Posted on February 2, 2012 at 9:48 am by Ramon Ricker
in Being a Successful Entrepreneur, gigs
Tags: business, money

If you have read my book, Lessons From a Street-Wise Professor, think back to Chapter 9: “Five Non-Linear Career Journeys.”  These are stories of very successful entrepreneurial musicians.  I chose to include them because they represent five different areas of the music business, but I had a secondary reason as well.  They all have reached their goals in different ways.  There really is no one single road to success in music.  If you gain experience, be observant, have good role models and develop an entrepreneurial mindset, your time will come. Once a friend of a friend asked me what her daughter could do to prepare for a career in music.  Her daughter was then a high school student and was considering a college major in music.  Half-jokingly I gave her a flip answer. I said, “Tell her she should 1) get a paper route, because then she will know how many papers she has to deliver just to purchase one CD; and 2) get a ukulele, because she will learn how to harmonize tunes with just three chords.”  In other words, know the value of a dollar and work on your ears.  But, something was lost in my profundity: I forgot that kids haven’t had paper routes in 30 years.  Got to change that one. No comments

Posted on January 30, 2012 at 6:00 am by David Cutler
in Mindset
Tags: Business models

During the second half of the 19^th Century, rail transportation in the United States was a booming enterprise. Expanding to every corner of the land, this lucrative growth industry seemed unstoppable. Yet within 70 years of its heyday, rail companies tumbled. And today, their impact of is negligible (beyond Amtrak and lines of Thomas the Tank Engine toys).  What on Earth happened? (more...) No comments

Posted on January 26, 2012 at 2:19 am by Robert Levine
in General

It’s axiomatic in the non-profit sector that, more than any other single factor, it’s the quality of the board of directors that determines whether institutions succeed or not. Of course, it’s axiomatic that the way to make money in the market is to buy low and sell high. That doesn’t mean it’s helpful advice.

But, if a good board is key to an orchestra being a good employer for its musicians, those musicians ought to be both concerned and informed about the quality of its board. But, while musicians may have an opinion about the quality of their board, generally it’s an opinion uninformed about anything other than the end result, which means of course that it’s essentially useless in informing the musicians about what they might contribute to building a stronger board.

So what makes a good board? There seems far more art than science to answering that question. But a good place to begin would be two recent blog posts (both of which I find through the email list that Ray discussed yesterday).

The first is on a blog run by the Western States Arts Federation:

Ideally, of course, we seek board members who are passionately committed to the goals and missions of our organizations.  Smart, involved people with deep ties to various segments of the community who will be active in helping to increase the capacity of our organizations, improve their sustainability, and be responsible stewards in the discharge of their fiduciary duties.  We want high profile people, solid business contacts, diverse representation and people eager to right our financial ships.  From the perspective of most staff, the goal is people who will get involved but not micromanage; partners in community outreach, fundraising and as advocates and boosters.  We seek people who have some knowledge of the arts and in particular the ecosystem of the given organization, who understand their role, and who bring something to the table as it were.

But the reality is that there are really two principal criteria that invariably govern our decision to invite someone to join our boards:  1) without meaning to sound specious, the main qualification we look for is really just a warm body – someone who will actually show up at meetings and contribute in some way, someone who will accept the position; and 2) people willing to write a check – the bigger the better.  Less important, but an added bonus is if the candidate has a high profile that we believe will somehow inure to the benefit of our organization.

We don’t, for the most part, vet potential candidates much more than that… Bottom line:  almost never does an arts organization reject a potential board candidate.  We can’t afford to – the pool is too small, the competition too fierce and the options too few.  And, we have so little time to devote to this enterprise.  We take what we can get and give the whole process precious little thought or energy.

Of course, it is difficult to find a slate of candidates clamoring to join the typical arts organization board.  And that is particularly true for those candidates every organization wants – the well heeled, people of color, business and civic leaders, people with cache.

