By Mark Stoddard
The following is an excerpt from Mark’s best-selling book Marketing Singers, a business and marketing guidebook written specifically for singers. It is available online at www.classicalsinger.com/store.”
Occasionally I like to dabble in online forums. I prefer the original Greek and Roman public forums far better than today’s. They were open areas of public discourse where ideas could be traded, honed and either added or discarded. Today’s forums are too often guilty of producing more heat than light, mainly due to the secretive nature. People hide behind pseudonyms to protect their identity from real or imagined bogeymen, and this cover gives them the courage to say things they would never say face-to-face. Lack of courage has rarely produced anything of much value.
Examine a posting directed against me recently. The poster asserted my marketing comments were off the mark because I suggested pay-to-sing programs were a way to get more customers. She found it distasteful that I would advise pay-to-sing programs because she thought they were evil. She said I was helping to arm-twist poor ignorant singers into thinking these summer programs were worthwhile.
Was she right about so-called pay-to-sing programs? No. Pay-to-sing programs are neither good nor evil on their face, any more than are university pay-to-learn programs.
Her attitude may have come from having a rather low opinion of mankind. The truth is, consumers cannot be forced or coerced to part with money. Advertising NEVER made a person buy something. To believe this is to believe that “everyone else” (not me) is the lemming.
“Everyone else” is a funny thought. It is always the great unwashed masses (everyone else) out there needing our protection or condemnation. It is a rather cynical view of mankind. They are too stupid to make up their minds and are easily manipulated by oppressive advertising.
Wrong. Advertisers wish it were so, but their top copywriters get paid big bucks for continually creating something new to woo people. Were it easy, they could create the Orwellian ad that would force mind-numb robotniks to stand in line and give up the cash that somehow these fools earned.
In real life, people are smart. The smartest person is not that much smarter than the average person. Everyone makes choices. They succeed and fail and tend to learn quickly. Advertisers study people. So do you. You have since you were first conscious. YOU study people in trying to understand their wants and desires. Then YOU use that knowledge to persuade them to give you what you want.
Opera singers are no different. They want to sing great music. The trouble is that the opera industry in America is a dying industry because of the way it is marketed. It survives through beg-a-thons and government coercion to subsidize them rather than selling their product to the public and living on the revenue generated from sales. So fewer and fewer singing opportunities now exist, while the university-trained singers continue to increase. Diminishing demand and increasing supply results in an ever more stringent standard for singers. Musicians must have more on their resumes to impress artistic directors and greater experience to give them valuable stage presence.
Singers often wonder why no one will give them a chance. With a shrinking audience, would you risk alienating that precious audience with an unproven singer? Not a chance. So, singers need to find places to sing to simulate that all-important stage experience. If you cannot get it locally, try to get it somewhere else.
Add these factors, and a creative person might conclude that creating a summer program for singers in their 20s and 30s could be viable. If legitimate, these programs are expensive and labor intensive. Hiring good teachers costs more than minimum wage. All the housing, accounting for dollar fluctuations, food, transportation, etc., add up quickly.
“Will people come?” is a valid question and concern. According to the forum poster it is simply a matter of seduction. But it is not. It is a matter of tapping into an existing need and want. That takes advertising. Of course, what the poster fails to understand is that word travels quickly in proportion to the cost of a product. Summer programs, or pay-to-sing, have been around a long time. People who attend come home and talk. Word of mouth is a summer program’s best friend or a worst nightmare. If the program produces the desired results, others will come from a referral. If it is poor quality, fewer people will come and more money will be spent to advertise their way out of the hole. That cannot go on long. Eventually the market place will deem the program a fraud and they will spend themselves into oblivion. In a free market, competition will drive out poorer quality – or experience will teach the organizers of a faltering summer program to hone their product and offer higher quality.
What has that to do with you? Simple. You are in marketing. Not in theory, but in daily practice. Your quality must constantly be improved in this exceptionally competitive singing market place. Advertising will not solve the problem if the voice is not the best. The poster fails to understand that advertising can only give the product the chance to be sampled. If the product does not meet the consumer’s expectation, a sale is not made. You cannot trick people into buying your voice. Advertising can only open the door. PR will only do the same. Marketing concepts follow the same course.
Mark Stoddard, author of Marketings Singers, is a business leader, professor, marketer and consultant who has been helping singers get jobs for more than 20 years. On the singing front he staged more than 100 professional shows aboard cruise ships that employed classical singers, pianists and strings. He’s also coached singers on how to sell their CDs and other products, use the social media and how to negotiate contracts. Email Mark at mark@mjstoddard.com.
