people who can’t afford opera tickets. Thus the net effect is not greater ticket sales at the Met.

Everyone agreed that opportunities to reach the young must be found. For example: in Berlin, where most of the concerts sell out, Rosenberg has initiated a policy of withholding 50 tickets for every concert specifically for people 28 and younger; those tickets sell for €15.

Was there a disconnect between the technologists and the classicists? Maybe. There was certainly a fair amount of “talking down” going on, especially when one presenter told the audience they probably weren’t even using computers 10 years ago. Jaws dropped all over the room, not only by this writer (who had written literally thousands of reviews and columns on computers before 1999) but by such figures as Seattle Opera’s Jenkins, who in 1998 had already written an extremely sophisticated on-line guide to connecting one’s PC in the technical nightmares of European hotel Internet systems.

The “only connect” mantra was getting a real workout in Benaroya Hall’s Founders Room. Some of the connections seemed to be working; time will tell whether the often-repeated connection advice (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, user-generated content, etc.) is really going to work. For one thing, recent statistics suggest that 60% of Twitter users drop out after a month because it’s pretty boring to read someone texting “This is what I’m doing and it’s really cool!” over and over. And according to analysts at Credit Suisse, YouTube is going to lose $470 million this year. Judging from the number of concert invitations this writer is seeing on Facebook, their ability to influence the greater community might be fairly minor. Further, there is something dispiriting in being told that potential audiences really are more interested in the faux-communities connecting with each other online than in the experience of live, real community of the kind that performing artists spend their lives reaching from the stage. That’s enough to put a little byte in your Bach.