The whole post is definitely worth reading carefully. The second post worth looking at is about specific questions that might be asked of prospective board members – and that those prospective members might ask of the board before joining:

The most important area to explore is specific to what your organization is seeking someone to do (rather than seeking what someone is):

• One of the reasons we’re talking to you about possibly joining our board is because we think you can help us connect with other public school parents in the African American community. Are these connections you could help us make? (Don’t assume, for instance, that a gay person can connect your organization to the gay community.)

Other questions can help spark conversations:

• What interests you about our organization? Which aspect of our organization interests you most?
• What are some of your previous volunteer experiences or leadership roles?
• What appeals to you about board service as a volunteer activity?
• If you were to join our board, are there any experiences you’d like to have as a board member or people you’d like to meet?
• What skills, connections, resources, and expertise do have to offer and are willing to use on behalf of this organization?
• Do you have any worries about joining the board?
• Is there anything you think you would need from this organization to make this experience a successful one for you?

If fundraising is an important activity for board members, be sure to raise it now:

• We’re hoping that if you join our board, you’ll be a member of the fundraising committee. In fact, we hope that you will be able to ask five or ten of your friends for contributions of over $1,000 each. Is this something you think you could do?

Again, the whole post is worth reading carefully.

No comments

Posted on January 24, 2012 at 12:55 pm by Ramon Ricker
in Being a Successful Entrepreneur, Staying informed

One of the listservs to which I belong is Thomas Cott’s, “You’ve Cott Mail.”  As Cott says, “It’s a free service for professionals in the arts,” and he sends it most weekdays. I’m interested in it because it doesn’t just cover music, and we musicians can learn from our brethren in other areas of the arts world. The other interesting thing to me is he doesn’t editorialize. He collects articles and blogs from all over the web and presents similar content under a theme or title.  There are usually 3-4 entries each day. Cott will sometimes summarize an article, but if they are short they are presented in full, and always with a link to the source. Today’s topic (Tues, Jan 24) was: Dealing with Negative Feedback, and the sources cited were: Dealing with negative feedback on social media Rebecca Coleman on her blog, 1/23/12 Tuning out negative comments online Michelle, Talenthouse blog, 11/29/11 Why a negative review may not be so bad after all Matt Rhodes, eConsultancy.com, 6/8/11

Here is a sampling of other recent Cott posts.

Tues, Dec 13: When/How Will Arts Address Lack of Diversity? Thurs, Aug 25: Double-Dip Recession & The Arts Tues, Nov 29: Let’s Talk Tourism Tues, Nov 22: Arts For Free? Tues, Sep 27: Competing with Cirque du Soleil We’re in an information age. There is a lot of information out there at our disposal, but the problem is often locating it. With “You’ve Cott Mail” you will know immediately if the day’s articles cover topics of interest to you. Check it out and see for yourself. No comments

Posted on January 16, 2012 at 1:07 pm by David Cutler
in Books, Projects
Tags: marketing

Here are 10 of the most influential books I read in 2011. This year, my reading list focused around the topics of institutional change, education, leadership, business models, and marketing. Notice that not one of the titles on this year’s list is written specifically for artists. But all are deeply relevant to the challenges faced by this sector in our quickly changing world. I hope you’ll find some of these helpful and beneficial to your own evolution. (more...) No comments

Posted on January 13, 2012 at 2:52 am by Robert Levine
in General

There’s been lots of chatter in the arts blogosphere the past few days over “the model,” most prominently in the email publication You’ve Cott Mail for January 11, which cited a number of online commentaries on the subject, including a very good one from Drew McManus at Adaptistration. But the commentaries invariably miss crucial points and end up in an analytical mush. Most of this is caused by the conflation of lots of different issues into one pernicious concept – the “business model.”

