Do we not want to know?

Classical music — supposedly in crisis — has no data on its overall ticket sales. How could that be?

Let’s say — just to put this in context — that you run a company, and you think you’re in trouble. Sales of your product are down, you think.

What do you do?

Well, first you’d want data. Are sales really down? And if so, by how much?

Though of course, in any well-run business, you’d have that data, in your computer.

Cut now to classical music, a business troubled, people say, by falling ticket sales.

But have ticket sales fallen? And, if they have, how bad is the crisis? How much are ticket sales down?

And note that we need long-term data, since talk of a classical music crisis — I was there — began in the 1990s.

So, wow, ticket sales falling ever since then? And by how much, if that’s really true?

You’d think the whole field would be crying out for that data. Which would be public.

But try to Google it. Search for “classical music ticket sales decline.”

What I got, last week, was nothing but fragments. Sales at the Kennedy Center fell this year (for reasons that everyone knows). Met Opera ticket sales have, for the past few years, been falling, which Peter Gelb blames on declining tourism in New York.

There’s more — more fragments — but this isn’t long-term data, and it’s not comprehensive. The Kennedy Center decline is not even relevant, if we’re looking at larger classical music issues, because what’s happening there is (as we know) its own special mess.

In the rest of the world, in other industries, data exists. Try Googling newspapers, another industry thought to be troubled, and in fact, from its data, proven to be. In just a few minutes (Googling “newspaper circulation decline”) I found this, from the Pew Charitable Trust, a reputable source of reliable info:

Couldn’t be clearer, or more comprehensive.

Here’s the link. You can read there why Pew says some of the totals are estimated — though not for most of those years — plus what they do know for sure, and why they believe in their estimates:

https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers/

And you can find data elsewhere, showing, just as thoroughly, the same decline.

You can find data, too, for ticket sales to movie theaters, Broadway shows, and baseball games.

But not for classical music. An art form that, perhaps, sits at the peak of human achievement, but doesn’t handle its business affairs on quite that level.

Why is that? Do we not want to know?

Footnote:

Google can find us numbers from the National Endowment for the Arts, which, since 1982, show fewer and fewer people going to classical music performances in the US.

Note, though, that this isn’t hard data on ticket sales, or on attendance of any kind, paid or unpaid. It’s data on what people say they do. The NEA regularly surveys a sample of Americans, asks them if they go to hear classical music, and reports the results.

So this data can’t be precise. If someone says they heard classical music, we don’t know what they mean — what, exactly, they went to hear.

But, sigh…approximate as this is, it’s the only good data available, at least in public. And, when it says the numbers have fallen over the years, I do trust it.

But do people in classical music talk about even this?