Ticket data difficulties

The classical music field doesn't know how many tickets it sells, and in fact it would be hard to get an accurate total. But they shouldn't act complacent, as if ticket sales hadn't badly fallen.

About classical music ticket sales and the lack of data on them…

Yes, it’s unpleasant to realize that we have ample data on newspaper circulation (their equivalent of sales), but not much on classical music.

In fairness, though, classical music data is harder to get. The big classical music institutions have it, whether they make it public or not. But classical music institutions vary greatly. Besides big orchestras, opera companies, and presenting organizations, we’ve got choral groups, chamber music concerts, solo recitals, new music concerts, early music performances, and more. Conservatory performances, too.

Who’s keeping track of all of those? A chamber music series doubtless knows how many tickets they sell, but that info isn’t aggregated with data from other series. I might know (have known, in fact) about chamber music series where ticket sales had fallen, but that doesn’t mean that they weren’t rising elsewhere.

I once asked someone high-ranking at Chamber Music America if chamber music sales had fallen, overall, and they didn’t know. CMA had no data.

Which makes it hard to get data for the entire classical music field.

Though some data does exist. Opera America, for instance, knows how many tickets opera companies sell. And they publish annual surveys of the field, where you can find some version of that data. The way they present it, though, doesn’t lend itself to overall conclusions, that, let’s say, sales from 1990 to 2025 are overall down.

To put that together, we’d have to collate data from each annual statement. And since, as I recall, the data is given for groups of opera companies, sorted by size, it might not be strictly comparable year after year. There might, for instance, from one year to the next be different numbers of opera companies in each group.

The League of American Orchestras collects sales data from its members, but won’t reveal it in any form. I’ve had discussions with people there about this. Most recently, I was told that the data is difficult to collate, with different orchestras reporting it differently. And also that the League wasn’t greatly interested in this data, giving more priority to for instance getting data on diversity.

Which is admirable, but it also seemed that they don’t think the data is crucial to have, and for the world to know about, because there’s no chance that it poses any danger for the orchestral field.

Which then brings me from comments on my last post, from two people I greatly respect in the classical music field, who both said that of course big organizations have this data, but it’s not customary for them to reveal it.

I know that, of course. But this was part of my point. I can put it a different way. OK, big organizations have data, don’t publish it. Doesn’t matter so much, if the field is healthy.

But what if it isn’t healthy? What if it’s suffered a sales decline so large that we might be facing extinction?

Oh, that’s not true! people might say. But how do we know? As I’ll say in another post, enough can be known to make it certain that sales have declined, maybe by quite a lot.

Whether “quite a lot” means extinction we don’t have the data to know. But the reason we don’t have the data is that the groups that have it don’t take the danger seriously enough to release what they have. If they urgently thought they might go extinct — and if people outside them did — they’d tell us their truth, because all of us, including them, would see that it’s urgent.

Turn this around, and by not releasing data, big classical music institutions hurt even themselves. If the data looked very bad, and everyone knew that, there would be an urgent rush to fix what’s wrong. Or try to!

But if there’s no public knowledge, it’s easy to shunt the problem away, in our minds as well as in reality. So — which I’d guess is the case now — not enough gets done.