Subscribe Now!: Building Arts Audiences Through Dynamic Subscription Promotion

By Danny Newman

"Buy it, borrow it, steal it, but get your hands on it! If you follow Danny's advice on how to sell tickets, you won't have an unsold seat in the house all season long!"--Ralph Black, American Symphony League

• Language: English
• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Release date: Aug 1, 1981
• ISBN: 9781559367066

Book preview

Preface to the Fourth Printing

The contents of SUBSCRIBE NOW! in this, its fourth printing, remain exactly as they were when the book first appeared in the fall of 1977. All that has since transpired in the task of building audiences for the performing arts has indicated that its concepts and its recommendations continue to be both valid and valuable. Readers will certainly, on their own, make adjustments when, for instance, inflation has obviously altered some of the figures stated.

Remembering my modest expectations for Subscribe Now! at the time of its original publication, I cannot but be pleased that it has become the all-time bestseller of performing arts promotion books; that its consistent sales do not diminish, even after six years; that it is currently in use in 30 countries; that I continue to receive those heart-warming letters which report—as a result of following the book’s recommendations—gains in the size of subscribed audiences ranging from great all the way up to astronomic. I also am gratified to know that those startling before-and-after subscription sales figures for 100-plus producing organizations in all the arts disciplines (enumerated in the book’s epilogue and testifying to Dynamic Subscription Promotion’s power when effectively applied) should now be even more impressive because of continuing, dramatic increases in the number of committed subscribers to those projects; and that such a listing, if it were being compiled today, would have to chronicle the subscription successes of the far greater number of organizations that I have reached since we went to press in 1977, without even taking into account the accomplishments of those thousands of theatre companies, opera companies, dance companies, orchestras and performing arts centers that I have not been assisting personally but that have been getting their advice from the pages of Subscribe Now!

Admittedly, it was a kind of blow to my ego when I began to learn that major subscription selling successes were happening in so many places sans my personal involvement with their staffs and boards, without my writing their brochures, without my constant re-indoctrinations and re-chargings of their promotional batteries via urgent long distance calls and return visits at strategic points in their campaigns. Had they only to read a book in order to run up those big season or series ticket sales? In time, however, I came to terms with the situation, taking solace in the thought that I had, after all, written that book.

Were I writing it now, I would be able to enrich my Sales by Ma Bell chapter considerably with the motherlode of new information generated by the hundreds of successful telephone sales campaigns it inspired. So important has this weapon now become in our promotional arsenal, that it is hard to believe that pre-Subscribe Now!, there was not a single such effort to attract new subscribers taking place in the U.S.A. that I know of. (Hunting down recalcitrant subscribers who had not yet renewed for the next season had, however, long been done by staff members and/or volunteers.) Within months of the book’s publication, such marketing activities began and have been escalating ever since. The basis for the phone chapter was my experience in Canada, originally with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s vigorous subscription drives. But even north of the border, telephone sales tactics did not become widespread until the still burgeoning proliferation of what is now known as telemarketing began in the spring of 1978.

The emergence of telephoning as a major sales method for so many organizations has given a new cachet to the old, faithful, central instrument, the brochure, at the very time when—in some places—we have been experiencing diminishing mail returns. Now our brochures have developed an after-life, in that after the initial mail-order response, we follow up by telephoning the non-responders, who may require that additional push before collapsing into our waiting arms. In addition, I have, for some time now, been urging arts marketers everywhere to place large panels in their brochures—contiguous to the order forms—saying YES, WE DO TAKE TELEPHONE ORDERS (with a drawing or photograph of a person’s hand in the process of dialing); JUST CALL 332-2244! The telephone number must be printed in the big, bold type which we have heretofore reserved for the word FREE, when we state our discounts in terms of free plays or concerts. This must be followed by the suggestion that season tickets be charged to one of the several mainline credit cards whose logos we show prominently. In this way, we now give much larger display value to patron-initiated telephone ordering and to concomitant credit card paying than we used to do when we squeezed those elements into small type inside our order forms. What I am saying is that the telephone works two ways, and if we are now phoning our brochure readers to proselytize them for our subscription faith, does it not make equal sense also to strongly stimulate some of the impulse buying-prone among them to call us, and to thus evoke even more conversions from the same number of brochures distributed at no additional promotional cost?

