Tag: public relations

What Are We Afraid Of?

Posted on August 25, 2014 by - Columns

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Photo by Joel Cooper, via Flickr.

Here we are at the denouement. I cannot help but feel that my final post in this series on entrepreneurship should offer different fare. I do hope discussion continues on the topic, and I will continue to offer my two cents on occasion, but I can sense that my final aria is nearly here and that the curtain will fall soon. Sitting here, writing this, I feel the need to offer something more personal. I remain, after all, a performer at heart, whether I like it or not.

Speaking of which, I never really introduced myself, did I? I just sort of started arguing at you. Let me try again.
My name is R. Andrew Lee, but you can call me Andy. I’m a pianist who plays a lot of new music, particularly of a minimalist bent, some of which I’ve recorded. I live in Denver, and I’m a proud to say I’m from Kansas City. I’ve been married 9.5 years and have two daughters, ages 5 and almost 3, and one son who is 4 months old. I take my grilling and drinking seriously, and have a penchant for interesting socks.

Veneer and Reality

Now let us take a look at what the professional world sees, or at least what I try to portray.

I teach at Regis University, and before that I was artist-in-residence at Avila University. I’ve performed in Belgium, France, several times in the UK (including London), Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Austin (among many others), and I’m about to add Chicago to that list. I’ve had six albums released to date, with three more already recorded. They have been played on the radio in Australia, Slovenia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Canada, and all over the States. They have been reviewed in nine languages. My recordings have been extraordinarily well received, making “best of” lists in Gramophone, The Wire, Mojo, Time Out New York, and The New Yorker, along with a host of smaller websites/publications. I have my New York Times quotes. I also have press from two of the most prominent classical music critics, Steve Smith and Alex Ross.
That’s not too bad, if I do say so myself. Now let’s take a different look at the above.

My job title at Regis University is associate university minister for liturgical and sacred music. I fall on the staff side of the staff/faculty divide, though I also teach in the music department. My primary job is to prepare music for Sunday and other campus-wide services. My artist-in-residence title was great to have, but it was a half-time gig while I was still working on my doctorate. I supplemented that income with private teaching and high school choir accompaniment. The performances in Belgium and France were part of international conferences (not bad, but also not paying). The UK tour almost broke even (only because I could stay with family) and the Toronto gig lost money (not a big deal because my brother was living there at the time). The performing accounts for a small percentage of my annual income. I’ve made very, very little money from the recordings, despite the press, though I’m glad that sales have at least been sufficient enough to justify more albums (well, at least since album number four.)

The Fear

So why the veneer? The obvious, logical, and justifiable reason is that it is important to put your best face forward professionally. We’re all hustling for gigs, and it doesn’t make sense to do anything but make yourself look as appealing as possible.
But perhaps there is another layer to it. I think we’re afraid.

In the comment section of my last post (and a hearty kudos to the NewMusicBox readership for bucking the “Don’t read the comments!” rule), I was directed to a post by Kevin Obsatz titled “The Business of Art.” In this post, Obstaz articulates what I would contend is a nearly ubiquitous fear that is rarely discussed. After arguing that the “unquestioned orthodoxy” of our society is that everything is a business, he writes the following:

There’s a moral imperative [in a capitalist system] to succeed or give up, and succeeding means growing—bigger audience, more profits, bigger budgets. To keep making art that isn’t successful by a conventional definition is an affront to a capitalist ideology—unless it can be recategorized as a hobby, a consumer activity. …And, in my experience, that is truly terrifying to artists: if I stop pursuing my work as a business, does that mean I’m a hobbyist prosumer dilettante, and therefore not serious? That is death or exile, banishment, existential crisis.

Let me boil down my “reality” bio to a sentence and see how it strikes you. I am a church musician who performs and records recent classical music on the side.

Do you still take me seriously?

The thing is, when I was nearing the end of my doctoral program, I had three on-campus interviews. One for the job I currently hold and two for tenure-track positions in cities that I knew I would feel motivated to leave as soon as humanly possible. I have a great job that is rewarding, in an amazing part of the country, that also allows me to afford a mortgage, payments on a minivan, and music lessons for my oldest child. But my primary job is to prepare music for liturgies, and that has raised eyebrows and elicited pity from more than a few people. As a result, I don’t talk about my job that much in certain circles.

There are innumerable articles about how to define success for yourself in the arts, but doing that means being able and willing to go against how everyone else views success. We seem to be exceptionally good at judging a work of art on its own merits, but when it comes to judging artists, we too easily adopt a different set of criteria. If you can make a living as an artist, you must be good, and if you can’t…let’s just say you’re better off in the eyes of many if you struggle financially trying to make it work rather than doing it “on the side.” Never mind that a day job might actually mean having more time for your art.

Entrepreneurship

I’m a moderate in most respects. I don’t have trouble seeing the perspective of those on both sides of an issue and often find more grey than black and white. Yet sometimes being a moderate means wanting to balance the discussion, and that is a bit of what I’ve been trying to do here. I’m not saying that these essays are some devil’s advocate intellectual exercises; I stand by the points I’ve made. Rather, in the face of such grand optimism about music entrepreneurship (or at least its pervasiveness), my nature seeks a middle ground.

We should be teaching the next generation of musicians how to promote the great art they will produce. I do not question that. What I worry is that we are selling something with a pretty, new face without looking beneath the façade.

We are promoting technologies that inspire creativity while at the same time drowning it out. We are embracing a path for success that allows few to be successful. We are trying to help artists promote their work but also reinforcing the mindset that to be a legitimate artist, one must successfully monetize his or her art.

