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The Scene Room
The Scene Room Podcast spotlights the movers and makers redefining the performing arts—focusing on innovative marketing, leadership, and the importance of collaboration. Hosted by Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman, with a keen eye on audience trends and cultural shifts, the goal is to explore how artists and organizations are connecting with communities, shaping the future, and redefining what it means to engage and inspire.
The Scene Room
Patricia Price — Strategic Success in Classical Music PR
Join us for a conversation with the co-founder of 8VA Music Consultancy, Patricia Price. She shares her journey to becoming an industry leader in classical music marketing and PR.
We also explore the evolving role of digital media in arts PR, the balance between traditional and digital platforms. Patricia shares insights on building a compelling artistic narrative and how blending business skills with creativity leads to long-term success.
Additionally, She highlights her work with artists like Sandbox Percussion, Andy Akiho, and Graeme Steele Johnson, emphasizing the power of thoughtful communication strategy. We look ahead to how technologies like AI and data analysis are shaping arts marketing, and how they work alongside the irreplaceable human element in sharing great art.
All episodes are also available in video form on our YouTube Channel. All episodes are hosted by Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman.
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Don't hesitate to reach out to us with guest ideas, information you'd like covered, or any ideas you might have—the hope is for this to be a continuous resource and dialogue with our listeners.
Visit TheSceneRoom.com for more information.
Hi, I'm Elizabeth Bowman and welcome to the Scene Room. Today I have Patricia Price here. She is one of the managing directors for 8VA Music Consultancy, one of the world's leading marketing and public relations firms. She and her husband, matt Herman, founded 8VA in 2012. Their roster, if you look at their website, includes conductor Alexander Shelley, Anne Akiko Meyers , clarinetist Anthony McGill, Bravo! Vail, the Beijing Music Festival, the Cliburn Competition, the Curtis Institute of Music, the Dover Quartet, just to name a few. I'm looking forward to chatting with Trish. All about the business, Trish. Welcome to the scene room.
Patricia Price:Lizzie, thanks for having me.
Elizabeth Bowman:I thought this was appropriate attire for today.
Patricia Price:We have hoodies. I need to get you a hoodie.
Elizabeth Bowman:Oh, I'd love a hoodie. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I didn't realize this came in hoodies as well. This is like what if this was from your 10th anniversary for 8VA?
Patricia Price:Yes, yeah, three years ago,
Elizabeth Bowman:I think that was my first real outing in New York after the pandemic shut down.
Patricia Price:Yes, we say it was the best and last party we will ever have, because everybody was so ready to get out and about.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, no, it was great, and it was great to see everyone's faces and there were many, many great artists present and performances and, yeah, it was really fun. For the listeners who aren't familiar with 8VA, which is the company that Trish and her husband, Matt, founded, can you tell us a bit about what you do and how the company came to be?
Patricia Price:So we are very simply a publicity firm for classical music, but in broader terms, we are the leading strategic consultancy in classical music for a lot of arts organizations, top soloists, conductors, festivals, competitions, and we work with organizations and artists all over the world on amplifying their impact.
Elizabeth Bowman:Okay, 8VA started, let's rewind. Let's go to your beginnings. Were you an artist before? What's your background? What's your education? How did you land in 8VA?
Patricia Price:I started out as a pianist so I've been training for our work since I was three. I'm also lucky that I'm not saying would you like fries with that Because I went on to get piano performance degrees and graduate degrees in piano performance. I studied in Vienna as a Fulbrighter and then came back and started my career in the record industry and I was lucky to come into the record industry at a time when it was really compressing. So I was given a lot of responsibility at a pretty early stage and I ran the classical division of a late grown media group which was a large distributor at the time with about 70 distributed classical labels at the time with about 70 distributed classical labels, and I thought I wanted to be the executive director of an orchestra someday. So I got my MBA and while I was working then a perfect position for me came up as the executive director of Portland Piano International, which is a great nonprofit in Portland Oregon and they have a recital series and a festival and that was wonderful experience as their executive director, working on the nonprofit side and seeing what that was really like.
