Harnessing social media’s power is crucial for classical music’s survival
As I was interviewing the organist Anna Lapwood for this issue (p26), a memory flashed through my brain. It was of a conversation many years ago with a wise old public relations man who was explaining to me his ‘concentric rings’ approach to marketing music. ‘Say you are selling your next album,’ he said, ‘you know it’s going to be bought by your family, friends and diehard fans. That’s the first ring, and it doesn’t need any marketing effort. You would also hope that you could market the album fairly easily to connoisseurs of the style of music you are performing. That’s the second ring.
‘The third ring comprises general music fans. They take more persuasion, because there are many new albums competing for their money. But the real prize is to be noticed by people in the fourth ring: the general public. Why? Because there are millions of them.’
I suspect many classical musicians think they are doing well if they simply get through to the second ring. But Anna Lapwood, of course, is at the other end of the spectrum. She has got through to the fourth ring! And she has achieved that by harnessing her talent to the power of social media. Extraordinarily for a classical organist, she has more than half- a-million followers on TikTok.
I am pleased for her, and would be even more pleased if her example changed attitudes to 21st-century communication tools across the classical music world. At its best, social media has a colossal power to reach millions, cutting through the usual boundaries of cost, geography and cultural barriers that stop people entering concert halls. But the very fact that we are talking about Lapwood’s achievement as if it’s remarkable (which, in our field, it is) demonstrates that far too few classical musicians and promoters are using these tools to anything like the extent to which they are being utilised in other branches of showbusiness, politics or retail.
Instead, I often feel that the classical music world has become mired in what you might call the ‘dark side’ of social media. Sometimes on Twitter or Facebook you feel as if you have stumbled into an echo chamber, or perhaps some sort of modern-day Inquisition. There’s often a herd mentality at work, with everyone feeling that they have to subscribe to exactly the same viewpoint or be expelled from this particular friendship circle. And along with that goes a perceptible hostility towards outsiders, or those who hold a different point of view.
I understand why that happens, especially in a field where
