We've all seen the same photo; it's become like a metaphor for the state of classical music (indeed, for the arts!) in many post-COVID cities that once saw healthy audience numbers at regular in-season cultural events: row upon row of red velvet seat covers all tipped up and vacant, receding into an ominous darkness that even flashlights can't reach. The stage beyond it—however—is all lit and set, waiting like a table laid out for guests who subsequently (and apologetically) telephoned to cancel. Above the podium, in a typeface selected to convey abject grief, reads the title like an elegiac epitaph: "Classical Music Is Dying". Then, hovering precipitously and obscurely below it, reads a somewhat accusatory eulogy—and that accusation is against you: the delinquent audience member.
I don't go to concerts anymore because—much like once-religious devotees who have gone astray because they no longer feel connected to their deity's abundant love and blessings—the blatant stench of false aestheticism and obvious displays of commercial narcissism offend my long-held belief that classical music is a serious art that should only be professed by genuine masters of their craft. Nowadays, the only concerts I go to are my own (only because I have to); and I remember standing stageside on several occasions, remarking to myself that it is, indeed, empty. I've learned to count those rows (and fast!) in blocks of two to four, during the applause, while pretending to adjust either my cummerbund or perhaps the full score—lying innocently open-faced on the stand. Or while locking eyeballs with the one audience member whose applause is so frantic, so wildly out of proportion to what the rest of the room is offering, that you find yourself blushing on her unbeknownst behalf.
The conclusion everyone draws from those empty theater seats carries a portentous message: that the future is bleak, and that the public has wandered off elsewhere with something that has a screen in it. That foregone conclusion is quite inaccurate, I believe, and requires an economist to explain. But economists are hardly arts practitioners or managers, and classical musicians have proven time and again that they aren't the best experts on economically efficient ways to run their business. As a student of macroeconomics, I tread the middle path between the two—therefore, allow me to make sense of things.
Beethoven writes his volume of Opus 18 string quartets in 1799, and it takes four people half an hour to go through one of them. Then, history tells us, Napoleon marches in (and out), the railway arrives, the light bulb is invented, the assembly line redefines mass production (remember Adam Smith's factory of pins?), penicillin is introduced, the transistor takes over, the jet engine blows its way through, the shipping container moves the world on its axis… the semiconductor, the network, the algorithm that knows what you want even before you know it, etc. etc. etc. After over 200 years, the Opus 18 still takes four people, and half an hour. Not three people and two minutes, not two Juilliard graduates and a laptop. Beethoven's Opus 18 hadn't evolved with technology and the times. It remained an artifact from 1799, as if time had stood still in black notes on paper.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Karl Joseph Stieler, 1820
Then, let's put that in economic context. Everything else on earth got cheaper because it got faster. Music didn't, because music can't. You cannot accelerate an adagio to protect your profit margin: Samuel Barber's enigmatic and funereal Adagio for Strings would sound like a frantic waltz at twice its usual tempo. In a bid to cut costs, you cannot possibly ask the first horn to also cover the second horn, or the cello to double the viola at rests. Try asking the concertmaster to conduct Mahler from the violin—without additional pay! And as the cost of living begins to rise, so does the cost of wages—which severely inflates the price of performing music.
Two economists noticed this in 1966. William Baumol and William Bowen introduced the theory that the cost of services rises much faster than general inflation, even without productivity gains. The economy splits into sectors with high productivity growth (like manufacturing, tech, and agriculture) and labour-intensive sectors with low or stagnant productivity growth (like healthcare, education, and the performing arts). They coined it "the cost disease"—not a metaphor, but a pathology: chronic, progressive, and incurable. Musicians must still be paid roughly what their training would earn them somewhere else, or they will go elsewhere. So as wages rise, productivity does not, because it cannot; and the cost of one hour of live music climbs forever, silently, like sediment. That's why your ticket price keeps rising.
"The cost of one hour of live music climbs forever, silently, like sediment."
Now, it's no secret that many orchestras and other classical music presenters around the world are facing an existential crisis. Festivals and competitions have shut down, and scholarships and funding have been withdrawn. In recent times, you've read about the plights of orchestras from Nashville and Tulsa to those in Konstanz (Germany) and Kuala Lumpur. Although I still think that the presenters themselves (as well as classical musicians in general) are partly to blame, let's examine the books.
