Just in: Constanzo offers all Philly Opera seats for $11
Operapress release:
Anthony Roth Costanzo, the star countertenor who took the helm as General Director and President of Opera Philadelphia on June 1, announced today that all tickets for every performance in the 2024-2025 Season will be available for $11, or a higher price of your choosing, as part of a new initiative called Pick Your Price. The pioneering ticket program, the first of its kind initiated by a major American opera company, represents a radical shift aimed at bringing opera to more people.
“Price can be a big barrier to entry at the opera, and ticket sales are a metric that too often determines how we program, how we engage, and how we market. If we are worried about making sure we sell expensive tickets, it limits the possibility of who we reach and what we make.” Costanzo said. “Pick Your Price invites everyone to connect with Opera Philadelphia at a price that works for them.”
Does this work anywhere? It’s usually a disaster.
Never. Ever. Works.
People have been doing these free-ticket schemes for as long as I can remember — let’s call that 40 years. I have never heard anyone claim that it helped build a sustainable audience.
I remember Carnegie Hall trying many permutations of this. At one point that had a student subscription program where all concerts were $10 (except the VPO). And these weren’t rush tickets — you could buy tickets for $10 at any time. Other times they’ve done mini festivals where no seat in the house was more than $40.
Dumb, just dumb.
Whether you like it or not, the price of admission does set a value on performing art. At $11, you’re sending a messaging to the masses that opera has little value.
If you cannot persuade the public that they should pay an admission rate that at minimum covers the overhead cost of the production and provides the artists, crew, and musicians a fair wage, then you have no business be an arts administrator.
I’m trying to think of any current opera company anywhere “persuades the public that they should pay an admission rate that at minimum covers the overhead cost of the production and provides the artists, crew, and musicians a fair wage.”
Even the Salzburg Festival gets government subsidy, and even Glyndebourne takes charitable donations to help cover the costs of production.
Most opera companies strive to generate as much revenue from ticket sales as they can, which is why they use dynamic pricing to push ticket prices as high as possible with a duel goal of having every seat in the house filled.
The irony is that if this $11 pricing scheme actually works (it won’t, expect the bankruptcy announcement same time next year), it’d mean that opera has been price gouging us all this time.
ARC and the company are raising money to cover the cost. They’ve brought in $7 million just in the ten weeks since he became Opera Philadelphia’s director.
They won’t be able to keep offering all seats for $11 indefinitely, but they are well aware of that.
I wouldn’t call Opera Philly a major opera company as the orchestra is full of freelance musicians who always look bitter in the pit. They don’t play at a high level either.
A bad economic model, by an absolutely fantastic guy and artist.
First of all, $11 is a bar set so low that it equates a night at the opera with two coffees, or less than a monthly Netflix subscription. What does that say about how we value our own art form? We are now literally begging people to come! And truly, how many people are there out there desperate to go to the opera a few times a year but for the price of admission to the cheaper seats? Almost everyone these days can afford the cheaper seats, but they are simply making different choices with their money. That’s why sports stadiums and pop concerts are full.
Then, if all tickets are $11, how do they control seating in a 3,500 seater house? Does the person choosing to pay a higher price get rewarded with a “better” seat, or does the person paying $11 get to have it all his/her way? A cheap ticket and a fabulous seat, on top? The higher payer might feel somewhat less inclined to be generous next time if not given a better service and experience than the $11 ticket holder.
And when you have invested so little in a ticket, what is to stop you from just not bothering to go because the weather is bad that night, or a football game seems more appealing?
Pick your price doesn’t work. At the very least, the minimum should show some deference to the art form, and be set at $50, say. At $11, a full house will generate a mere $38,500 of income, and that is barely enough to turn the lights on, let alone pay the wages of the company staff and all the creatives. Hoping that generosity will cover the rest of the wage bill is not a plan, it’s a dangerous wager.
Taylor Swift has shown us all very, very clearly that money is not the problem in our world. She fills stadium after stadium with people of all ages and backgrounds paying way, way more than $11. Plus hotels, plus transport. And if she charged them $11, they would be insulted, because they want to value her. That’s the psychology of pricing; if you sell something too cheaply, you diminish the buyer’s sense of investment and, in turn, cheapen the product.
This doesn’t end well. Opera will soon become a free museum piece. Instead, we should be innovating and presenting great theater – like ARC’s own Akhenaten at the Met, which sold out the entire run of the revival because it was fabulous! And not for $11!
