During the lockdown, audiovisual music sources accessible on the Internet or by cable channels experienced a significant boom. While the providers of these services feared a post-pandemic disengagement, customers have remained loyal, a finding made for The Duty by Wilfried Texier, CEO of the cable channel Mezzo.
“For televisions as well as for theaters, finding and retaining the audience is the most important issue,” summarizes Wilfried Texier, visiting Montreal on the occasion of ten years of collaboration between Mezzo and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra (OSM), for the capture of rare and phenomenal Gurre-Lieder Schoenberg’s opening night. “For the venues, it’s about finding an audience again. For us, it’s the opposite phenomenon. In many countries, we’ve had an increase in consumption, with people at home and needing music. Our challenge has been to keep them. But, in the end, that doesn’t change our approach,” says Mr. Texier, who has just succeeded Hervé Boissière, with whom The Duty had spoken during the pandemic, as early as May 2020.
The baby and the bath water
“COVID has not necessarily changed things. It has accelerated phenomena and destroyed some existing models” in the eyes of the new director of Mezzo, a cable channel specializing in classical music, which covers 75 countries all over the planet.
According to Wilfried Texier, the refined measurement of audience retention is tricky, if not impossible. Since there is no advertising on Mezzo, there is no economic marker. However, the channel now claims 80 million subscribers compared to 65 million before the pandemic, while the number of territories reached has not particularly expanded.
“In some countries, we can measure a number of subscriptions specific to Mezzo. They show us that we have a loyal audience that we have managed to keep.” The trend is all the more positive since the television market in the world is a market of “resistance” and not “growth”, according to the director, due to the change in consumption patterns. However, when “traditional operators lose subscribers, we will lose them mechanically.”
In other words, if a cable customer opts for the Internet, Mezzo is inevitably thrown out with the bathwater. To avoid a massacre linked to the potential change in these consumption patterns, the Les Échos group, which owns Mezzo, also owns Medici.tv, the leader in the distribution of classical music in video on the Internet. These two networks are partners, the Gurre-Lieder of the OSM will be on Medici.tv at the end of September as well, before later rebroadcasts on Mezzo. Unlike Hervé Boissière, Wilfried Texier does not direct the two entities, but they operate in very close relations.
Mezzo itself is available on the web in some territories. In France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, Mezzo can be seen by Internet fans on Amazon Prime. The experience in these four countries does not yet suggest a significant shift in cable customer consumption patterns: “There are no figures that can lead us to a serious conclusion, because we are in a niche market.” For now, the slightly older age of the customer base makes the issue a little different: “We are a little more resilient, but that is a question that all cable operators are asking themselves.”
Artistic comfort
Mezzo, which broadcasts classical music (orchestral, instrumental, lyrical), dance and jazz, sought to estimate whether this post-pandemic loyalty varied according to customer tastes. “There is no notable difference: jazz fans are as loyal as classical fans, which is explained by the fact that the offer is reduced in all these genres,” explains Wilfried Texier.
In live music, the question of mediation and increased contextualization arose after the pandemic, with the aim, for Mezzo, of becoming more inviting to viewers. Is the channel experiencing this demand in the same way? “We know the virtues of mediation. All our live broadcasts are presented to explain the context and provide keys that allow you to better appreciate the music. [Mezzo a] the constraint of being broadcast in many countries with different languages, but with the same signal that goes everywhere, in Korea, in France, in Canada… We hope that, perhaps, artificial intelligence will allow us to resolve this problem of language in mediation in the more or less long term,” Wilfried Texier tells us.
The biggest surprise, however, is in the artists’ attitudes towards the medium. “I notice that there are more concerts that follow concepts, but it’s mainly habits that have changed.” But that’s not the big change. “During the pandemic, we continued our collaboration with the artists. So we filmed them in empty rooms. Some of them said to us: ‘Why put ourselves in live conditions without the need to be live, since we don’t have the adrenaline of the audience’s presence?’ So we filmed, allowing ourselves to make corrections, while broadcasting very quickly after recording, in the following week,” recalls Wilfried Texier.
From this modus operandi a new hybrid genre was born. “When the public returned, some artists were very happy to find the public and the fever of live, but others found the latitude offered by the corrections very pleasant. They asked us to record live, but to broadcast in the following week with the possibility of corrections. We no longer called it “live”, but “live session” ». This makes the director of Mezzo a little sad, in whose eyes “live has more value”.
Montreal
The request for live sessions touched all disciplines, “especially dance, much less jazz and, in classical, soloists as well as conductors”.
Medici is more impacted by the phenomenon. “Music lovers mainly watch the live broadcast or the concert in the hours and days that follow. So what is damaging, for a platform, is an artist who agrees to the live broadcast, but who, after the live broadcast, comes and says: “Wait, we will make corrections and you can put it back in a week.” At that point, the platform loses a significant part of the audience. With us, rebroadcasts are more delayed.”
Wilfried Texier admits that the number of artists who are reluctant and switch from live to live session has increased. “Let’s say they realized they could do it. So some are taking advantage of it.”
The director of Mezzo is, however, pleased with the abandonment of the pandemic habit of many projects being decided at the last minute. “A platform like Medici can adapt to this. It is much more difficult for a television, because the programs are sent well in advance and we try to work with the operators to promote them. We are therefore happy to find anticipation and reliability in planning.”
The Russian part of the programming, once rich on Mezzo, was replaced quite naturally: “There was no strategy, in the sense of how to replace this specific content. A space was simply freed up and filled naturally with other projects, elsewhere.”
In Montreal, Mezzo chooses a certain number of programs per season: “The OSM provides the rights; we provide financing for the producer, who will be able to set up his financing plan. We are both Mezzo and Medici, the two companies contributing to the pot.” Gurre-Lieder were an exceptional project. For Mezzo too. “It’s very rare, and we didn’t have it in stock. I can’t go into the cooking secrets, but we had to work a little harder.”
As for listeners’ listening habits, they don’t change as much as in streaming, where people listen massively to piano and few vocal recitals. “At Medici, the promotion, the way of editorializing, is thought out according to what people watch the most. Our work is very different: we have a grid and we mainly observe variable tastes depending on the territories. In Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan, the audience, younger, is clearly less attracted to opera than in France. It’s up to us to make them broaden their palette.”