The MYOpera Rebrand Story

I’m here to tell you about MYOpera’s recent rebrand from Metro Youth Opera. You may already know the story. I founded Metro Youth Opera in 2010 to create viable, paid performance experiences for emerging artists throughout the world of opera. I was a young artist myself at the time, no longer in school, and I realized there must be many others like me who were in need of performance experiences. So I created Metro Youth Opera to help fill this void. Over the course of five years, Metro Youth Opera grew in both size and reputation, and began to attract attention from outside the world of opera.

Here’s when the story of the rebrand begins. When I named the company Metro Youth Opera, “youth” referred to “Young Artist”. In the opera world, this is nearly synonymous with “Emerging Artist”. Outside of the opera world, however, “youth” means teenagers. Pretty soon, I found myself explaining the terminology to patrons, journalists, and anyone interested in what Metro Youth Opera was doing. After a few years of this, I knew I had had enough.

Out of chaos comes clarity, and this confusion became was the perfect catalyst to rethink Metro Youth Opera’s brand, mission, vision, and values. We had 5 years behind us and great recognition in the industry, but I knew that to push the company forward, we needed a rebrand.

Back in 2010 when I came up with the name Metro Youth Opera, I knew the abbreviation would be “MYOpera”. After playing with a variety of great new names (and some terrible ones!) the company’s leadership team decided to proceed with with MYOpera. We love that this name reflects our belief that opera can and should be moulded not only by new artists, but also by new audiences. No longer is opera “theirs”, but “ours”…MYOpera.

In the end, the heart of MYOpera is the same as it’s always been. We’re still focused on providing excellent formative professional experiences to emerging artists, but we’re making it clear that MYOpera is here to serve the future of opera. We’re focused on engaging new audiences in this art form and creating a viable platform for emerging artists to kickstart their professional careers. We want to take this classical art form and let new artists and audiences mould and transform it. We’re excited that our new brand, MYOpera, speaks to this sense of ownership.