What if orchestras were more like Netflix?
Perhaps you spend your mornings at the gym, working out with the help of a playlist on Spotify. In the evening, you wind down with Netflix or a movie on Max. As you go to bed, you might even open a meditation app to help you fall asleep. Then you wake up, and do it all again.
A routine like that is built on memberships that provide unlimited access to something for a monthly fee, and are tightly woven into our lives in part because they’re convenient. (Dangerously so: I’m far from alone in having realized too late how many free trials have turned into valves quietly hoovering up money from my bank account.) Why, then, have they not caught on in classical music performances?
The model could go something like this: You pay a monthly membership fee to your local symphony orchestra that entitles you to attend however much you’d like. As with a gym or a streaming service, some people may go often; some, not at all. Regardless, the orchestra receives steady revenue, and you have full control of your calendar, with the ability to make plans even the day of a performance.
While a handful of orchestras have experimented with this model, it hasn’t become standard because most institutions already have a long-established ticketing program they prefer: subscriptions. In that system, people are sold packages for a season, which involves planning evenings out up to a year or more in advance. This works for those who like to go on the same night of the week, or sit in the same seat. Orchestras, in turn, are provided with financial security.
According to the League of American Orchestras, subscriptions have bounced back from a pandemic slump strongly enough that they grew by 7% from 2019 to 2024. Administrators, however, have long been anxious about the future of the subscription model. Less than a decade ago, the League commissioned a study that revealed subscriptions were not only in decline, but also out of touch with how people plan and purchase entertainment today.
Subscriptions as we know them are unreliable at best. Largely because they change from season to season, they don’t renew automatically, which forces orchestras to sell ticket packages every year. (Put another way, orchestras must devote substantial resources to repeatedly selling them.) And, as the League’s study said, people by and large don’t like to make concert plans so far in advance.
At their core, though, subscriptions are not about the audience. They’re a business model, designed above all to benefit the orchestra. Memberships more akin to those of streaming services and gyms could be a viable replacement that suits both parties. People could make plans as late as minutes before a performance; institutions would have passive income that, if it renewed monthly, they wouldn’t have to fight for every year.
Among the pioneers of the membership model is the St Paul Chamber Orchestra in Minnesota, which introduced memberships in 2012. In an interview, the ensemble’s president, Jon Limbacher, said that the idea sprang out of the uncomfortable realization that subscriptions, while “the foundation of everything” for the orchestra, were declining irreversibly.
The traditional model, Limbacher recognized, asks too much of people with its long planning cycles. “There just aren’t that many people in April who want to commit to concerts from September to June,” he said. “It’s like if I joined a health club and they asked, ‘What days will you be in?’ Or if you sign up for Netflix and it says, ‘Which days and which nights?’ It’s not how people consume things that are important to them.”
Still, he said, orchestras can’t simply pivot to putting subscriptions on life support and filling the rest of the hall with single-ticket sales, which are more expensive to market. And, critically, people who buy only one ticket at a time are less likely to donate. If they do, he added, it’s at a “much lower rate” than subscribers.
When Limbacher became interested in a membership-style model, he worried about what it would mean for the future of subscriptions. “We saw a lot of potential,” he said, “but we also had a lot of trepidation.” The pandemic, though, answered any uncertainty he had; subscriptions dropped rapidly on their own. Now, Limbacher likes to say that the St Paul Chamber Orchestra isn’t getting rid of subscriptions; subscriptions are getting rid of the orchestra.
There are different tiers of membership, ranging from $5 to $20 per month. To differentiate the program from subscriptions, members are allowed to pick any seats they want, but not from the most expensive section, and only after subscriptions have been settled for the season. Only on rare occasions, like on the evening of a particularly popular concert, have members who waited too long to book their seats not been able to get in.
Members, Limbacher said, attend an average of 8.5 concerts per season, whereas subscribers attend an average of 5.6. The orchestra, he added, has also learned that members tend to be more adventurous, seeing their unlimited access to concerts as a way to try out contemporary music at no additional cost.
One of the biggest advantages of memberships, Limbacher said, is simply time. Without having to persuade as many subscribers to come back every season, “we can focus on adding to our base rather than renewing it.”
The Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, which started its membership program in 2017, has been similarly pleased with the results. Christina Littlejohn, the ensemble’s CEO, said the new model was inspired by St Paul’s, though it was introduced softly, out of fear that it would cannibalize subscriptions.
That never happened. “Our fear was simply fear,” she said. “There has never been data to back up the idea. One or 2% of subscribers became members, but that’s it.” Memberships, though, have grown rapidly, while about a third of subscribers were lost during the pandemic. (During that same time, Littlejohn said, only one member asked for a refund.) Today, memberships for the Arkansas Symphony have a retention rate of 96%, compared with 75% for subscriptions.
Although there are more members than subscribers, they bring in less money; memberships cost only $9 per month. (The orchestra tested $6, but the lower price translated to lower attendance.) Littlejohn was more interested, however, in the nonfinancial benefits of the new model. “We want to make music for as many people as humanly possible,” she said. “Our halls look fuller, and our orchestra is happier. It’s just been a game changer.”
Memberships are nearly nonexistent among the country’s largest ensembles. The Cleveland Orchestra, which introduced one in 2015, remains an exception, with a $29 monthly membership that provides unlimited $10 tickets.
Cleveland has a healthy number of subscribers, declining but at a relatively slow rate, and it directs the bulk of its resources to them, said André Gremillet, the orchestra’s president and CEO. But the membership program has allowed the institution to be proactive, he added, while it has the luxury of time to experiment.
So far, members have proved to be the more dedicated audience. They attend performances more frequently than subscribers do, which, Gremillet said, increases the likelihood of their becoming donors. Interestingly, they generally come from a different, younger demographic than subscribers do, meaning that they aren’t chipping away at subscriber income but are adding to the orchestra’s revenue. “All of this,” he added, “is both inspiring and promising.”
If the idea is so promising, though, why isn’t it more widely adopted? Simon Woods, the president and CEO of the League of American Orchestras, said that while subscriptions are, broadly speaking, doing well, institutions are hesitant to do anything that might hasten their decline.
Woods is also not convinced that memberships are a viable replacement for subscriptions. “The customer is getting a pretty good bargain at the price points you’re seeing,” he said. “This is driving attendance, but at the cost of income. The membership strategy is a great attendance strategy. It may not be a good revenue strategy.”
While memberships may attract younger, more diverse audiences, he added, some of those members may be able to afford higher costs. “What you don’t want,” Woods said, “is to get an audience that is able to pay more but doesn’t.”
Littlejohn said that the issue is best looked at from the perspective of abundance rather than fear. That can be a challenge for her peers in a famously risk-averse field; concert programs are often organized with cookie-cutter reliability, and the word “canon” might as well be shorthand for “marketable.” The pandemic, however, proved that rapid change was possible. That was a tangible emergency, though. An unsure future for subscriptions may not feel as urgent, but a looming threat is still a threat.
Now is the time to try something new, in the spirit of the orchestras in St Paul, Arkansas and Cleveland. They all took a chance when the moment was right, and sought a balance with the steady money they already had coming in. None of them abandoned subscriptions; all of them learned that membership programs, while not yet a cure-all for an ensemble’s troubles, provide more growth than risk.
And, by tending to traditional subscriptions while creating and refining memberships for new audiences, these orchestras embody something like the ideal of classical music itself: respect for the past, with an eye toward the future.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