Patricia Price:And for me the fundraising part of being an executive director was not as close to the music as I wanted to be. I wanted to be in daily conversations with artists making an impact in an artistic way, so I started consulting on the side, which quickly grew to be 8VA, what would later become 8VA. We had a business partner in London for a while and now we've had the current iteration for about 13 years. We feel really lucky to do what we do. My husband came from the PR side PR and marketing side so our combined skillset was a complimentary offering for musicians and organizations and it's really nice that I still get to be involved in the nonprofit side of a lot of organizations. But in this way I feel like I'm able to make a larger impact in our beautiful classical music world.
Elizabeth Bowman:Can I ask how 8VA measures the impact of your work for arts organizations and individuals?
Patricia Price:So it depends on the client, because I think for every client they're wanting to make sure that their artistic product is seen and experienced at as broad of a level as it can be and that doesn't look the same for any two of our clients. For some festivals that might be a large media hit where they're getting a large feature in the New York Times. For some of our artists that might be a more comprehensive feature where they are really seen for their artistry in an expansive, more intimate way. So we have different things. You can measure the advertising value equivalent where you take a multiple of what the paid advertising would be for earned media. You can see reach of social media posts. There are a lot of actual metrics you follow, but ultimately my level of success feels like when an artist is really satisfied and feels like our work is helping them reach more people.
Elizabeth Bowman:For the bigger arts organizations. I assume ticket sales must play into the measurement as well, in terms of like, if you're promoting a Carnegie Hall concert, would that responsibility come on to you, or is it a shared idea?
Patricia Price:Sometimes it depends on the scope of our work. For some artists or arts organizations we are specifically focused on the media hits we are getting and not necessarily marketing the concerts, but sometimes we do market various concerts and then we're very focused on how to get tickets sold.
Elizabeth Bowman:The past. I guess 13 years that's how old 8VA is 13?. The landscape of arts journalism and then the rise of the importance of digital media. How has that changed the way that you approach each case, now that short form videos are so important and there are less arts journalists employed by each paper and now you have to do a lot of cross-pitching? Tell me a bit about that.
Patricia Price:So it's interesting because when we started, we were one of the first companies to help artists with their social media, which sounds crazy. Everything I say lately sounds very old, and that's one of the things that sounds very old that artists weren't really outsourcing social media help, so they weren't outsourcing social media advertising. They weren't outsourcing social media posting, and that has grown to be an important point of contact for audiences with artists and arts organizations. Obviously, it's an imperative part now. You can't be a serious musician who's trying to reach audiences or a serious organization that's trying to reach audiences without social media.
Patricia Price:That being said, the pendulum is a little swinging back as far as I advise clients to make sure that they're not investing a black hole amount of time in social media, because if you want to be a TikTok influencer, you can spend all of your working time focused on TikTok, and that's not necessarily what we want the great violinists or pianists or cellists of our time to be doing, and that's not necessarily what we want the great violinists or pianists or cellists of our time to be doing.
Patricia Price:So that's something where I try to really focus our artists and arts organizations on what will make the largest difference With the change in the media landscape. There are so many online outlets that we try to have a mix of media coverage, so artists and arts organizations feel like they are getting well-rounded coverage, even if it's not the big New York Times hit or a big Wall Street Journal hit, while those are very important still, and often we are lucky to get them with our clients. It's something that we also like to supplement with some of the great online outlets, and in those outlets often you get a more comprehensive picture of what the artistic experience is like, and that can be more valuable through the echo chamber of the artist's social media than one big hit that goes in the newspaper bin the next day.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, I was thinking, as you were saying, that one thing that I think is a common mistake for artists is, when they get a story in the paper, to simply leave it in the paper and not compound it on their social media platforms. But there are certainly ways to do it that are more interesting, like grabbing quotes from it, doing carousel posts on Instagram or even TikTok, if anyone's on there anymore.