We should now understand that the telphone does not displace the brochure, but that the former beautifully complements the latter, and that the two are logical partners in our drive for greater success. For we do not, except under some aberrant circumstance, phone prospects who have not already been sent the brochure. Perhaps, where telemarketing is in full operation, we can now afford to send our brochures in less duplication, but I would certainly not recommend the elimination of duplication in such cases.

Many of our organizations are troubled by the high cost of selling by telephone (often ranging from 40 to 50%) when outside direct-sales forces are brought in to do the job. Of course, in those situations where acres of empty seats have been a continuing pattern, such costs are neither unreasonable nor unbearable. The alternative is to go on losing 100% of the value of the unsold tickets. However, some of our more able managements, having achieved their own sophistication in telemarketing, have eliminated the middleman and, in internally run efforts, sold new subscriptions in the thousands at overall costs of as little as 15 to 20%.

We are now often told that mail distribution of brochures has become so expensive that we can no longer bear the cost. Those who say that have only looked at the inflation in charges for the third-class, nonprofit postal rates and printing, but have not looked at the other side of the ledger which would have shown that we have also been charging more and more for our tickets. For example: When I was paying 1.4¢ postage to mail a brochure for my opera company, our top ticket price was $14. Now, the postage costs 5.2¢—a 200% rise. But the top ticket price is now $53—a 300% rise! Thus, in relation to present ticket income, it actually costs us less to circulate our brochures by mail than it did in the ‘‘good old days.’’

The wonderful third-class, nonprofit postage rate has been under fire for a long time now. On page 183 of this book, I wrote (in 1977) of our cliffhanger rescue when the performing arts came very close to losing that precious privilege, and I predicted that our "disenfranchisement from this blessed form of subsidy’’ would continue to be a dire possibility through the years. Only eternal vigilance and effective lobbying—by TCG and others to whom our arts are dear—has kept this recurrent threat from turning into a stark reality.

Orders for Subscribe Now! have been received from all 50 of our Untied States, the territory of Puerto Rico and all 10 provinces of Canada. The book—and its preachings and teachings on behalf of DSP (Dynamic Subscription Promotion)—have by now also reached Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Ireland, England, Finland, France, Holland, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Norway, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Nigeria, the Philippines, Republic of China, Scotland, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Venezuela and West Germany. Four printings in under six years have been required, too, because of bloc orders which recur with each new semester at universities offering arts administration courses for which Subscribe Now! has become a standard text.

While I had, before becoming a successful author, done considerable consulting work (primarily for the Ford Foundation’s Office of the Arts, Theatre Communications Group and the Canada Council), the book’s widespread dissemination has created a far greater demand than ever for such advisory assignments—plus a whole new career for me as a lecturer, not only in North America but increasingly for overseas arts entities. I hope that, with Heaven’s help, I shall be able to visit all who continue to invite me, and that my dear Lyric Opera of Chicago will continue to take the enlightened, sharing attitude which has permitted me to remain in perpetual motion for so many years now, on behalf of so many worthy projects.

Editor’s Note: In 1984, Danny Newman will celebrate his 50th year in the profession.

Preface

The information and insights contained in this handbook have been gathered not only in my own projects where I have been in charge of promotion—but in the observation of the functioning of the myriad professional performing arts companies with which I have been, and am, currently consulting.

I shall always be indebted to the Ford Foundation’s W. McNeil Lowry, through whose vision I have been afforded a unique opportunity for involvement to date in the affairs of more than 200 performing arts institutions, and to Marcia Thompson for her warm and wise, day-to-day guidance in that connection. During my army training, I hated my tough sergeant but, after undergoing infantry combat, I blessed him. This illustrates my feeling toward Theatre Communications Group’s director, Peter Zeisler, upon whose implacable insistence I began to write and have finally completed this manual. I acknowledge, too, the special efforts of my editor, TCG’s Lindy Zesch, and her associate, Arli Epton, in bringing this book to publication.

I am most grateful to the former Canada Council directors, Peter Dwyer and André Fortier, to their successor Charles Lussier and to Council officials, Timothy Porteous, Hugh Davidson, David Peacock and Monique Michaud, for having opened an entire nation’s performing arts plant to my brand of DSP (Dynamic Subscription Promotion). I appreciate, too, that it was Tom Hendry and the Canadian Theatre Centre, who gave early impetus to my activities in so many north-of-the-border places.

