Musical Tourism: the new frontier of melody and harmony in the US classical music

In challenging times with a keen competition on the supply side, the US classical music is looking for new audiences. Next to marketing for audiences and fundraising for donors, national and international tourists become a relevant issue and focus. Social media marketing (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010; Lovejoy & Saxton, 2012; Nah & Saxton, 2013; Macnamara & Zerfass, 2012) is supporting the promotion of concerts to national and international audiences, whose musical tourism is growing. The paper investigates how much tourism marketing is today developed by marketing officers of a sample of 200 US symphony orchestras and opera houses, whose 2015’s economic performances are estimated together with tourism intensity of their locations. Thanks to k-means cluster analysis, the most crowded cluster (97 organizations) shows the highest gain and the highest tourism ratio according to US statistics of International Aviation Development Series of the US Department of Transportation, the US Department of Commerce, ITA, the National Travel & Tourism Office, and the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. The Italian US classical music could find suggestions about strategies and policies, international tourists to be much more involved than now. Above all, when cultural tourism is hitting high notes in the Italian market thanks to the worldwide well-known heritage.