Patricia Price:If TikTok's open again, yeah, I've got golden retrievers and you know, great interior design and some of our artists on TikTok that I scroll through, unfortunately, probably at least 30 minutes a day, which is pretty, pretty good.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, I mean it's your job to to obviously have a look at what's going on with your clients, and so it's excusable.
Patricia Price:I would say I don't think golden retrievers are part of my job, but I would love to find a way to have golden retriever puppies be a part of my job.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, speaking of common mistakes that artists might make, do you have anything to add to that? Are there things that artists can do and should not do when thinking about their image?
Patricia Price:On social media specifically, I always recommend we always recommend a three-legged stool of content. Sometimes artists get a little too self-focused or can get to the point of having their audiences be alienated because it's a little too promotional. So the three-legged stool tool is one leg being self-promotional. So I've got this concert coming up, here's this album, here's a great collaboration I am doing. One leg shareable content. So here is my take on this great work and this is how I conduct it. Or this is how I play it. Or here's another really wonderful artist I'm admiring. Look how they do this. And then the third leg, where it's just a more personal look at the artist or organization and that doesn't mean too personal. This means their golden retriever puppy or their dinner or something that their travels, something that's interesting and personal, but not an overshare.
Elizabeth Bowman:I call it curated honesty. Yeah for sure, yes, yeah To some degree with boundaries.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, I mean, if you're a public figure, there certainly should be boundaries. So I don't feel that's an ugly term, it's just. It is what it is. It's curated honesty and it's also somewhat calculated when you're thinking of your career arc and building up to certain events and building interest on those outlets. So it makes. It makes a hundred percent sense and you don't want to post too much. I find some artists are just it's just too much too like it's going because they've been encouraged to post like every day for the algorithm.
Patricia Price:Post every day, which will obviously decline. Usually you see a decline in the followers if you do that.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, it's not a good idea. I'm not sure why that advice ever surfaced on the on the internet, but I've taught PR and digital media, most recently Banff Center in Joel Ivany's opera program there, and that's been something I've heard that has been taught in some young artists programs that they should be posting every day, and I have to absolutely disagree. You have to have purpose behind every post.
Patricia Price:And the good takeaway. Part of that advice is that sometimes young artists don't dedicate an hour a day to their career, and that's very useful and imperative. Artists do need to answer their email every day, respond about contracts, think about their website, think about their social media channels. And some young artists make great, beautiful music and think that that will turn into a large career and are rudely awakened when they have to have a combination of business skills and beautiful musicality.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, it is a necessary evil, I guess, for lack of a better term for artists these days. They have to be entrepreneurs. Even if they're hiring a PR firm or a marketing firm to help them with their strategy, they still need to actually be involved in that. That's another thing. Do you have people that might come to you and think that you just have magic without them inputting enough?
Patricia Price:We are lucky to have our clients come to us in all cases these days, which is a really beautiful place to be, and when artists come to us, usually I look for performances and key press center dates, some level of recording component, and then what I call special sauce, which means that they have a reason for why they are important now, why we need to get them coverage now. And if they don't have at least those first two things so performances and key center dates and some level of recording that can be video too Then they're a little too early for us to be able to help them fully. We're also looking for long-term relationships, so we don't work on projects. There are a lot of great PR firms who do work on a CD or one performance, where we are really after long-term relationships with clients where we can help them build a career or an organization over several years. So they're coming to us at a certain point when they have all of those things in place.
Elizabeth Bowman:That's something that makes sense for all PR and marketing relationships with clients, this yearly idea, this continuous relationship, because, first of all, if you have one project, you need sometimes you need a year of lead time to get the result that you're going to want to get, to be satisfied. So, if you have an album coming out, you need your publicist or your marketer or whoever's involved in your career to be thinking about the angle before you even step into the recording studio, because you don't know what behind the scenes footage you're going to want to grab. You're going to want to have a strategy in place with all those assets and I understand it's difficult because budgets don't allow it and, especially with younger, emerging artists, they are challenged with a market that won't fund the same way it used to.
