Our friend Bill Anderton - who has been working very hard with entering all the listings on the new Chamber Music Plus website and also runs several of his own, including the Contemporary Music Project and his blog, www.billanderton.blogspot.co.uk, where you will find a piece about increasing audience numbers.

And here's some tips from Shoshana's Build My Audience blog from the other side of the music world (in several senses):

"Last night I was fortunate to see Billy Joel in concert at the Pepsi Center in Denver. Being a huge fan with the majority of his albums, I am kicking myself for not going to a concert sooner. I am glad I was finally able to witness how great he was with his audience engagement! Here is a list of some of the fun he had with the audience:

·        Audience choice moments - He gauged by applause which song out of two choices the audience wanted to hear next. He did this twice during the concert. Of course my pick was not the popular choice, since I wanted to hear the lesser known of the two choices, but the audience in general loved being engaged in this fashion!

·        Of course he let us take over on Piano Man for one of the choruses.

·        He shook hands with many of the people in the front row and signed two on the spot autographs. Lucky folks!

·        He was quick with a joke...

·        He talked conversationally the entire time. We, the audience, was part of the conversation!

·        He pulled in Colorado references all the time. Of course he played Billy the Kid: "Well, he started with a bank in Colorado."

·        The cameramen captured some fantastic audience footage. The audience sincerely loved every minute!

·        The set list drew from all aspects of his career which catered to the different generations of the audience.

·        The quality of the musicians, background media set, etc. was top notch!"

Many of us have had bad experiences with other audience members over the years - I feel particularly upset when I've taken a friend along to a performance and they've received a telling off (on one occasion for leaning forward, and the other for having noisy jewellery).  Gillian Moore has come up with some new rules for concert-going in an article for Sinfini:

1. Love the experience of sitting in a comfortable seat with no distractions, listening to glorious music for an hour or two.
2. If you don’t know the music, read up about it on the internet beforehand, or arrive early, get a drink and buy a programme. The more you put in, the more you get out.
3. When the music is playing, stay as silent as possible: there are often a lot of very quiet moments.
4. Check, double-check and check again that your mobile phone is switched off.
5. When the music stops, clap if you want to. There is a convention not to clap between movements, but it’s not a strict one.
6. Wear what you like.
7. Be nice to the person sitting next to you, even if they break one of the rules above. This might be their first concert.

Don't miss the comments below the article!  What do you think?

An article by David Lister in The Independent has started some discussion about concert programmes, and particularly those artist biographies which simply list venues, orchestras, conductors, repertoire...which can be very boring. 

"In this, the final week of the Proms, I had the pleasure of seeing the great German violin virtuoso Julia Fischer. She not only played brilliantly, but unlike some of her peers, had commanding stage presence. So, in the interval I paid my £4, and bought an official programme to find out more about her.

It was a mine of information. Useless information. It listed all the orchestras she had performed with “in recent seasons.” There they all were, from the Cleveland Orchestra to the Leipzig Gewandhaus and many others. But wait, there’s more. The next paragraph listed the orchestras she had played with “this season.” And in case you were wondering – I wasn’t – these included the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra to name but two."

I encourage my Concert Directory International/Davies Music singers to write more personal (and more interesting) biographies for themselves - and I've discovered all sorts of things about their lives outside music, from training for triathlons (Jeanette Ager) to appearing on the BBC's Top Gear singing "O sole mio" whilst being driven in a Maserati sports car by Michael Schumacher (Matthew Minter).

Should audiences have to pay for programmes or should they be free?  Some organisations make the notes available for download before the performance - and sometimes the information is frustratingly skimpy; I always want to know who the performers are!

Here's another article, this time from Susan Smith Ellis in The Guardian about the importance of images - and this is something that I find difficult to get across to people. 
"Why do people often get behind images more than words? According to researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the human brain can process entire images in as little as 13 milliseconds. Social media and content analysts will also tell you that visuals increase user engagement – in some reports, by as much as 94%. Images have the power to connect with people instantly and emotionally."

A good photograph is an essential part of any marketing attempt!