ARTS GROUP TICKET SELLING PRACTICES - A RANT & AN APOLOGY

Just had an unintentional argument with a member of a well-established local choral group and needed to get some rants off my chest.

The disagreement was over the issue of the choir mass selling tickets to school and personal friends and relatives. My understanding of the ticket selling practice of this group was that the selling was two fold. Members were expected to meet certain quotas in ticket sales, while the remaining would be made up by the public sales through the ticketing service, SISTIC. My guess is that there would be certain “performance pressure” on the members to meet and exceed the quota.

This choral group has among its members, a number of choir instructors who teach at various local school choirs. From past experience during their concerts, it appears that the students from these school choirs make up the main body of the choir’s audience. I would hazard a guess at 70-80% of the concert hall available seating. It does not seem unreasonable to extrapolate the relation between the required quota and the sales to the students of these members.

This is not exactly a bad state of affairs. For one, it is definitely a good thing that the choir students are exposed to a higher level of choral expertise and I believe that the schools or the student’s education fund may be paying for this, so it doesn’t financially affect the students. But I do wonder if this well-establish choral group is taking advantage of this “easy” sales from the school choirs and not doing more to publicize and reach out to the general public who has no direct links to the group.

I used to be actively involved in the amateur performing arts scene as well and hold the opinion (along with a few other friends) that in order for performing arts to flourish locally, performing groups need to move away from the “force-feeding” method of selling tickets and move towards letting “market forces” determine the “demand” for the tickets. Performing group members need to ensure that the quality of the performances is as high as they are able to achieve, not busy trying to sell tickets to their nearest and dearest and getting stressed about it into the bargain. Arts managers (or committees of amateur groups) need to focus on influencing the “market forces” rather than the “demand” directly, whether through public education, better publicity or other means.

The practice of selling concert tickets to their own school choir students seem to be a means of “force feeding” in my opinion, and coming from the instructors of the choir themselves, may seem a little biased and also rather too commercially oriented. I do wonder if these choir instructors do as much to promote concerts of other performing groups where they have no affiliation. Ditto for those other members who sell their tickets to their own friends and relatives.

Also, the fact that the tickets get sold to the same group of people every concert simply means that less of the general public would be aware of the presence of the group itself or even the presence of a choral music scene locally. It would always be a closed “insider” circle, and contributes nothing to the growth of the local performing arts scene. Commercially, spending some opportunity cost (in lost ticket sales to “insider” circles) to try and reach out to the bigger public may be a more commercially sound move in the long run.

If it had been any other amateur group, I would definitely have been less critical of this practice, since I fully understand the difficulty of ticket selling and covering costs in a country where performing arts is still relatively unsupported at the even at the professional level, not to mention semi-professional or amateur groups. Many amateur groups are simply not well known enough to attract enough audience by their reputation alone, and also do not have the funds to engage in major publicity exercises. My own group died a natural death after two not very well attended concerts where we tried not to rely on “enforced members selling”. Well, I can, at least, say we tried.

However, for the group in question, other than being relatively well established and having a loyal following, I understand that they are also reasonably active in their various other activities like recordings and private bookings, and various other types of sponsorship, to ensure a reasonably healthy funding. In my humble opinion, they are in a better position to lead the way in the abolishing of this system of “enforced members selling” for a concert or two and experiment with the selling of tickets solely through public means and more involved publicity, without suffering major loss in ticket sales. Practicing “enforced members selling” at this stage of their development only appear to bring this group to the same level as any other secondary school choir (whose members have to canvass their friends for “support”), and is perhaps not the expectations of a leading group in the local choral music scene.

Of course, to be fair, this is the state of affairs not only for this particular choral group, but also many other local established performing groups in various genres. It is further exacerbated by the fact that the various public ticketing services will only do so much and no more to promote and publicize non-big ticket concerts, even though publicity is one of their services when they have been contracted. I certainly understand the constraints, and can even emphathise, but like I mentioned, certain groups are in a position to do more and change the status quo.

Well, I do apologise to said member if my comments had offended, and I firmly believe that we can take an “agree to disagree” approach to this.