Patricia Price:Yeah, there are a lot of really wonderful competitions and young artists programs that if you win them, you get more comprehensive support through the prize and that's a great way for artists who are really going to be able to break to have that support that they need early on.
Elizabeth Bowman:That's a good piece of advice. Competitions obviously are extremely high, high pressure, but obviously the business is high pressure, so it's no different than the business. So what competitions come to mind when you're thinking of, let's say, a pianist or a violinist or a singer?
Patricia Price:It's interesting from your home country, the Honens competition. They look for the complete artist, which is an interesting angle that has a component of being able to speak with media, to be able to think about programming, to have a unique perspective on a career, and I find that very useful because that creates a winner that's not just a technician. There are so many really beautiful, wonderful technicians these days. The conservatories are producing amazing musicians at a constant rate. So to be able to break through that pretty deep landscape of artists coming out, you also have something unique to say, and I think that the complete artist is a way of thinking through that. And Honens is also really wonderful in supporting the laureate, which is what they call their winner for the time period after their win, for that time period, so they are able to get up on their feet and build a career within that nice block of a couple of years.
Elizabeth Bowman:How do they measure that? Do they interview?
Patricia Price:each of the participants. So I think they are on to something, as far as let's not just see who can play rock three the best Although I was in the hall when won the Cliburn competition and that was a once in a lifetime performance that has launched one of the greatest careers probably we will ever see. That's also important, but that's probably also a once in a lifetime performance. It's not not necessarily enough to play rock three really, really well.
Elizabeth Bowman:Can you share uh, I know these relationships are confidential, uh, sometimes so with your clients and the work that you're doing? I mean I used to say, uh, if my work is silent, then I've done a good job. You know like, if if no one understands that, then I've done a good job. You know like, if no one understands that you know there was anyone helping you, then I've done a good job. But if you can share a success story where a client saw dramatic transformation, they came to you and they had a need to perform certain repertoire and and they were known a certain way, and then you had to shift that, or an organization was struggling and then you brought success.
Patricia Price:Some of the most gratifying work are the young artists that we have the opportunity to work with. So we're really lucky to work with household names like A and Anne Akiko Meyers and Leonard Slatkin and George Schwartz and all these really amazing musicians that our job is to amplify what they're doing and they are going to be great musicians, with or without Patricia Price, and people will pay attention. Hopefully I honor their beautiful careers with a lot of help and amplification, but they're going to be fine without me. What's really exciting for me are the young musicians we get to work with and grow through our work, and sometimes that turns into the difference of musicians having a large career and maybe just having a smaller career.
Patricia Price:Sandbox Percussion is one. We've been with them for several years. A percussion quartet is a little bit rare. It's hard to break through as a percussion quartet. They didn't come to us when they were too young, but we were able to work with them and get them a substantial New York Times profile. That took quite a while to get, but we were able to bend the ears of the right writers who really got to know them, got to know Andy Akiho, the great composer, who wrote Seven Pillars for them during the pandemic and that broke through to be Grammy nominated. We just had them on Tiny Desk. So they're going from percussion quartets, which are by nature a little in obscurity, to platforms like Tiny Desk, where you have the highest recognition of artists. We also had this really interesting project this year which was a little out of the norm for us Graham Steele Johnson, a great clarinetist, discovered this octet that he beautifully restored octet that he beautifully restored, that he got from the Library of Congress and premiered in DC and New York and had a recording and it's gone viral and it's not something that I would have normally thought, oh, this is going to be an out-of-the-park success.
Patricia Price:But it's just such beautiful music and so earnestly performed with such a dedication to the craft that people are experiencing it because we are able to put it in their hands and they're loving it. So it got New York Times coverage. It got Washington Post coverage. This is an obscure composer in an obscure format, with the octet, with a clarinetist. It's like none of these pieces are what I would normally say.
