Community choir finances
The SF Bach Choir currently runs a structural deficit. I was surprised to learn this — we sing, isn’t that the cheapest pastime? — so I recently spent a morning looking at the 990, trying to understand the money flows.
To put some numbers to it, each year, we spend more than $300k but make about $100k in ticket sales. The rest is made up for by donations and grants but, since some grants that we used to rely on were directed away from organizations celebrating dead white men, last year we ran a deficit of around $20k.
This is obviously a pretty big deficit.
We’re not in danger of going bankrupt soon — the simplest model of our finances that includes investment returns and inflation gives us 10 years of runway before we’re out of money — but it was still a shock to go from thinking “people pay to hear SFBC sing; everyone gains from trade” to realizing that ticket sales cover a minority of our expenses and so we’re entirely dependent on donations and grants. And honestly, much of the audience is friends and family of SFBC singers, and it’s appropriate to view their attendance as being in the spirit of a donation.1
What would it take to have an amateur choir perform classical music sustainably, i.e. through ticket sales alone? In the next section, I’ll say that the analysis in this section isn’t the right way to think about the issue. I’m including it because I found it helpful to ground my thinking in concrete numbers — just, don’t get too attached.
There are three main costs: occupancy, the orchestra, and the artistic director.2
For the 2023-24 season, occupancy cost SFBC $35,927 for 167.25 hours of rehearsal and performance at a choir size of ~60. Assuming occupancy costs are linear in time and choir size, this is about $3.5 per singer-hour. It takes SFBC 30 minutes of rehearsal time to prepare each minute of performance, so rehearsal occupancy costs $1.75 per un-duplicated minute of performance per singer. (“Un-duplicated” in the sense that, once the choir has prepared for the first showing, it costs no more rehearsal time to prepare for the second.)
Orchestra costs depend on the size of the orchestra, which in turn depends on the size of the choir. I’ll base my estimates on these figures provided by our artistic director3:
Regressing number of singers against orchestra size, there should be 1 orchestra member for every 4.5 singers. We pay musicians $200 per call, and call counts from previous concerts suggest that the musicians we hire need 1 call per 15 minutes of performance. Rehearsal calls thus cost about $2.96 per un-duplicated minute of performance per singer. Performance calls cost about $44.44 per performance per singer (NB: per performance, not per minute of performance).
Because we’re limited in the rate at which we learn music, we sometimes ask musicians to perform instrumental pieces. Using the same ratio of rehearsal to performance time for musicians, rehearsal costs are $13.33 per minute of performance per musician. Costs associated to performance calls were already accounted for in the previous paragraph.
Altogether, the costs come to4:
$1.75 per un-duplicated minute of choral performance per singer, for rehearsal occupancy
$.06 per minute of performance per singer, for performance occupancy
$2.96 per un-duplicated minute of accompaniment in performance per singer, for rehearsal calls
$13.33 per minute of instrumental performance per musician, for rehearsal calls
$44.44 per performance per singer, for musician performance calls
Here are the costs associated to a few ways to organize an hour of music (single showing):
The wholly-unaccompanied concert is feasible, assuming that singers have friends and family who want to see them perform and are willing to pay a small fee. The wholly-accompanied concert is probably infeasible to cover by ticket sales alone, but the excess is relatively small per singer — many choirs have dues on the order of the costs that would remain after ticket sales.
The main levers for cost reduction are:
Cheaper rehearsal space. SFBC generally rehearses and performs in the same space, which has the advantage of limiting performance week adjustments for acoustics, but it’s not strictly speaking necessary. There may be other advantages to having an established relationship with the venue, but these are unknown to me if they exist.
Better singers. Decreasing the amount of rehearsal required decreases occupancy, which is a large part of the cost at current margins. Of course, at some point the singers start expecting to be paid, which adds another cost.
Volunteer orchestra. High-quality community orchestras are rarer than community choirs, but they exist (e.g. the Awesöme Orchestra in SF).
The main levers for revenue increase are:
Higher ticket prices. This one trades off against the next.
More tickets sold per singer. Marketing is the standard tool here, but inevitably most audience members of community choir performances will already know a singer — if you’re going to go to a show where you have no personal connection with the performers, you go see professionals. The best tool is to have all the singers be 26 year old extraverts.
You may have noticed that we haven’t accounted for compensation of the artistic director. Considerations of supply and demand, and the Baumol effect, are left as an exercise for the reader. Suffice to say that, for some groups, this quantity can easily be as much as the other costs we’ve considered combined.
As I say above, I think this counting pennies approach to choir finances takes the wrong perspective. The danger of looking at every expense as an opportunity for cost reduction is that every expense is made in service of the goal of creating a great choir experience. Choir is a huge time commitment, and if it’s not great it’s not worth doing. If it is great, we’ll be able to find donors who recognize what we’re doing and want to support us.
Here are some ways to create a choir that people want to participate in:
Be friendly and cool
Actually be friends with other singers, so the choir becomes a real community
Learn your part well, so the performance sounds amazing
Learn your part early, to make it easier on others singing your part
Take *great* snacks
Take on a functional role (board president, treasurer, etc) so others don’t have to
Yes, look at the budget and figure out how money can be spent better
Don’t harangue people about making the choir experience great (or about anything)
I want to be honest here, but I’m not proud to admit this, so I’m placing it in a footnote:
My reflex when I first started looking at SFBC’s 990 was to think, “am I being taken advantage of?”. Between dues and music fees, singers pay a not-insubstantial amount of money to participate (though NOTAFLOF), and that doesn’t account for the opportunity cost of private rehearsal time. In contrast, Magen and the managing director make a reasonable (large, for the arts) salary.
From a purely financial perspective, the organization exists to sustain Magen, Dara, and our managing director.
But on the flip side, there wouldn’t be an SFBC without Magen and Dara. Magen is an amazing director and a very valuable part of our organization. She’s incredibly knowledgeable about repertoire, effective at planning performance preparation, and skilled at giving the choir direction to improve our sound. Dara’s an amazing pianist. Her solos are the best part of our autumn and Christmas concerts. So of course we pay for what we get.
Look, I know this is ridiculous. This isn’t “something that the audience and Magen and Dara do for the singers”, or “something that Magen and the singers do for Dara”, or whatever, but something that we all do for each other. Except for the major donors, of course, who really do support us all (speaking of which). It just… feels vulnerable to need that support.
There are other costs as well — accounting, advertising, payment processing, etc — but we’ll ignore them for the sake of simplicity.
A few notes:
Interestingly, the size of the choir determines which periods are appropriate for selecting repertoire.
I believe that call counts vary by period because the pieces we sing from later periods tend to be bigger/longer, not because larger choirs directly necessitates more orchestra rehearsal.
Minium singer ability is ranked from minimal reading skill at 1 to professional-level at 5.
Defining the following variables
n showings
d dollars per singer per minute occupancy
r1 performance minutes per rehearsal minute
r2 performance minutes per call
o singers per orchestra member
c dollars per call
t1 a capella performance minutes per showing
t2 accompanied performance minutes per showing
t3 instrumental performance minutes per showing
a general formula for the cost per singer is given by:
(This model makes some assumptions.)