60%Earned income, American orchestras, 1990
40%Earned income, 2014
43%From philanthropy, 2014
17%From endowment returns
The endowment quietly doing what endowments do, which is to sit graciously in an index fund. In addition, the earned 40% is a work-and-a-half: ¼ of it is parking, the rest is split between programs, hall rentals, youth-orchestra tuition, the gift shop's inventory of Mozart refrigerator magnets.
Which means the ticket in your hand is not a markup. It is, in fact, a discount, a coupon. Somebody—a donor, a foundation, or the wife of a late oil-magnate who experienced an unforgettable Brahms Fourth in 1958 and never fully recovered—paid for two-thirds of your night before you found the parking garage. Despite that, it still wasn't cheap enough to fill the room. So, with the misplaced confidence of a man who believes he has just invented fire, I would ask—"Why don't they simply lower the prices of tickets?" The answer? They did lower them. They have been lowering them for forty years. Rush tickets, student rush, pay-what-you-wish, under-thirty-fives, over-sixties, free in the park, free with a library card, etc. Putting one more body into a hall already lit and heated and staffed would cost nothing extra. You see, the question was never whether to discount the seat, but rather if the person in the discounted seat ever comes back—a question with an actual, ascertainable answer, which is perhaps why nobody goes looking. And then I looked at the demographics.
Millennials: 9% of tickets in 2019, 25% by 2023. Gen X: 20%, increased to 31%, pulling alongside the boomers like a car merging without signalling. Sales up 6% across the last two seasons alone. Households that were buying them: up 14%. Fact of the matter is, the room is not emptying; quite the contrary. The room is filling with the very people it was told would never come. I guess that's a good thing, a very good thing. But the coffers aren't filling up fast enough. Why? Because individual giving to those same orchestras fell 23% across those same four years—and not because fewer people gave. In fact, more people gave; the number of gifts rose eight percent. It only fell because the large checks stopped. The donors aged seventy-nine and above, whose gifts were 23% of all giving and are now 16%… are probably gone. The rich old lady who inherited the oil baron's estate… well, she died.
"So that is the story that no one is telling. The audience did not leave, au contraire: they are younger, larger, and more curious than ever before. What is leaving—right now, quietly, without pomp and solemnity—are the people who were paying for it."
I suppose we can take comfort in the fact that the music did not fail: Beethoven has a stronger balance sheet than anyone reading this. Mahler is a box-office draw that only Disney cartoons could match. What failed, however, is the "plumbing": a financial contraption assembled in the middle of the last century, threaded through concert halls built for a crowd that is now largely deceased, and financed all this while by that same crowd's checkbook, which has now all but closed.
Film score concerts routinely fill the largest halls. Programming strategy alone cannot resolve a structural deficit.
You cannot program your way out of a demographic. Not with film scores, not with a rebrand, not with a lobby cocktail named after the music director, and not with one more essay instructing you to care. The remaining question is dull, and dull questions are the only ones that pay. If the symphony concert cannot cover its own cost—and it cannot, and never has, and was never built to—then who covers it for the next fifty years, and with what? The answer to this is "Endowment Design". Diversified revenue. Public money. Patient capital. Some instrument nobody has thought of yet. Above all, we are talking about Philanthropy. It is not a music question; it never was. (Philanthropy is something I will be investigating in the course of my Finance studies and work. It is something that is dear to me, one of the missions I have chosen to fulfill.)
And we go on answering it with feeling—beautifully, at length, in the program notes—while the person who was actually paying for that feeling quietly finishes her will. When the halls went dark in 2020 due to the pandemic, something extraordinary arrived to replace the box office: in the US and some other countries, it was emergency money—the Paycheck Protection Program, Shuttered Venue Operators Grants, a torrent of federal relief that for two years papered over the gap so completely that some organizations posted their healthiest balance sheets in a decade. Then it stopped—all of it, more or less at once; and it stopped into a headwind nobody had budgeted for.
The years that followed brought the sharpest inflation in forty years, which has vicious effects on philanthropy; because the donor who writes the same check in 2023 that she wrote in 2019 believes—reasonably—that she has been as generous as before. But, in economic reality, she has not. Post-COVID inflation has caused that check to lose close to a fifth of what it could buy, and the orchestra—paying more now for everything from rosin to rent—feels the shortfall twice. Adjusted for inflation, giving to arts organisations fell by double digits across those four years, even when dollar figures held perfectly flat. The relief evaporated, the dollar shrank, and the largest gifts, the ones that actually move an endowment, pulled back the hardest of all. Now we are all facing the massive aftershocks. Classical music will never be the same again in the economic climate of the future.