I am thankful to two of the ladies in my life—my beloved colleague Carol Fox, who has long suffered my frequent absences from Lyric Opera of Chicago so that I could carry on my work in so many places, and my dear wife Dina, for her understanding forbearance during my Danny Appleseed performing arts odyssey of so many years.

I have attempted here to speak about the audience development-by-subscription requirements of the full range of nonprofit professional performing arts entities—theatres, symphony orchestras, ballet companies, opera companies and festivals, too—in the knowledge that, although each field has its special characteristics and problems, the basic promotional approaches which work for one, work for all. Thus, when I write in terms of theatre, I assume that the reader who may be with a musical arts or dance company will make the necessary transpositions for himself, and vice versa. Some already experienced promotional practitioners in these fields may feel that I am preaching to the already converted or teaching to the already knowledgeable. However, one of my major considerations in selecting these materials has been to be of maximum assistance to the many younger people who are, after only academic training, now entering the professional performing arts in ever-increasing numbers.

Many readers of this book may be surprised that so much of it is concerned with arguments in behalf of the subscription concept’s merits and benefits, to the extent that the nuts and bolts of subscription promotion itself seem to be accorded secondary importance. If this is indeed so, it is because I am convinced that when professional performing arts organizations fail to fully utilize this powerful audience developmental instrument, it is often because their leaders are victims of certain myths and misconceptions about it. I have found that the prerequisite to getting effective subscription campaigns going is to vigorously challenge and, hopefully, change these attitudes. Only if I succeed on that initial level can we then, together, get on with the job and begin to implement those methods of promotion which I recommend—or somebody else’s methods—with the only criterion being, Do they bring us the results we need?

I do allow for the possibility that some of my recommendations may not be applicable under all circumstances to every performing arts entity. However, I know of many cases in which organizations have much benefited by the implementation of only one or two of the numerous planks in this promotional platform, and I have noted that some, who have at first thought their cloth didn’t fit the pattern, later found that it did. While subscription has previously been employed mainly by performing arts institutions of a more traditional variety, the same techniques can apply to less traditional performing arts organizations and nonperforming arts as well (including galleries, museums, public TV and radio). For further discussion, please see the chapter on alternative formats for subscription.

The reader will, no doubt, take note of the fact that a number of my points are stated, restated and stated once again throughout this book, in a number of different contexts. The reason is that I believe (as you will discover in the chapter on duplications in direct mail) that repetition is a successful convincer, and that most problems are widespread and not unique or limited to one institution, one art form, one locality or even to one country.

As to the methods which I suggest, I wish to say that I have by no means attempted to describe all the possibilities—just a number of the most useful ones, knowing that they will work for those who employ them with zeal and on a scale large enough to match not only immediate subscription sales requirements, but aspirations for future expansion of committed audiences, too. These methods are, I feel, rather ordinary and perhaps obvious ways in which to accomplish the job, and I don’t think they’re all that special. I’m fairly certain that anybody really wanting to promote subscription sales for his project badly enough would arrive at some of the same methods or similar ones. The prerequisite is the understanding of how tremendously important subscription itself can be in the life of the given performing arts company (even to the point of increasing grants and contributions as discussed in the chapter on subscription and fund-raising). For, only with that realization comes the will to do the job that needs to be done. It is when I have successfully led people of our field in that direction, helping them heighten their perception of what subscription can mean to their organization, that I feel I have done my best work.

I would like to point out that the methods I have outlined permit all sorts of adaptations, and I would hope that they will also stimulate the readers of this book to generate many additional promotional activities, some of which might well turn out to be very effective in selling subscriptions, in which case, I ask my readers to let me know about them. I can be reached through Theatre Communications Group, 355 Lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017.

Subscribe Now!

I am and have been an unabashed enthusiast for the concept of subscription to the performing arts since I first entered the theatrical world when I was 14 years old. For it was then that I sold my first subscription—to the Mummers of Chicago, a civic theatre group—by going from house to house, apartment to apartment, ringing doorbells and convincing those who dwelled therein to sign up for my season. Perhaps they bought the subscription because they were touched by the zeal of a spindly lad who seemed obsessed with his mission. For I was the child prodigy press agent of the company and, as such, I saw my role in quite romantic terms.

