Commitment or choice? Subscriptions vs. single tickets

Submitted by Amy Iwano on Thu, 08/17/2006 - 12:00pm.

As the summer winds down and Labor Day quickly approaches, we start to look forward anxiously to our first concerts of the new season. We hope for full concert halls and inevitably find ourselves counting the number of anticipated people for the performances by tracking sales of subscriptions and single tickets. Do you tend to be a subscriber or a single ticket buyer?

As an article in this week’s issue of Crain’s Chicago Business points out, subscribers are the life blood of performing arts organizations. The piece explains why it’s difficult for most of us to think about giving up our focus on securing as many subscriptions as possible. At the same time, we do recognize that times have changed, and with them, audiences’ arts consumption habits have changed as well.

People’s hectic schedules and less-predictable lifestyles seem to support the growing single ticket trend. However, subscribing may be an antidote to the busy-ness of our lives: think of a subscription as a scheduled dose of pleasure for yourself, and take advantage of engaging as a subscriber with your chosen organization in the ways the Crain’s article describes.

Which works better for you – the flexibility and choice of single ticket purchasing or the certainly of having dates on your calendar and special treatment that come from subscribing? Whatever your preference, we are always interested in how we can better facilitate patrons' experience, so please be generous with your suggestions.

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I think an article like this comes out in some pubilcation every year--and yet Subscribers continue to be most arts organization's lifeblood. I simply think there are 2 kind of ticket buyers: Subscribers and Single Ticket Buyers. And while there are definite consistent demographics associated with both (Subs older, STBs younger, exceptions to both, of course)--it's really life phases/changes/personal preference. As an arts marketer you try to target this best you can--selling subscriptions to people who are most likely to subscribe and individual tickets to people most likely to come just once or twice--and, that, of course, is the hard part.

Why would anyone want a ready-made subscription unless they were a brainless opinionless concert goer? I don't want someone else to choose for me which concerts to go to. I go to far more concerts than any subscription will ever provide, and yet I can never find any subscription all of whose concerts I want to go to. So I always build my own subscription, which sometimes involves going to the same opera five times. Last year at the CSO the most concerts I wanted to go to out of any single 10-concert subscription was three. So why should I subscribe? And yet, I went to around 50 CSO concerts in total.

By going only to the concerts you want to see, you probably won't get to hear a lot of pieces that you aren't familiar with but might enjoy anyway. Picking a subscription isn't a brainless, optionless choice. By subscribing, a listener can attend a set of concerts an organization thinks would work well together.

It seems like the safe route to only go to concerts where you know all the pieces that will be played, and it's the safe route that's put this genre of music into such trouble in the past several decades.

Here's another reason to subscribe rather than"cherry pick". If you trust and like the taste of the artistic director, he/she might lead you to something new and exciting. It's like going to eat at a truly great restaurant. Though you might not generally care for a certain type of dish, in the hands of a gifted chef, you might discover something fantastic.

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Commitment or choice? Subscriptions vs. single tickets

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