Patricia Price:Well, duh, this should get coverage. It was really exciting to be able to take someone's work when they've so dedicated themselves to something and then have it work out. I felt the same with Andy's Seven Pillars. He worked on that for years and years and years before people heard it. So when you hear it and it's the greatest percussion work of all time, I'm not saying that lightly you think, oh my gosh, thank goodness we got the massive New York Times profile, because this deserves it, but it wasn't a sure deal that it would get that. So for him to do his thing and for us to do our thing and for the combination to result in what it needed to is really exciting.
Elizabeth Bowman:That's where your investment in your contacts and their belief in you and you saying this is the real deal, this is worth listening to. You have the right ears. That's where this really makes a huge difference. I mean, we're so lucky.
Patricia Price:I get off my Zoom calls at the end of the day and I think what is this life that I am living, where I've been on six hours of Zooms and every hour I've had geniuses of our time on the other end and we get to talk about ideas and we get to talk about what they're doing and they're taking my advice. Why I don't. I mean, I kind of know, and usually it's, it's very it works out. But I think I'm really lucky to be able to share great musicianship and ultimately it has nothing to do really with my contacts, it just has to do with we are lucky to have an amazing roster that's creating beautiful, beautiful music and I get to tell people about it.
Elizabeth Bowman:That's great. Let's take this in a different direction Now. I'm interested to hear how you see AI and augmented reality playing a role in the future of arts marketing. I know it, creativity and true art will always have this human component that no AI could replace.
Patricia Price:You're not going to have a beautiful piano performance that makes you sing on the inside and the hair go up on your arms, without a human soul behind it. That being said, I think there are certain intellectual property issues that need to be very carefully guarded around. So people's intellectual property is not taken in context of composition, in the context of very literature, et cetera, et cetera. Where I think it can be helpful is as an inspiration for writing, as an inspiration for content. I find it helpful if I have a blank page and I'm having a challenge thinking about what I want to say, fitting into Chat GPT what I'm trying to do and seeing what it produces so that I can write my own thing. But sometimes it takes away writer's block.
Patricia Price:You know there are also things like social media content that can be interesting to see what it creates and that can be a starting point for saving time. It's an amazing tool that we shouldn't be too precious to not use it just because there are parts of it that need to have boundaries. This is a theme of our conversation, but have boundaries around. Yeah, I think we will continue to evolve with it. It's a theme of our conversation but have boundaries around. Yeah, I think we will continue to evolve with it. It's a really wonderful tool for translation too. I think we will continue to see how it affects what we do. But as far as actual musical product I shouldn't say product in this context, because in this context I'm not meaning product, I'm meaning musical experiences it's something that we'll never be able to create magic.
Elizabeth Bowman:I would never want to go to an AI performance. I wasn't trying to say in terms of the creative process for the musician or the marketing tools.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, as a marketing tool. I think it really can tool, I think it really can. We have a statistics problem. I think in arts marketing in terms of reading numbers more than others. I mean, obviously there are algorithms you can read, facebook post goes up and you get your report back.
Elizabeth Bowman:But in most big businesses they have data scientists who are analyzing that data full time and in the arts it seems like there are not. Like you won't have a data scientist necessarily hired on staff for an opera company or symphony. I'm hoping that that is changing, that they are going to start employing data scientists, but I do think that AI will help with budget constricted organizations like those in the arts, to take that data and analyze it in a way that is more affordable, so that we can take advantage of it in the industry as well and not necessarily hire someone for $200,000 or whatever these data scientists are getting paid, because I think they're getting paid quite a lot of money. You know I don't want to take jobs away from data scientists, but throw us a bone in the arts, it's true, yeah, anyway, thanks for coming into the scene room and I really enjoyed our chat today and I hope we'll do it again Thanks for having me so great to see you.