I thought of myself as the brave knight fighting the battle for the lady fair, with the artists I represented in the latter category. Poor, dear, helpless artists—they could create their wonderful art, but they were impractical and certainly incapable of buttonholing people or grabbing them by their lapels, while shouting at them, I’m great, see, great! Y’gotta come to see me perform tonight! And would we ask this of the artists? No, but the press agent could do it, the manager could, the board people could. And it was our obligation to do so, the way I looked at it. After all, wasn’t that paying our dues? On what other basis could we justify our continued association with the project? If the artists couldn’t do these things and we didn’t do them, why were we hanging around?

In the mid-1930’s, as an emergent press agent, I was constantly troubled by the early demise of legitimate plays I handled, despite my newspaper-space-grabbing talents. Why did the patient die so many times on the Saturday night after opening? Why didn’t the single-ticket buyers buy? I became fascinated with the brilliant subscription ideology of the visionaries who founded the Theatre Guild, which had come onto the scene a decade earlier with a Eugene O’Neill, a John Galsworthy, a George Bernard Shaw up their sleeves. They had intelligently concluded that they would, in short order, be murdered mallards if, with their plans for a better repertoire in the commercial New York theatrical climate of the 1920’s, they were to submit themselves to the vagaries of the box office, to the tender mercies of single-ticket buyers. So they organized a subscription audience in New York, and began an historic, successful revolution in the aspirations and achievements of its legitimate stage. Then they toured their superior plays to the superior audiences which they organized to receive them in many other American cities.

During that same era, Columbia Concerts, through its Community Concerts Division, was bringing professional classical music to hundreds, and then thousands, of communities in an allied field of the arts. It is interesting that these two organizations, the Theatre Guild and Columbia Concerts, were both commercial entities. Their stunning demonstration of the efficacy and power of subscription in building new audiences, the creation of new employment opportunities for artists, the generating of activity where there had been a void, seemed to make little impression on the nonprofit sector which, in the main, continued to operate on a basically nonsubscription economy, through the 1920’s, ’30’s, ’40’s and ’50’s.

The main exceptions were the symphony orchestras, which were the oldest subscription practitioners of our arts society; but they had not, except in a very few instances, attempted to increase the size of their subscription audiences so as to bring about more performances and longer seasons. Not until pressures from the musicians for longer seasons and fuller employment forced the hand of orchestra managers, did it become important to boards and managements to create additional series and seek additional subscribers.

It is what I have called the congealed series-ticket audiences of the old, established symphony orchestras (and they are almost always the oldest, most established of the arts organizations in a given community) that have sometimes given a bad reputation to subscription. I will explain. An orchestra was founded in 1883 in a medium-size city, with 2,000 subscribers. By 1933, a half-century later, it had held its own and still had 2,000 subscribed seats (1,000 husbands and wives). By 1973, it had 1,912, a net loss of 88 subscribers after 90 years of promotional inertia. However, since its hall seats 3,000 and single-ticket sales practically never happen, there remain about 1,000 unsold seats for the average concert. And, the actual attendance is nowhere near the 2,000 that the records show, since at least half of the 1,912 season-ticket holders are the third-generation heirs of the original 1883 subscriber complement. Their seats have been handed down to them by inheritance. They send in their checks for renewal annually, in the family tradition, but they (the grandchildren) just don’t go to the concerts. The grandparents liked music and were devout followers, but the grandchildren have no such tradition. To compound the problem for this orchestra, these subscribers simply ignore all pleadings to get them to send in their tickets so that they can at least be given to impecunious students. Thus, we have the demoralizing embarrassment of whole sections of the best seats empty at concert after concert.

Needless to say, this orchestra has enjoyed no expansion and is still playing a series of 11 individual concert performances per season, just as it did in 1883. What I have just described is certainly grim and depressing. This utter stagnation is unfairly blamed on subscription by some unthinking people. There is nothing wrong with subscription, but there was a lot wrong with the orchestra’s promotional philosophy, which had neglected subscription’s tremendous potential. They did nothing to increase its audience for 90 years, remaining content to have and to hold their orchestra, even if hardly anybody came to hear it. Perhaps snobbism came to be synonymous with their kind of subscription, for I sometimes suspected that the audience was purposely being kept small and select. Had big audience development drives been entered into, others besides the old-line, blue-blooded patrons might have started attending concerts.

