Most of Chicago’s biggest performing arts organizations have recently announced their upcoming seasons. Two striking things emerged. One is that most of the biggest institutions suddenly are producing more shows, albeit sometimes with shorter runs. The other is that they are trying to shake off the confines of the traditional five- or six-show subscription season in favor of appealing more to the perceived habits of the millennial generation, known for their love of Netflix-style memberships, flexible scheduling and their preference for last-minute ticket purchases on mobile phones.
But they are doing so gingerly. With good reason.
Although no one sends out a news release to announce a declining subscription base, arts subscriptions are declining nationally. In an atypically frank interview with American Theatre magazine in the last few days, Todd Haimes, artistic director of New York’s huge Roundabout Theatre Company, said that the subscription base for his nonprofit theater had declined from 40,000 at its peak to its current level of 30,000 subscribers.
Nonetheless, as Haimes well knows, 30,000 is still 30,000. And those 30,000 customers represent $15 million in box-office revenue to the Roundabout, an amount that cannot easily be replicated by courting fickle millennials with their discounts and flexible punch cards, especially since these new audiences do not enter the room with the same level of institutional loyalty as their parents and grandparents. In fact, the millennials with their TodayTix apps are embracing many different providers at once.
In this dilemma, nonprofit arts organizations are not unlike newspapers, such as this one, which are also striving to reinvent themselves for the digital age as their print subscription bases decline. As with the arts organizations, the media executives are trying to go where they think the puck is going, which means embracing the habits of millennials who consume individual stories (the newspaper’s equivalent of individual shows) from many different publications shared on social media. At the same time, the publications remain reliant on the revenue that comes from those still-colossal subscription bases.
Newspapers also know that those subscribers are exceptionally loyal to them, and often them alone. Just as the theater’s longtime subscribers are willing to go to every show, even titles they would not otherwise attend if they were making individual purchases, so the newspaper’s subscribers buy the paper day in and day out, for it has become a habit.
The tricky part of this equation is that it is difficult (some would say impossible) to reinvent yourself while maintaining a structure that allows you to hold on to that existing well of loyalty.
Take, for example, the case of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, which has added a production to its subscription season next year and shortened the length of the runs. Everything that Steppenwolf has done makes sense. By having more shows, it acknowledges that the theater, and its powerful brand name, tends to attract dedicated heavy users who want more to consume. More programming clearly is a prerequisite of more diverse programming, allowing you to hit more demographic groups and artistic tastes, and providing more of a cushion in the event of failure (the next show will come more quickly).
Moreover, the shorter runs will allow Steppenwolf to better attract its celebrity ensemble members, who sell a lot of tickets and are far more willing to commit to a four-week run than a 12-week engagement. So it should improve both quality (they are stars for a reason) and marketability (who does not like a bold-faced name?).
Steppenwolf also is pushing its new alternative space, located next to a new bar and cafe that will provide one of those hip “third spaces” (neither home nor work) that millennials allegedly embrace, as they commit cautiously to how they plan to spend their night, or maybe just part of their night.
But before Steppenwolf announced its new season, it sent out a cautious note to the subsection of its subscribers who would be losing their prized seats to the shortened runs (at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, this would be even more of an issue) and moved to another spot. It can’t afford to offend them (not yet anyway) anymore than it can actually eliminate the traditional subscription.
The gain of doing so lies in reinvention for the future, perhaps, but definitely not in present revenue.
What is most fascinating about all this is the level of unknowns in terms of future behavior. Last fall, Jack Griffin, the former chief executive of Tribune Publishing, opined in an interview with Lynne Marek, a reporter for Crain’s Chicago Business, that his 20-something sons would likely turn to newspapers, maybe even the printed kind, as they become older, more adult in their outlook and more entrenched in their communities.
The observation was widely ridiculed in media circles because conventional wisdom has it that the habit of reading a printed newspaper was ingrained in the era before the proliferation of multifarious digital options. If you have been getting your news from your iPhone since you were 12 years old, this thinking goes, why on earth would you suddenly abandon the device of choice of your youth in favor of a yet-older method of news delivery?