Most people who pay all that money to go see a pop star like Taylor Swift do it only once every few years, not once every few months. And it’s every few months that most opera companies are aiming for.
They’re really not comparable.
Some of the commenters actually seem to be under the impression ticket sales are supposed to cover the costs of opera performances. I think it’s a workable outreach idea for a few performances, if only for publicity value. Doing it for a whole season smells of desperation.
It’s a season of only three productions, with three performances each. Nine performances across a season is really just enough for “outreach for a few performances.”
If the shows sell out and get good reviews, then Opera Philadelphia will have room both to charge somewhat more and to raise more money to subsidize ticket prices.
So demeaning to the talent.
Let’s do the math, shall we?
Philadelphia Opera:
Chorus of 50,
Orchestra of 50,
Cast of 10.
__________________
Total Performers: 110
$11 per customer = $0.11 per performer.
Not quite the 3 Penny Opera, but the 11 Penny Opera.
So insulting, if you threw 11 cents into the instrument case of a street performer, he’d chase you down the block and beat you with his instrument.
Someday, folks will understand that pay as you go is not a good or sustainable model without a strategy for subsidy.
This was not that day in Philadelphia.
They are working on a strategy for subsidy. (They’ve raised $7 million in just the past 10 weeks.)
And nobody — nobody — has suggested that Opera Philadelphia will keep this pricing strategy in place forever.
I definitely had to piece some of the articles together to learn this, and I admit my previous post was a little too dismissive to be helpful. I have some concerns still for the “what comes next if it isn’t forever”, but that’s just me. Some ticketing initiatives have lingered long after their effectiveness. Maybe this is different?
To all those losers who are posting here that this is a dumb idea, maybe you’re the ones who are dumb.
Is it better to sell expensive tickets and have the house half empty, or to have the place packed with people who perhaps discover for the first time they like opera and then come back?
Bravo to ARC and Opera Philadelphia for planning such an interesting and well-balanced season, and for trying something new. I will be attending several performances and I will be proud to pay more than $11 to subsidize those who pay less.
Let’s break your comments down, piece by piece.
If the only way an opera company can fill a house is to essentially make the admission free, that means public interest in opera just isn’t there and/or the opera company is fundamentally failing to connect with audiences.
The especial danger of doing this with first-time opera goers is that you’re training them to believe that opera should be free. Artists not only deserve to a fair wage, but they deserve to be paid an amount that reflects their talent.
If people can afford to pay $200 to see a pop concert or a sporting event, they can afford to pay that much for the opera.
The biggest threat to art isn’t a lack of arts education in schools, but the pervasive belief in our society that art should be free. Art organizations wouldn’t be struggling financially and so dependent on donations and government funds if ticket prices reflected true costs.
“To all those losers who are posting here that this is a dumb idea, maybe you’re the ones who are dumb.”
I always admire the courtesy, respect for others, and respect for rational debate that characterises posters on this site.
Well balanced season: A new work, a Mozart opera, and an unfamiliar work by Mozart’s contemporary. And only one canonical work? Please explain how that is well balanced.
Better to make the ticket price free and charge $50 for parking with a $11 surcharge for ‘gasoline burning vehicles.’
What a novel idea. Can they do it for sporting events and Taylor Swift concerts too? Because they’re a BIGGER barrier of entry.
A very unpopular opinion:
The nonprofit status of performing arts organizations have let many survive despite a lack of popular support from the residents in their city. And because they can survive without ticket revenue, they have a disincentive to truly reach out to the community to bring in new audiences.
Simply put: a performing arts organization that struggles to break 70 percent house capacity shouldn’t exist in its current form, even if philanthropic can subsidize all of the empty seats and reduced ticket prices just to make it to 70 percent. Something is not fundamentally working if so few people are attending.
Look at Broadway: shows run as long as they can consistently pull in a certain amount of revenue each night. Once revenue drops below a specific amount, the show is retired and a new one is brought in. Donors and governments don’t contribute money to keep the show running indefinetly.
That’s the Gospel of End Stage Capitalism where ‘bottom line’ economics always equals ‘lowest common denominator’ results. Enjoy your endless cycle of disposable “musical” comedies then. Meanwhile, Government continues to spend more on miltary bands than on all the arts anywhere in the nation combined.