Prominently displayed in public places, in parks and squares and in plazas, in so many towns and cities throughout the United States, are impressive equestrian statues of long gone Civil War military leaders—the General Jubilation T. Cornpone Memorials of Al Capp’s comic cartoons. These statues have been there since before any of us was born. We pass them every day of our lives, but we don’t really see them any more, and if a visitor were to ask us the name of the memoralized bronze horseman up there, we’d probably have difficulty recalling it. And what is the fate of such statues? Pigeons roost on them. Well, that was the situation of so many symphony orchestras in American communities. They are the oldest of our performing arts organizations. Often, they’ve been in their communities for generations (I recently met with the board of one which had been established for 116 years). Ninety-nine and nine-tenths of the population would pass them by daily and never attend their concerts. The community, at best, was only subliminally aware of their existence. One had the feeling that there were heavy, moldering drapes on the great windows of their concert halls, deeply impregnated with the dust of long ago, and one felt the urge to tear them down, to wash the glass, to let in the promotional light—to shoo away the roosting pigeons and start great subscription drives that would fill those halls to overflowing with new audiences!

And that is just what has happened in the many subscription-oriented organizations with which I have been meeting and working. Some of them were, not many years ago, in that grim and depressing category, but they have since seen the light, have campaigned hard for good results, and are now benefiting in many ways.

I am very often told by staff executives that it is their artistic leaders’ lack of charisma and poor judgment in programming that are the causes of the public’s apathy in the face of subscription offers. However, in many such instances, upon close inspection, it turns out that the fault really lies with the complaining administrators, whose failure in promotional initiatives is a far greater factor in creating the problems they decried than were the alleged deficiencies of their artistic leaders. At a certain symphony orchestra that comes to mind, the music director, a most distinguished conductor, was being blamed for the organization’s inability to replace what I would consider to be the normal annual attrition of its subscribership. Each season, the subscription audience was shrinking, as an insufficient number of new people were entering the committed audience bloodstream. When the administrators were convinced to make what was, for them, an unprecedented major promotional effort, there was an immediate, dramatic response from the public and, overnight, new sales increased more than 500% over the previous season. The orchestra entered into a new era of sellout seasons. The music director was the same man as before. The programming was of the same character. The difference was unquestionably the changed attitude toward the promotion of subscription on the part of the management, and the actions that resulted.

In the many years that have passed since I began proselytizing for Dynamic Subscription Promotion and working in close association with hundreds of performing arts projects, I have had cause to reflect all too often upon the parasitism that plagues our field, which by its authentic glamour draws dilettantish types, inevitably and inexorably, as moths to the flame—often pleasant persons who have little or nothing to contribute to these arts, although they want to be around them with all their hearts and souls. But they simply haven’t the will to undertake the dirty work, the mundane, very unglamorous and difficult tasks the performance of which is so desperately needed by so many organizations. Such unworthy practitioners are not beyond redemption, however. I have seen cases where these indolent administrationis personae have come to life and given up long discussions about art in cafes and endless hours of lolling at rehearsals. (Who needs them at rehearsals when they should be out beating the bushes to get an audience for the actors, singers, dancers or instrumentalists, come performance time?) They have found pride in giving an honest 15-hour day’s work for their pay, satisfaction in bringing audiences to the artists they represent and revenues to the projects that have depended upon them. To be fair, many of these people had not understood or appreciated how important their roles could be, and once they did, their attitudes underwent great changes for the better.

Theatrical publicists come in all sizes and shapes, of course, and are varied in the range and level of their abilities and modes of operation. However, one attribute which I believe is all-important for those in our profession is a genuine, affirmative, even loving feeling for the art and for artists. Only in that spirit of involvement can we truly represent the interests of both. Albert Camus said it beautifully: ... the only people who can help the artist are those who love him. That brings to mind a sour, older colleague of my theatrical advance agent days, who was fond of belligerently proclaiming, Actors? I hate ’em. They put paint on their faces, don’t they? I wonder how he would have felt about Camus’ sentiments.

I have occasionally found an organization’s own administrative employees talking down its productions or programs outside the confines of the offices, thus gratuitously assuming the role of quasi-critics, and using what they claim are the deficiencies of the artistic product as justification for their failure to better promote its interests. Whether you call this crutch seeking, copping out or just plain treason, it isn’t right and is not going to help either the renewal or sale of new subscriptions.