That’s an excellent question. But Griffin was nonetheless homing in on our lack of knowledge about how much millennials will change their consumption of the arts and news as they age, and also on the fact we do, in fact, change the way we consume culture as we get older. So will the millennials become more like their elders? Or will they merely continue their current habits into their dotage?
Bill Rauch, the highly successful artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, has often said that he does not lose sleep at night worrying about whether his gray-haired audience will die off. He’s argued to me often that the retirees who dominate his customer base will merely be replaced by other retirees, because retirement is the point in one’s life when one has the time, and hopefully the money, to travel to Ashland, Ore., and take in a Wednesday matinee performance of “King Lear.”
If you take this argument to its logical conclusion, Rauch should be worrying not so much about what millennials want now (although he would not mind a few of them), but what they would want in their retirement, when they will be easier to snag. Not coincidentally, they will also be easier to convert to becoming donors. The grand, new Writers Theatre in Glencoe, which opens its first show in a few days, was not built on the backs of the contributions of 25-year-olds paying half price. Its benefactors were subscribers of a certain age — loyal supporters who had watched the company for years.
The retirement home industry is a bellwether for this question of what millennials will be doing at 65 — what kind of care homes they will want, assuming they want them at all? Will we all be listening to the music of our youth — or is there music for older people, regardless of generation? It’s probably a bit of both.
In the cruise industry, they cope with this existential dilemma primarily by market segmentation. Thus the Holland America line appeals primarily to seniors (the ships feature string quartets) while Carnival Corp., which owns Holland America, uses its separate Carnival Cruise brand to appeal to the millennials it hopes to attract to sustain it in the future (currently with climbing walls, microbrews, faster Internet access at sea). In the future, presumably, Holland America will change its offerings to reflect the seniors of the future (which might well mean that everything you now find on Carnival simply will move to Holland America), while Carnival will offer whatever young cruisers will want in 2030. And who knows what that will be? And who knows if Millennials will lose interest in climbing walls as they age, and start to prefer string quartets? That is the issue.
Segmentation is tougher to achieve in the arts and news businesses, because Steppenwolf, the Chicago Tribune and the Lyric Opera all strive to be institutions that appeal to all sectors of the market. Each can differentiate itself to some degree — Steppenwolf has its smaller new stage and the Tribune long ago created RedEye, in an attempt to shore up its perceived weakness among the young. But it’s more difficult for them.
What’s the answer? Some would say that reinvention invariably is brutal — in the corporate world, it is often perceived as being accompanied by pain. Others would argue it’s mostly a matter of keeping one group happy while simultaneously appealing to another and not letting the one know what you are so carefully doing for the other.
I was sent the atypically obsequious Steppenwolf note to displaced subscribers by a colleague at the Tribune, and the theater did not seem pleased I had it in my possession as it announced its dynamic season of change.
I understood. It is a very delicate dance. Its presence was contrary to the main message.
The real answer, surely, is the largely unexplored one of how you give millennials what they want — access to everything on their phones, bargains at the last minute, programming requiring minimal advance commitment — while somehow creating the kind of loyalty, and revenue, that supports the survival of the venerable institutions they are patronizing.
Danny Newman, the Lyric Opera marketing genius who literally wrote the book on “Subscribe Now!,” argued that partial commitment results only in, well, partial commitment, and that choice often allows in the competition. Newspapers know this well.
Some news and entertainment companies have avoided the problem brilliantly. Disney, for example, controls every experience at its theme parks, which have changed with the times without altering their fundamental structure of total commitment. In fact, Disney has found ways to increase that commitment through technology, doing a far better job through pricing now of coaxing its customers into multiday visits than it did in Walt’s own era. But that’s rare. And it requires a very strong product that never fails, but merely moves on to the next generation. That’s tougher in the arts when you’re changing what you are doing every few weeks.
I’d argue it’s paramount that institutions embracing change do not allow such change to encompass ageism, which is notably prevalent in the arts world, and insidious. The big challenge facing them all is how to make this new audience feel as loyal as did their parents and grandparents, while not forgetting that the old school is still very much alive and in their business.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @ChrisJonesTrib
