I follow every major Australian opera company on social media. All of them. It’s part of my job, and honestly, most days it’s a depressing exercise.

The Instagram accounts post the same thing: a rehearsal photo with flat lighting, a caption that reads like a press release, and a “link in bio” that takes you to a ticketing page designed in 2011. The Facebook pages share those same posts plus the occasional badly cropped dress rehearsal video. The email newsletters arrive with all the warmth and personality of a tax return.

Meanwhile, the Sydney Theatre Company is running social campaigns that actually make you want to buy tickets. Sydney Dance Company is posting behind-the-scenes content that’s genuinely compelling. Even independent music acts with zero budget are outperforming our major opera companies online.

The Press Release Problem

Most opera companies treat digital marketing as a distribution channel for press releases. Someone writes a formal season announcement, and that text gets chopped up and distributed across every platform.

This fundamentally misunderstands how social media works. Nobody opens Instagram hoping to read about how “internationally acclaimed soprano [Name] brings her luminous voice to the role of Mimi.” That’s brochure copy. It’s not content.

Content is a 30-second video of the soprano warming up backstage. Content is the lighting designer explaining why they chose that shade of blue for Act III. Content is the chorus sharing what they eat before a three-hour performance. Content is the props master showing how the stage dagger is made.

People connect with people and stories, not institutions. Opera has an abundance of both, and companies are wasting the opportunity.

What Theatre and Indie Music Do Better

The theatre world figured this out years ago. Belvoir St Theatre’s social media feels like a friend telling you about a show, not a corporation selling you a product. Casual, warm, personality-driven content that treats the audience like intelligent adults.

Even more instructive is what small Australian music acts do with essentially no marketing budget. They reply to comments. They share fan content. They post in real time from rehearsals. Their tone is human, not institutional. They make their audience feel like participants, not customers.

Australian jazz musicians on Instagram are a great example. They post rehearsal clips, share what they’re listening to, discuss their creative process openly. Their follower counts might be modest, but their engagement rates are extraordinary compared to opera accounts with ten times the following.

Engagement, not reach. That’s the metric that matters for an art form that depends on repeat attendance and word of mouth.

The Website Disaster

I did an informal audit of Australian opera company websites last month. Three of the six major companies have ticketing systems requiring more than four clicks to complete a purchase. One still doesn’t have a mobile-responsive booking page — in 2026. Two have season pages with 500-word production descriptions, no images, no video, no pull quotes.

Compare that to any major music venue’s website: clear dates, clear prices, a compelling image, a short description, and a buy button. Three clicks maximum. The friction is minimal because they understand that every additional step loses customers.

Opera companies seem to believe their audience is so committed they’ll navigate any obstacle. That might have been true when your subscriber base was locked in for decades. It is not true for the younger audiences every company claims to want.

The Real Barrier Is Cultural

The root cause is institutional rather than technical. Opera companies are risk-averse organisations run by boards that care about prestige and propriety. Posting a casual backstage video feels uncomfortable to people who think of their brand as synonymous with elegance and formality.

I’ve spoken to marketing staff at several companies who tell me, off the record, that they know exactly what they should be doing. But their internal approval processes are so cumbersome — every post reviewed by three people, every caption sanitised — that by the time content is approved, it’s lost whatever life it had.

Three Things That Would Help Tomorrow

First, give your social media person actual creative freedom. Hire someone who understands the art form and trust them to represent it online without running every caption through a committee.

Second, invest in video. Even basic, phone-quality footage of rehearsals, backstage moments, and artist conversations. This is the single highest-return marketing investment any performing arts company can make right now.

Third, fix your websites. Make buying a ticket as simple as ordering a pizza. If someone has to create an account, navigate a confusing seating map, and fill in details across four pages, you’ve lost the casual buyer. They’ve already found something else to do on Saturday night.

Opera is extraordinary. The people who make it are extraordinary. The stories it tells are extraordinary. All that’s missing is telling the world about it in a way that doesn’t put them to sleep before the overture starts.