Personally I despise the term as applied to arts organizations. The term “business model” is entirely appropriate when it is applied to entities whose fundamental and primary purpose is to make money for its owners – in other words, businesses. But there are vanishingly few arts organizations in this country whose mission statements include the words “owners” or “profits.” Businesses exist to make money for their owners by making things, or providing services, for sale to other entities or to the public at large. Arts organizations exist to make art for the public. They need to arrange for a revenue stream in order to do that. But in  no sense is the revenue stream, either gross or net of expenses, the point of the exercise. For non-profits, the “bottom line” is not the bottom line – the service provided by the non-profit is the point, not the revenue.

The term “business model” simply cannot be divorced from its implication, which is that the point of the model is profit derived from an excess of revenue over expenses. Using the term to describe any aspect of non-profits is to invite non-rigorous thinking on a level too deep to extirpate.

But I’m not going to win that battle, at least not today. So let me try something simpler: to point out that a “business model” for an arts organization has at least four components, all of which need to be examined before anything meaningful can be said about current of future models. Those four components are

• How decisions are made (governance)
• What the organization does (mission)
• How money is spent in doing those things (expenses); and
• How money is obtained to pay those expenses

What’s important to remember is that these four components not only interact (which is obvious), but that some of the most important interactions are very non-obvious indeed.

Take, for example, the recently reported events at the New York City Opera. These can be best viewed as attempts to revamp the expense component by radically reducing how much the organization spends on the people actually making the art. But doing so will, of course, radically impact what the organization does, and will do so in ways that are both obvious and subtle. One of the most important, yet subtle, ways will be to change how management and the board view putting on performances at all.

In the current model of paying artists, most of the cost of putting on performances is in the form of fixed annual expenses composed of compensation guaranteed to the artists by the labor agreements between the NYCO and the various performers’ unions. This means that the marginal cost of each performance is far less than the average cost (marginal cost being defined essentially as the costs associated with doing a performance that would not be incurred by not doing that performance). The “new model” might lower NYCO’s total expenses, but would radically raise the marginal cost of all performances.

NYCO management might think that won’t change their thinking about doing performances – but it will. If everyone is getting paid regardless of whether the company schedules 1 or 4 performances in a week, the incentives are all to do 4 performances; putting on opera performances are, after all, why there is an NYCO in the first place. But if the company can save a ton of money – or the staff doesn’t have to go out and raise a ton of money – to do a particular performance, the incentives all lean towards not doing that performance and justifying to the board and the funders why that particular performance was just too damned much trouble. After a while, most performances will be seen as being just too damned much trouble, and the company will end up doing just enough performances to justify having a full-time staff.

Interestingly, two components of the current model appears to be left unconsidered by the NYCO management and board -  revenue and mission. The most interesting quote from the New York Times article on the situation came from Gail Kruvand, chair of the orchestra negotiating committee:

“We can’t keep sacrificing if this effort by current management is doomed to failure,” Ms. Kruvand said. “You can’t run a nonprofit performing-arts company on 10 percent earned income,” she added, referring to the rough proportion of ticket sales to donations.

10% earned income? Wouldn’t they be better off by trying a new model of revenue and mission? Why bother to sell tickets at all if all it does is produce 10% of the company’s revenue – especially as that is most certainly not net of expenses, such as marketing, associated with selling tickets? Wouldn’t they be more likely to raise money if they thought of themselves as a cultural service agency and not a Broadway show that never turns a profit? Wouldn’t that liberate them to explore new ways to bring opera to the masses?

It is impossible to have an intelligent discussion about new models without identifying core components of what a model is and putting them all on the table.  Demonstrating that is the only service that NYCO management and board have done anyone during this debacle.

No comments

Posted on January 11, 2012 at 1:43 am by Robert Levine
in General

My orchestra did, and it was kinda fun:

When Joshua Phillips signed on this season as a French horn player in the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, he had no idea the job description included taking a snowball to the head.

“I was trying to do what I was told,” he explained.

