Steady Ticket Sales Mark First Year at Green Music Center

Green Music Center’s inaugural season was marked by solid ticket sales and many shows at full or nearly capacity, according to data recently acquired by Rohnert Park-Cotati Patch.  

Top-of-the-line acts like cellist Yo Yo Ma, jazz musician Wynton Marsalis and vocalist Lang Lang sold out early, but many others did almost equally well, selling between 70 percent to 95 percent of the 1,400 seats at the Weill Hall.  

Rohnert Park Patch filed a California Public Records request to obtain the data.  

The lowest sales were for vocal performances including mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe and Joyce DiDonato, who sold only 427 tickets and 660 tickets, respectively. Soprano Karina Gauvin also failed to generate a lot of interest, selling only 598 tickets.  

Green Music Center spokeswoman Jessica Anderson attributed the low sales partly to timing, since the DiDonato concert was held on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, a day when many people are traveling.

Another lesson the center learned was that the audience for vocal performances tends to be older, and older crowds want an earlier concert. Most concerts in the 2012-2013 season began at 8pm.  

Despite that, Anderson said the music venue exceeded its goals and expectations for its first year.  

“We consider the inaugural season a success in every sense of the world,” she said. “Even for the ones that got 800 people at a show, if you look at attendance at classical concerts, that’s incredibly successful.”  

The Green Music Center is using the data to reconfigure how they sell tickets, bundling a greater variety of performances into one package compared to selling a bundle of one type of musical style, Anderson said.  

There are also plans to open two other performance halls at the Green Music Center. Schroeder Hall is scheduled to open in the 2014–15 academic year if enough funds are raised.
 
The center is also fundraising to complete the MasterCard Performing Arts Pavilion, slated to be completed in spring of 2015. 

Tickets for the summer season and package series are currently on sale. For more information, click here.

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