http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDkTrYmBJ0E
As the New York City Opera heads toward financial ruin, Russell Platt takes stock of the industry’s troubles. Greg Sandow focuses on orchestras and their ever-older audiences:
[N]ow we see what a systemic crisis means. Because from the aging and shrinking of the audience follows every other problem that we’re having. Declining ticket sales. Declining funding. Performing arts centers (as the New York Times reported back at the start of the 1990s) booking fewer classical music events, because the audience for them was starting to fall. …
Maybe the current orchestra crisis shows us this danger starting to be real, meaning that it’s hitting now, and isn’t just something we project into the future. So many managements arguing with their musicians, over dividing a shrinking financial pie, the result (no matter how it plays out in each situation) of an overall drop in demand, and drop in funding (which of course is tied to the drop in demand), while expenses continue to rise.
Previous Dish on the struggling classical music industry here.
The Dish 