Southbank Centre is chasing new audiences with “bangers,” TikTok collaborations, and a podcast you don’t need a PhD to listen to.
The well-meant tone misfires, dismissing passion and expertise while misrepresenting the music the building was constructed to celebrate nearly 75 years ago.
There’s been a noticeable shift in Southbank Centre’s social media posts recently. New audiences are being courted. Younger, fresher-faced types looking for experiences. Southbank has set its sights on them and is prioritising countering claims of stuffiness.
To achieve this, Southbank’s marketing team are leaning more heavily on describing classical music with a different language. Well-meant pieces to camera demystify the genre for this untapped, cynical and supposedly disinterested audience, the word ‘bangers’ used to describe popular works and sundry other nerve-jangling scores.
This content strategy is alienates more than it is includes. In promoting its jaunty new podcast So, Hear Me Out, the new series is billed as a classical music podcast ‘you don’t need a PhD to listen to’, disappointingly relying on tired strawman castigating the dedicated audience (and musicians) for their passion and expertise.
This uncomfortable attempt to differentiate themselves from other London venues, does little else but misrepresent the genre to existing audience members and musicians alike. You’d naturally assume that an arts organisation like Southbank Centre fast approaching its 75th anniversary would be looking to honour the very music the building was constructed for in the first place, rather than betray it.
In doing so, Southbank Centre are communicating to its existing followers (and a great many of its existing subscribers) that their deep knowledge and appreciation of the genre is the very thing that is the problem. Enticing other generations in is done at the expense of the one already inside, sabotaging the beleaguered venue’s own efforts securing new audiences for a cash-strapped future.
One quote graphic from the podcast series drives the point home with a depressing inevitability. Radio 3 presenter and bassoonist Linton Stephens classical ‘hot take’?
“50% of the time it’s other audience members that make classical music seem inaccessible to newcomers.”
Give me strength.
The tone-deafness continues. A recent reel on its Instagram account puts a call out for Tik Tok content creators interested in joining Southbank’s ‘Crescendo’ programme – an offer (presumably paid) for content collaborations that help increase the brand’s reach. Strategically a good idea, but the execution is flawed. ‘How far have we fallen?’ asks violinist Daniel Pioro. Quite a distance.
