<p>The Met HD broadcasts cost a lot to produce, so it wouldn’t surprise me they are break even. The movie theater ticket price represents the theater’s cut as well, and if you ever go outside the Met when they are doing an HD broadcast, it is pretty amazing the amount of people involved…all very high paid people, not to mention the cut the stagehands and such get at the Met as extra for doing a broadcast (don’t get me going on that; while the met stagehands do a very difficult job, a lot of the people working places like Carnegie Hall are ridiculously overpaid, sorry, the stage manager at Carnegie Hall makes 500k a year…). …so it is expensive. Though with the Met opera broadcasts, they are underwritten so I am a bit surprised they break even, given that, but it is expensive.</p>
<p>What a lot of these places are facing is an aging audience, that in some ways is dying out, along with cutbacks that the big companies used to do…take a look at the met or carnegie Hall or NY Phil and you see a lot of the big financial companies and such, but the people responsible for that are aging, and the new people taking over are of a generation that doesn’t quite have the same attitude that arts patronage means business. Guys like Sandy Weil (Citigroup), Bruce Wasserstein, Henry Kravis, and the list goes on, were big patrons, but the people coming up? Not so much. I don’t know if those guys were particularly more cultured, or the younger guys running the firms are less, but it definitely is affecting things. In some ways the arts organizations can blame themselves, they really haven’t done that great a job creating new audiences, and they are paying a price for it I think. There is an article in today’s Times about how museums are doing everything they can to attract the attention of younger people who have the potential to be donors, and it kind of mirrors what arts organizations face across the board. No simple answers to this, one hope is that with age comes appreciation of the arts, but it isn’t automatic, and a lot of the arts groups don’t do much to dispel the notion that their stuff is snooty, elite and boring as dust, which is sad.</p>
<p>I saw the difference with the LA Phil, I went there last year when my S was auditioning in LA, and they had a very different audience, there were young people there on dates, I saw people in their 20’s and 30’s, young married couples, and people from usually underrepresented groups, like Hispanic folks and others, it was kind of heartening, and I suspect some of that is because of Dudamel and the excitement around him (interestingly, the program featured a lot of ‘new music’, that can turn off young audiences, but it also featured a fantastic piece by John Adams, who conducted it…). </p>