fringe economics
Despite the Scotsman’s coverage, I think it’s pretty obvious that the decision taken by the four biggest Fringe comedy venues to collaborate and bill themselves as the “Comedy Festival” is motivated by pragmatism, rather than any desire to split away from the Fringe. In fact, the managers at each venue have been very specific in making that crystal clear to companies coming up to Edinburgh this summer.
I am slightly confused, though, by Fringe Director Jon Morgan’s reading of the picture:
[He] said the comedy collaboration may be necessary to shore up what he calls the event’s “fragile economies”.
He added: “The cost of running a venue and a show is rising – accommodation, licences, none of these are going down.
“A lot of the planning is highly marginal – often the management of a Fringe venue or show is on a knife edge of happening or not happening.
If there are venues which have any measure of security against the fragile economies of the fringe, it’s these four. And, more importantly, their book-balancing act is rather different from the vast majority of other, smaller venues that make up the body of the Fringe.
I’m also reminded of the relationship between fringe finances and the deliberate choices taken by some venue organisers over the last five to ten years. At the end of last year’s Fringe, a story in The Times reported:
William Burdett-Coutts, director of the Assembly, the festival’s largest theatre operation, said that competition for audiences is now too tough.
“Even great shows, with great reviews, have not been getting the crowds. It’s the first time I have felt there are too many shows in Edinburgh.” [...]
Mr Burdett-Coutts began working with the Assembly Rooms on George Street more than 25 years ago. This year his empire has grown to eight venues around Edinburgh with 144 shows and a total of 700,000 tickets to sell during the festival.
“I’m as guilty as anyone else. There is a limited local audience. We have expanded our shows,” he said. Sales are down 10 per cent in terms of where they should be, Mr Burdett-Coutts added.
To complain about the number of tickets on sale at the fringe while simultaneously increasing your own venue’s contribution to that mountain is possibly a little churlish.
And given that context, while collaboration of venues does indeed represent good practice financially (and even artistically in the promotion of comedy as genre) you might just see it as a response to an economic situation that large venues have helped created for themselves.
Finally, you could argue there’s an implicit rationale in the behaviour of a number of venues at the fringe, a kind of ticketing arms race where increasing the number of venues under a particular management banner both increases your chances of taking a greater proportion of the potential total box-office, and distributes the risk associated with failure. Collaborative marketing – greater co-operation between venues – might be a step toward slowing that race.
Consciously or otherwise, it’s part of an economics of the long tail – and I’m not sure that such a model works at the level of individual company or performer in the environment of the Fringe.