OPERA America Shows an Industry in Free Fall!
191: 9 June 2023
Hi!
15th June 2023 at 1 PM Eastern time: we are doing another FREE webinar on brand management for professional services.
If you sell into the world of tickets as a service or tool provider, this is likely up your alley.
My ambition is to do one of these a month as a way to replace a little bit of the traveling I might have done in the past.
So let me know what you’d like me to cover.
To the Tickets!
I. Padres RSN collapse, a riff:
My full riff is at the link…
Some takeaways from the changing in the RSN model:
Mental and physical availability is more important than ever. Tickets are good on physical availability, but the mental availability isn’t there.
This “crisis” about the RSN model was predictable and highlights the need for people to disrupt themselves.
Direct to Consumer businesses haven’t been successful. Warby Parker threw out their business model because it realized it needed physical stores. Dollar Shave Club was successful for the DSC founders and initial investors but has been a failure as a business.
OTT customer acquisition costs are super high, around $200. This is for more mass-market offerings like Hulu, Disney+, or Netflix. Sports are likely to be even more expensive.
PS. I did a podcast on the topic.
II. Challenge yourself to ask better questions:
Roger L. Martin is the best strategy teacher in the world!
My strategy work and thinking are built on the shoulders of giants like Roger.
What questions guide your organization?
Here are a few that I use in my workshops:
What does success look like?
What assumptions are we basing this on?
Who is our customer?
Why are they picking us over the alternatives?
What resources do we need to make this work?
Why will this work now?
Please share some of your questions with me!
III. California looks at passing a law to limit exclusive ticket deals:
Is it a good idea to limit exclusive deals?
Big Ideas:
Garrett lays out 6 reasons that exclusive deals should continue.
From my POV, minus #5, I don’t know if any of them are powerful enough in practice to make the practice continue to dominate the ticket business.
Streamlined ticketing process: I get this, but I think this is a bit of a red herring argument because even without an exclusive deal, it isn’t likely that a building is going to use 7 different systems for its own on-sales.
Enhanced marketing and sales: I don’t find most of the marketing that goes on effective and most of the sales processes are outdated. To me, making the need for marketing and sales efforts more competitive is a real reason to get rid of exclusive deals.
Consistent user experience: I send you back to last’s week’s newsletter where we looked at the UX idea. Some systems do have pretty good UX for people. But the exclusive contracts aren’t creating that, competition is.
Increased investment in technology: In my experience, exclusive contracts like the ones targeted in this bill limit innovation and tech investment. Senator Amy Klobuchar said it best, “Monopoly power threatens to choke off innovation.”
Revenue Sharing Opportunities: This one I buy into, but this one is also probably the spot where legislators are going to find a lot to give them ammo to push for cutting these exclusive deals out. Vertical integration can easily become “chokepoint capitalism”…and lawmakers are probably not going to be cool with leaving that environment intact if they do legislate on the issue.
Centralized data and analytics: I’d also be likely to side with this one except for my now well-established belief that people have too much data and not enough insight. So my thinking now is that this is dangerous because the data and analytics give people a feeling of security in their customer knowledge that doesn’t exist.
I’m curious what y’all think.
P.S. Garrett is my G!
We have these debates in person…so he gets prime ‘Talking Tickets’ billing and you should hire him if you need operations people at your events.
IV. Opera America looks at early ticket sales in the opera:
This study begs a lot of questions.
Major Points:
Companies are cutting their number of performances at the same time as they are raising prices. Performances are down 10%. Prices are up 7%.
Ticket sales, subscriptions, and other revenue are down, down, down! Ticket sales are off about 50%. Subscriptions down 33%. Single ticket sales are off by 84%!!!!
This is 5-alarm fire stuff…if you ask me.
Is there a fix?
Not an easy one.
You do have to start with some basic research. Specifically, what your non-customers are doing.
Why?
Because it is obvious that there aren’t enough customers at the top of the funnel to support these organizations.
Second, you have to establish brand building.
Not the kind of introspective, what would I like marketing that too many arts organizations are involved in, but the top of the funnel, emotional brand building that is necessary.
Third, you’ll need to dig into the idea of “Jobs to Be Done” and what role are the arts going to play in your audience’s life.
The Key POINT:
“The way we’ve always done things…” It isn’t cutting it! You have to try new ideas.
One More Thing:
I posted about this on LinkedIn.
A friend of the podcast and newsletter, Sean Kelly, talks about some of the practical considerations versus the emotional ones.
Good point.
But…all considerations are emotional. More often, when you make a point of being “rational” that’s often a sign of even stronger “emotional” digging in.
In the case of opera, tickets, etc., a lot of these challenges with declining attendance, lower subscriptions, and rising prices to mask them were evident before 2020.
The challenge now is that after a 2-year break, too many people wanted to go back to “the way we’ve always done things.”
That’s why my attention goes to the alarming nature of these numbers.
But…y’all weigh in on LinkedIn and let me know what is up!
P.S.: Point 2 has a lot to do with this one…
V. Links:
“Red Pill” thinking isn’t about tickets, but it is…
My “Red Pill” has always been about creating and capturing new profitable opportunities.
If you are in tickets, you can think of your “Red Pill” as entertaining folks, enlightening them with art, bringing people together, or something else entirely.
The key = challenge yourself.
Oakland A’s fans crowdsource protest T-shirts:
A novel approach.
Vegas looks set to throw tons of money at the A’s. So I don’t know that this is going to matter too much.
That’s one way to solve a problem.
Now, I have the antitrust argument against the “merger” or “partnership”. I should have thought of this myself.
What is your favorite album of the year so far?
I’m on that album by The National. But the most listened-to album is still the last one by the Arcade Fire.
You?
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