It has long been observed by Jazz musicians that when it comes to American art music funding, Classical Institutions take the lion’s share. These are of course anecdotal observations, however, this study seeks to verify these observations and, if possible, quantify them.
This study has two sets of goals:
Short-term goals:
Answer the questions:
Long-term goals:
This study compares the top 50 Jazz and Classical Non-profit Institutions, respectively, as determined by total revenue in the most recent tax documents available. A variety of metrics are looked at for comparison, in four main categories: Personnel, Revenue, Expenses, and Bottom Line. These metrics are investigated in terms of averages per organization type, totals by organization type, and totals by each organization.
The dataset, which can be explored on the last page of this dashboard, was collected from publicly available tax documents from ProPublica’s ’Nonprofit Explorer. The dashboard will be updated as more data is made available.
Of the data presented: 66% is from 2019, 31% is from 2018, and 3% is from 2017. Differences in when organizations report, when the IRS processes, and when ProPublica publishes accounts for the gaps in reporting. These are all pre-pandemic figures. This shortcoming in the data stream will be evened out over time by updating the dataset as new numbers are released.
This study does not include for-profit organizations, colleges/universities, or organizations that offer both Jazz and Classical programming. This is due to lack of publicly available data, the difficulty in parsing funding streams within an organization that supports both genres, and/or the limited resources of the author. However, it would be beneficial for future studies to look at the types of organizations just mentioned.
This study and dashboard was created by Jazz bassist and data nerd Nicholas Krolak.
Founder of Retrograde Analytics, a data research and analytics firm that perfroms data tasks and projects for nonprofit organizations and small businesses whose work benefits arts/culture, sustainability, and civics in order to harness the power of data for the greater good.
Retrograde Analytics specializes in:
Questions and comments can be sent to retrogradeanalytics@gmail.com.
The answer to the first question proposed by this study, “Is there a funding disparity between Jazz and Classical Institutions?”, is yes. There is unquestionably a funding disparity between the top 50 Jazz and Classical Institutions, which brings the next question, how is this disparity quantified.
If we look at the averaged metrics, we find a great disparity in favor of the Classical World. Among the revenue metrics we see an average discrepancy of:
When we look at the last major revenue metric, Program Revenue, a similar disparity to Total Revenue or Grant Revenue. However the gap is considerably smaller at 568.78%, which aligns with the data from both the Percent of Revenue from Grants and Percent Program Revenue metrics respectively. This suggests that Jazz Orgaizations get a higher percentage of their revenue from sales and are closer to being able to support themselves without outside money.
Solvency, although not the main focus this study, is in fact a point of interest in future discussions about the sustainability of Art Musics in America. It is clear from this dataset that the majority of Jazz and Classical Institutions cannot support themselves without major philanthropic support, however, it is worth while to see which group is closer to being able operate on their own.
Another interesting metric is Grant Dollars per Fundraising Dollar. This can be seen as a return on investment for fundraising expenses. Here, Jazz Organizaions average $23.32 per fundraising dollar, whereas Classical Organizations average $9.68.
In conclusion, there is no doubt that Classical Organizations have more funding than their Jazz counterparts. In total the 50 largest Classical Institutions have at their disposal:
compared to the 50 largest Jazz Organizations:
These totals are orders of magnitude apart. However, Jazz Organizations seem to be less dependent on outside money, get higher returns on foundraising expenses, and on average seem to make more with less.
Moving forward, let us consider:
Why does this funding deficit exist?
What can be done about it?
and…
What would the Jazz Ecosystem look like if Jazz Institutions were funded on the same level as their Classical peers?
This section expreses the data fields as averages per organziation in order to compare Jazz and Classical institutions.