Some Unqualified Advice
I haven’t exactly been thrilled with the way that the art music side of the New Zealand Festival of the Arts has been handled (which was probably fairly evident from my post about the lineup). Of course, I really have no idea about the kind of pressures involved in a running an event like this, but all the same I feel that there are a few areas that have been regrettably neglected.
- A festival will probably make more money or, more likely, recoup more of its losses, if it actually gets people to come to events. This also helps to justify the festival’s future existence. Because of this, it is most likely a good idea to actually advertise what the festival has on offer. Between the announcement of the programme and the start of the chamber music weekend there seems to have been a complete lack of advertising (exacerbated by the chamber music weekend never having been promoted when the programme was announced). The Festival seems to have chosen instead to promote a handful of theatre works – Sutra and The Sound of Silence. Aside from Apollo 13, which got quite a lot of publicity from the Dominion Post, everything else has been completely under the radar.
- Having decided that you will in fact not bother to advertise an event, it might be wise to pay some attention to ticket sales. Most of the tickets that are sold for an event that is only half-heartedly promoted once are probably going to be sold around that time, so it could well be worthwhile to see how many tickets are sold early on and then reconsider prices (or even better, recognise that an unadvertised show should probably have low ticket prices from that outset.
- Sometimes it looks better if there are actually younger people at chamber music events. Unfortunately, because ticket prices are outrageously high, they will either only be able to get to one or two concerts or none at all. So if you are going to offer NZSM students tickets for $10, it would be real nice to actually offer these from the outset. You know, before they spend quite a lot of money on going to one concert, and then find that they could have gone to every concert at the chamber music weekend for less money. Yeah.
- Having caused immense frustration to at least one NZSM student, please make sure that concert they spent six times too much money on is flawless.