The instructions were coming not from a sadistic conductor, but from Milwaukee export and funny film director David Zucker of “Airplane!” and “Naked Gun” fame. He agreed to direct a humorous new ad to promote winter tourism in Wisconsin. The spot will begin airing in parts of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Illinois this week.

The 30-second commercial opens with the orchestra peacefully playing “Winter Wonderland” on a stage covered in artificial snow. A caption says, “A winter evening in Wisconsin.” All is well until two stage hands, trying to sprinkle flakes on the performers, accidentally dump a whole box of snow on Ted Soluri, the principal bassoonist in real life but a French horn player in the ad.

Phillips, who plays a violin in the ad, smirks at his colleague’s misfortune, prompting Soluri to throw a snowball at him. Then pandemonium erupts, with snowballs flying everywhere. The conductor – an actor hired for the shoot – is hit in the eye with a snowball fired from a trombone, causing him to sway and the orchestra to go out of tune and rhythm. Captions at the end read: “Winter’s here. Sound like fun?” and the tourism website appears.

The idea was to draw attention to the arts in Wisconsin this time of year, fuel desire to play in the snow and pry us off the couch, all while getting a laugh.

“If it makes it look like Wisconsin is a fun place to go, then we’ve done our job,” Zucker told me.

Whether or not it’ll actually do that is completely beyond my ability to predict. But it was good PR for the orchestra and a pretty painless way to spend an afternoon. Lots of breaks, snacks for the orchestra, weird stuff to do – definitely a change of pace.

The arrangement of Winter Wonderland was done by veteran Milwaukee composer and freelance violinist Eric Segnitz. The only reason he wasn’t on stage with us as usual was that he was helping with the audio recording.

For those of you still curious to know what instrument I play, I can be seen at the bottom right corner of the screen from 0:03 to 0:05. No snowballs, unfortunately. But I was picking fake snow about of my clothes for the next 24 hours or so.

1 comment

Posted on January 10, 2012 at 2:08 am by Robert Levine
in General

My colleague Frank Almond did a very thorough take-down of the whole thing here:

“These instruments were loaned with the stipulation that they remain in the condition in which we received them (precluding any tonal adjustments or even changing the strings), and that their identities remain confidential. All strings appeared to be in good condition.”

There are countless factors that can shape perceptions while comparing violins (even in a double-blind study), and this was the first genuine red flag for me. The setup of a fine violin is critical and highly subjective-strings, placement of the bridge, etc. The soundpost can move a fraction of an inch and completely change the way a violin responds and sounds, and this is particularly true for notoriously finicky Strads. It’s not uncommon for a spectacular instrument to seem inferior just because of an unusual setup or old strings (or getting bumped around on an airplane). It is unclear who set up the newer instruments (or when). I enjoyed the confident visual assessment of the strings- for the record, I regularly play on a 1715 Stradivari and use Vision Solo strings. They completely burn out after about a month and the instrument sounds totally different, but they look fine…

(snip snip)

I could go on, but some of you may get the idea by now. The conclusions of the study seem predetermined to a degree: statistically, most of the participants couldn’t tell new from old, and everyone’s perceptions were somewhat altered by the knowledge that some of the instruments were Strads. Is this a revelation, given that actual humans were involved, under conditions that heavily favored the newer instruments? I can guarantee that the results would be completely different if the double-blind study had a third step in a concert hall (or two), with a luthier on hand and some of the participants listening to the instruments as well as playing them.

With all due respect, and despite the rigorous science and controls applied, my sense is that the researchers started with a premise and set out to prove it.

I’d put it a little differently. I think the researchers did demonstrate something, and not because they set out with a predetermined opinion. But it wasn’t worth demonstrating. Certainly it would have been possible to design the same controls into a test that actually did say something meaningful about the comparative performance of the instruments under the same conditions. But the researchers likely didn’t understand the difference between that and what they did actually prove.