Certainly we want the highest level of artistic excellence at all times for our various operatic, dramatic, balletic and symphonic projects. But, if there should come a time when this quality is not achieved, I would no more run all around town talking about it than I would if my child had failed to pass his school examinations. Certainly, if there should be a pattern of recurring failure on the part of the artistic department, the board of directors should deal with the situation. However, managers, publicists, box office employees and office personnel are not critics-at-large, and they should be both sensitive and circumspect in any statements they make outside the organization’s immediate family circle. Particularly unethical and destructive are employees, anxious to demonstrate their own superior and sophisticated taste to friends they may have in the communications media, who find themselves slipping into negative statements about the very cause they represent. As an attitude for all of us who work in support of the art and artists, I recommend wholeheartedly the classic press agent’s stance, If it’s my show, it’s great. If they’re my artists, they’re the greatest!

While not every resident professional theatre which has sprung into being through the 1960’s and ’70’s is now operating on the level of the British National Theatre or the Comédie-Française, remember that, nursed through their difficult periods, young, fragile artistic institutions can become rooted and successful, providing the possibilities of employment and artistic development to large numbers of creative people in all the fields. Think of how many actors and actresses, directors, designers, choreographers, dancers, singers, conductors and instrumentalists have found not only careers through subscription-supported arts institutions, but have been able to hammer out the kinks in their talent on the anvil of the audiences which subscription has brought them. Thus, we now have a constant enrichment in terms of professionalism in the performing arts picture, made possible by permanent institutions which would almost certainly have collapsed in their early stages, had not the people to whom they were dear fought for their interests at every step, and had they not built subscriberships large enough to achieve their stability, viability and longevity. Only in such a context can the arts flourish.

I am often impressed by some of the promotional methods which I find in operation upon my initial visits to performing arts groups, and I advise that these sound activities be continued. If there are efforts in progress by which subscriptions are being sold, I consider them sacred, and I would bite off my tongue before I suggested changing them. But I try to get the scale of these activities considerably increased and to introduce additional components which may have been omitted entirely, often for no reason except their having been overlooked despite their use by so many other organizations in the same field. In many cases, no more encouragement is needed than the pointing out of what is happening in those other places. I always seek to instill confidence in those who will most likely have to do the job. I try to induce their belief in the enormous importance of successful subscription campaigning to their projects and to their own careers. I want them to allocate the proper value to the wonderful contribution which non-artists who are associated with artistic causes can make. For only when they—the promoters—succeed, can the artists attain the conditions in which to flourish.

The idea of subscription seems to rouse the hackles of many people and to evoke all sorts of unfounded arguments as to why this method of arranging attendance of the performing arts will not be accepted in this or that community. I think a perfect example was the oft-repeated assurance I was given about the futility of attempting to introduce subscription attendance at the theatre in predominantly French-speaking Montreal. I was told that despite the stunning successes of our subscription campaigns in English-speaking communities throughout Canada, the Francophone playgoer was simply too individualistic, too nonconformist, too selective in his tastes, to submit to the advance planning and the discipline which organized attendance imposes on subscribers. In every way, I was discouraged from beginning such efforts in New France. Once, when I participated in an arts seminar in Quebec City, a charming functionary in the employ of the province’s cultural ministry explained to me in great detail the reasons the French-speaking theatre buff would never submit to the regimentation of subscription. Then, one day the visionary artistic leader of French Canada’s leading theatre company, the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, Jean-Louis Roux, and his administrator, Lucien Allen, informed me that they were ready to try; from a standing start (not one subscriber), we immediately sold 8,300 subscriptions, achieving percentage results from brochure distributions which were higher than we were obtaining in the same period in the English-speaking sectors of the country or in the U.S. (As I write this, I believe that TNM has over 14,500 subscribers.) The subscription fever spread to the English-speaking minority’s theatre companies there and the two leading ones, the Centaur and the Bronfman, now have about 19,000 subscribers between them. And the Montreal Symphony, which did have a subscribership, has now increased it by over 150%. So, I have learned to take with the proverbial grain of salt the protestations which I so often hear along the lines of, You see, Mr. Newman, our town is different....

A retarding factor in the audience development of some companies is the infinite capacity of their artistic directors and their managerial personnel for self-deception and their resulting indulgence in