Looking forward to our upcoming season

I’ve been a bit absent from the blog for the past few months, but I wanted to check in and give those who are interested (I know you’re out there because I’m asked constantly) an update on how subscription sales are going heading into next season.

Last season we spent quite a bit of our time seeking out and listening to feedback from patrons to understand why they subscribe to our performances and support USUO. We surveyed subscribers and single ticket buyers on everything from parking to their music preferences and ended up making some changes, both small and substantial, to our season subscriptions based on their feedback.

For example, the Classical, Pops, and Discovery Series were renamed the Masterworks, Entertainment, and Family Series (the traditional names of these Utah Symphony series). We decreased the number of concerts in our Entertainment Series from seven to five, which allowed us to bring in bigger acts and avoided the problem of overlapping the concerts with our Utah Opera productions (frustrating for those who wanted to subscribe to both). Some of the changes were great. Some of them (such as general admission tickets for the Family & Lollipops performances), we might need to give a little more thought for next season.

While we were making these changes, the economy was tanking and we weren’t sure how things would end up going into this season. We knew that the community supported us and wanted us to succeed, but with everyone’s shrinking budgets, there were a lot of unknowns.

The good news is that things went mostly as planned and you might notice seating at Abravanel Hall and Capitol Theatre is a bit tighter this season than it has been in recent seasons. One of the matrixes that orchestras and operas look at to measure their base of support is the number of households that are subscribing to their performances. Going into next season, we’ve seen a 20% increase in the number of subscriber households compared with this time last season, and we’ve already surpassed the number of households that we ended with last season. This is great news! For our Entertainment Series in particular, the response has been tremendous. For this series alone, we’ve had a 37% increase in the number of subscriptions. Our other series are also performing well, and we’re close to selling out of subscriptions for our Vivace Series (this will probably happen later this week or next with less than 20 seats left as of now).

So, with that being said, I want to say thanks! With the rough economy that we’ve been experiencing, your support for our performances, musicians, and organization speaks volumes about the commitment that Utahns have to their community and the arts in particular. There are still challenges ahead (ticket sales account for less than 25% of the revenue we need to operate USUO), but I’m convinced that we have the support in the community that we need to succeed.

Thank you! I can’t wait to see everyone at our performances.