My father spent his entire career designing experiments and analyzing the resulting data. One of his favorite axioms was “if it’s not worth doing, it’s not worth doing well” (which is not quite the version of that axiom you grew up hearing, of course). Aside from its other flaws (can you say “anecdotal data”?) this study was a case in point.

1 comment

Posted on January 6, 2012 at 1:58 am by Robert Levine
in General

Tom Loughlin, who is chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at SUNY Fredonia and has considerable performing experience in professional theater, takes on the diversity issue in his world and comes to some conclusions that could fairly be called politically incorrect:

According to The Broadway League 2010-11 Demographic Report, the Great White Way is whiter than ever. And then some.

…Given all the demographics we know about theatre in the US and westernized countries today, I think it’s safe to make the following conclusion: Theatre is primarily for white people, as both audience members and practitioners.

When I first saw these statistics, I got those old familiar feelings of guilt and anguish, that it’s a “bad thing” that theatre isn’t shared or enjoyed by large numbers of non-whites. I would like it to be – I would like everyone to like and enjoy theatre. I would like more white people to enjoy theatre (those numbers, although large, represent only a small fraction of the population as a whole, maybe 2% according to the NEA research on arts participation). I would like to see audiences grow, witness theatre houses full with a diverse crowd of theatre-goers. Clearly, it ain’t happening.

But then the question came to me – is it so bad to admit that theatre is for white people? White western culture has, for better or worse, risen to a dominant position in this multicultural, heterogeneous society that has evolved in this country, and because of that fact alone it is subject to criticism and the push of upward mobility from cultural forces below (at times rightfully so). But perhaps it’s just worth the few seconds it takes to stop and  consider the idea that white people, like any other culture or race, deserve to have a culture and forms of art that they enjoy and that is reflective of their values and history. Theatre, as it has evolved from the Greeks, seems to be one of those cultural art forms that people of white European descent have enjoyed for a long time (and the majority of them enjoyed it until the advent of mass media). And that, in and of itself, is OK. Isn’t it?

This is not to say that other races or ethnic groups do not have theatre or do not enjoy it. But the particular form of the scripted written work as interpreted by actors in a linear story-telling fashion seems to be one that has interested western Caucasians for a long time, and apparently continues to do so for a certain demographic slice of white people as a whole.

What’s interesting is that the statistics on which he bases this conclusion show that 83% of Broadway ticket buyers are white. I don’t know the statistics for our business, but I know that’s a lot more diverse audience that the ones I’ve been playing for the last few decades.

I don’t think what we do is “for white people.” But it’s beyond dispute that our audience, both nationally and for most orchestras, is overwhelmingly white. I wonder what a more detailed breakdown would like like in terms of ethnicity, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if that showed that large chunks of our audience were descended from immigrants from places where our core repertoire (including opera) was deeply embedded in the popular culture.

It’s not a good thing that our audiences are so monochromatic, especially as our society becomes more and more truly diverse. But I’ve heard no proposed solutions that do more than tinker around the edges of the problem.

1 comment

Posted on January 5, 2012 at 9:41 am by Ramon Ricker
in Being a Successful Entrepreneur, gigs
Tags: entrepreneur, money

Some musicians feel that they must dumb-down their music in order to be “successful.” I once had a conversation with Maria Schneider in which she made an interesting observation: many musicians who are focused solely on making money underestimate their audiences.  She commented that some musicians seem to think that if they write or present a particular kind of music, they will get a certain audience.  A dilemma can occur if they happen to get lucky and are successful in gaining an audience.  If they suddenly say “that’s not really who I am.”  “Let me show you what I really do,” they will lose that audience, because those fans were on board for what the artist was doing at the time.  They came to the concert just for that. Of utmost importance is to be devoted to developing your own craft and your own voice.  If you follow your artistic calling with passion and belief, when your audience does find you, they will be getting the best of what you have to offer.   Be true to yourself.  Don’t pander. No comments