There was a time when classical music was popular music. Anyone who has taken high school music history understands this.
The pedestal we have put classical music on, insisting that it is superior to all other forms of music, that it is so sacred that there are all kinds of rules with attending concerts, has seriously harmed its ability to build and sustain an audience.
There are plenty of great Broadway musicals. If you refuse to listen to them, I feel sorry for you.
What isn’t mentioned is that Costanzo raised $7 Million over 10 weeks, which both settled the opera’s debts and allowed the opera to subsidize this pricing model. Costanzo says in news articles that a large amount of that $7 Million support was given to the opera out of excitement about the $11 ticket scheme. $7 Million in 10 weeks.
Maybe let’s congratulate them for trying and see how it goes before denigrating. They seem to have themselves covered financially for some time.
What happens if people don’t want opera, even at $11?
If it doesn’t sound like good economic sense it usually isn’t. When the goal is to increase demand, there comes a point in price lowering where a consumer loses faith in the value.
All I can say is, good luck during your next union negotiation with the orchestra. They’ll want their piece of that $7 million pie and demand answers as to why it was used to undervalue their work and not give them a raise (deserved or not). And they would have a point.
Setitng the tickets at a high price point may be respectful of the artists’ worth, but what’s the use of that if no one is purchasing them? Costanzo said in the NYT that on the first day of the pricing scheme they sold 2200 tickets where as the day before they had only sold 20 tickets. And there is now currently limited availability on the website. Wouldn’t the artists prefer to play to a full house of enthusiastic supportive audience members who paid lower ticket prices than a half empty house? The status quo was not working. Reports were that the company was at risk of going under as soon as this season. Costanzo decided to take a risk. It sounds like he got the funding to do so. If it works and he is able to build an audience for the future that is willing to pay higher prices, then it was worth it. If not, well, then the company at least got one more year of life instead of dying today which is also worth it. No risk, no reward.
Ticket sales do not pay the bills for American arts organizations. ***Attention*** does. The attention, specifically, of wealthy donors and gift givers, who keep performing arts organizations alive with their donations and endowments, and who do so when they see some sort of extra-musical reason to do so. The brilliance of Costanzo’s move is that now, right at this moment, everyone in opera is talking about Opera Philadelphia. The wealthy will now want to be a part of that, and have their wealth attached to that attention. Costanzo–not only a brilliant artist but a brilliant businessman–has, in one fell swoop, made his company the most talked-about in the country.
If you think that Opera Philadelphia is the first opera company/orchestra to do something like this **and** it resulted in sustainable audience growth, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Please read again exactly what I wrote.
You frame this as something novel, calling Costanzo brilliant. This isn’t novel. It’s been done before by other ensembles and received earned media.
You say that this will help bring in more donations. Again, when this has been done before it has failed to yield sustainable results.
In fact, with attendance, data shows that when you make tickets free or nearly free, the people who take advantage of it are demographically the same as those who buy tickets. The barrier that cultural institutions face with attendance, whether they are opera companies or museums, is not the cost of admission, but a perception that you need some special knowledge to appreciate the art and they are not welcoming spaces to those without that knowledge. In fact, when it comes to price, data shows that people are perfectly happy to pay a lot if they feel that they’re getting a special and unique experience.
Low attendance is a complicated problem. There are no silver bullets. If the solution was to simply make everything free, every ensemble would be doing that. The fact that Costanzo thinks this will provide longterm benefit shows how naive he is and why we need professional art administrators.
Costanzo is a brilliant conceptualizer, fundraiser, and schmoozer, but here he is chasing a false dream.
The underlying assumption is that all sorts of people would like opera if only they could be tempted to come sit through a few.
The sad fact is that for most people under 65 today, opera is just boring. They didn’t open their ears in childhood through a modicum of music lessons, choir participation, school band, or the like. Without those things, the stuff we Classical fans love just doesn’t register. There isn’t enough rhythm track. The pitch combinations are too complicated and unfamiliar. Trained voices sound alien. Acoustical music sounds faint.
This doesn’t apply to everybody, but it does apply to most.
If we want an audience again, we have to start in the schools, and expect the results a generation later. With actual musical education, not “exposure.” The proof? Look at southeast Asia, where the schools treat the rudiments of music as something an educated person should learn. It works – and almost nothing else does.