Schultz reports that the median age of the company’s audience has dropped from about 50 in the early 1990s to 44 now.
Schultz’s department in the hope that the more established Urbanites for Opera members will persuade the Opera Nouveau audience to join their ranks. The two programs’ members are gathered for a joint social event, organized by Mr. The Urbanites’ group doubled its initial 100 subscribers in a year, thanks to an aggressive advertising campaign. Opera Nouveau, geared toward novice opera fans, features only one production, while Urbanites for Opera offers a discount subscription to four productions. So about five years ago, it began courting young professionals by creating two membership programs, Urbanites for Opera and Opera Nouveau. Schultz, the organization’s director of sales and marketing. The opera’s leaders came to realize that to maintain sufficient numbers of subscribers and donors, it needed to continually add younger ones, says Mr. And yet the awareness, however slow in dawning, spurred the organization to action. It was not a single epiphany, says Todd Schultz, when the Los Angeles Opera realized it should begin courting younger audiences, no moment when he and his colleagues looked out in the crowd and were taken aback to discover that the audience was predominantly middle aged or older.