My position is not one of a wholesale rejection of entrepreneurship in music. I only urge caution and perspective as we work to find a path in these uncertain times and suggest that we not forget the value of ars gratia artis.

The Media and the Message

Posted on August 21, 2014 by - Columns

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When I read Kenneth D. Froelich’s article “Lessons From The Central Valley” back in June here on NewMusicBox, his experiences presenting new music in Fresno resonated with my own as a presenter/producer, publicist, and music journalist and sparked some additional thoughts about audience development and the media.

(For those already knowledgeable about publicity and marketing, some of this may seem obvious or old hat. But I’ve learned from interacting with musicians, composers, and presenting organizations that a lot of them aren’t all as well versed in this sort of thing as I might have supposed, so my hope is that this will be useful to at least some of you.)

One of the lessons Froelich mentioned was to “shop local,” noting that when promoting an event, providing a local connection or angle is helpful in gaining the attention of the media. That’s true for all local journalists, not just those covering music or the arts, and there’s an important corollary to that.

“The media” is not a monolithic entity. It’s made up of a variety of outlets (each with a particular focus) and individuals (each with their own personality, interests, preferences, and so on). Knowing the specifics about each outlet and each individual can help you to target your communications more effectively, and even to develop angles and story ideas that may be of interest specifically to those individuals.

In my work with the Mizzou New Music Initiative, we’ve been fortunate to have local newspapers and radio pay a good amount of attention to our signature event, the Mizzou International Composers Festival, from the beginning.

That’s partly because Columbia, a college town with a population of 115,000, roughly equidistant from St. Louis and Kansas City, has a lot of local media for a city its size. There are two newspapers: the Daily Tribune and the Missourian, which is published by Mizzou’s School of Journalism and is not a campus paper, but rather a daily covering local, regional, and national news. The J-school also plays a role in the operation of the local NBC and NPR affiliates, and the market is served by affiliates of the other broadcast TV networks and a total of 15 radio stations.

It’s also because rather than just sending out press releases and hoping for the best, we’ve made an effort to identify and interact with specific people in the media who have taken an interest, and to keep them informed about what we’re doing.
For example, Aarik Danielsen, the arts editor of the Tribune, also is a musician and composer. When MNMI presented its first summer festival in 2010, it was clear immediately from our first contact that he had a genuine interest in what we were doing, so we were pleased to assist in arranging interviews, provide photos and links to online media, and do whatever else we could to help him cover the story.

For that first festival, Danielsen wrote a couple of stories for the Sunday edition, supplemented by online-only interviews, and he’s continued to produce extensive and substantive coverage of the festival each year. He and the paper’s other arts reporter, Amy Wilder, have written about various other events and profiled students and faculty members involved in MNMI, too.
Over at the Missourian, ongoing relationships are more difficult to develop, since the student reporters change assignments each semester and eventually graduate. However, when we learned that editor/faculty member Elizabeth Brixey had been a fellow in two National Endowment for the Arts journalism institutes and is an amateur French horn player, we began sending information specifically to her, which has led to reporters being assigned to cover several stories about the Initiative.

Now obviously, not every media outlet is going to have a musician or composer in a position of editorial importance, so we’ve undoubtedly had some good luck there. But the basic principle—look for specific people who may be interested in what you’re doing and then get information to them—still applies.

Contrary to some stereotypical views of public relations, there’s nothing inherently manipulative about this. You can’t force a reporter to cover a story—you can only appeal to their interests and then help them get the information they’re seeking. And although some journalists are understandably wary of professional publicists trying to “spin” them, most are glad to get pertinent information in a timely fashion, to have their phone calls returned and questions answered promptly, and to get some help in setting up interviews, obtaining photos, and so on.
Froelich’s essay also noted that in Fresno, “a smaller, economically disadvantaged market, nothing beats traditional media” and that social media had not been particularly effective in selling tickets for his series.

The conventional wisdom is that older people consume more traditional media like newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio, while younger people flock to social media and get more of their news from the internet. While my experiences suggest that’s generally true, there’s no real reason one has to choose between traditional and social media; a comprehensive communications plan should include both.

The first year I worked on the Mizzou International Composers Festival, most of our time was spent reaching out and pitching stories to traditional media, but the social media part of our plan has grown in importance in each subsequent year.
For the last two years of the MICF, we’ve even laid out a social media schedule for the weeks leading up to it, as well as during festival week. Tweets and posts to Facebook are scheduled throughout the day at regular intervals, with enough room in between for spontaneous and serendipitous updates, retweets and reposts of select messages from various participants, and communicating with other users.

The prescheduled messages cover all sorts of topics, including links to information about each of the composers and performers; videos and streaming audio; ticketing information; background about the Initiative and the MICF; and more.
While we can’t really attribute an increase in ticket sales specifically to social media efforts, the festival has enjoyed modest gains in attendance each year, so the overall plan seems to be working.

However, the really interesting thing is that in looking at who follows our Twitter account, we discovered that a vast majority of followers identify themselves as being involved in some way with music, including many composers, but also musicians, ensembles, educators, and presenters.

So we’re now trying to find ways to make use of that information going forward—for example, how best to employ Twitter as we solicit applicants for the resident composer spots at the 2015 MICF.

If we hadn’t developed an active social media component to our communications plan, or taken the time to analyze our followers list, we might not have discovered that so many people were paying attention through that particular channel. The takeaway is that as social media continues to evolve rapidly, the benefits may not be obvious at first, but instead may reveal themselves as you go.