1. Big Movies Squash The Rest: Hollywood is having an inequality moment. The middle class movies are disappearing, and big franchise movies have squeezed out everything else. “This year, a huge chunk of total sales went to a handful of titles. The top 10 films at the domestic box office have accounted for 38% of ticket sales so far this year, according to data firm Comscore. That’s up from 33% in 2018 and 24% five years ago.” What does this mean for audience? Franchise movies with built-in fan bases rule because they’re safer bets. But that is narrowing out creativity. So where is the creative talent going? TV.
2. How Big Data Is Changing Music: Figuring out what music will be commercially successful is getting to be more algorithmically scientific. Analysts claim it’s not only possible to see who’s blowing up now, but more importantly, who’s going to be blowing up next. Chartmetric says it can shortlist which of the 1.7 million artists it tracks will have a big career break within the next week. This is changing how artists are picking music and how it gets made. And audiences? Algorithms reinforce existing taste and amplify it. Is our taste being narrowed?
3. Do Music Genres Still Exist? Arguably, genres are a marketing device, a way of classifying music in ways that direct listeners. But artists have always resisted genres. And increasingly so are audiences. Music critics may resist the idea, but “what if the genre killers are right? What if it doesn’t matter whether they’re right, but it’s happening anyway? Start to finish, 2019 gave us plenty of evidence.”
4. Why Some Bands Are Quitting Encores: Encores are largely about vanity. The show “ends” three-quarters through, then the band leaves the stage to be coaxed back by prolonged audience encouragement. But the banality of encores has long been a frustration for some musicians, but, in recent years, a growing number of notable acts have taken a stand against performing them at all.

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1. The Arts Help You Live Longer? There are now endless studies that purport to show that participating in the arts makes your life better/makes you smarter/makes you happier. Now one that suggests you will live longer. We understand the need to quantify that the arts are tangibly worthwhile. But does this neverending stream of studies make anyone more inclined to take up the arts? Or is it a tool to use to try to convince funders?
2. What The Top Ten Books Of The 2010s Say About Publishing: A few interesting things. “In 2010, nearly 80 percent of the top-selling titles were fiction, and by 2019 that percentage dropped to 32 percent.” But perhaps more interesting were the titles themselves — the top three books were the Fifty Shades series. The other seven? All had movies attached (and in fact, the Shades books also were movies), so the lessons are clear. To get a top-selling book, you have to also have a successful movie of it made.
3. Broadway Musical Curtain Calls Are Getting Longer: These post-curtain moments have less to do with telling the story and more with telling the audience how to feel about the story they have just seen and what they should tell their friends. This follows the general audience trend that you want to give audiences opportunities to collectively render their appreciation in front of the community. In short — it’s become part of the show.
4. Paris Tries To Decentralize Its Arts: An ambitious new arts center is being built in a Paris suburb. Komunuma’s mix of programs will make it a destination, especially as the greater Paris region seeks to shore up activity in the capital’s suburbs. They foresee “a plurality of centers with multiple, distinct identities. The development of Grand Paris will lead to a redistribution of culture around the capital.
5. Can Virtual Reality Improve The Museum Experience? Virtual reality and augmented reality (AR)—which overlays digital elements on the real world rather than creating a fully immersive alternative—are “unbelievably promising” for the future of communication, says Daniel Birnbaum. How? It allows visitors to more easily dive deeper into what they’re seeing. The question is how to accomplish it in ways that aren’t distracting from the art itself.

1. Scalping’s Scary New Phase: Scalpers have been a fact of life since there were first tickets. The internet only made it worse, and performers and those running venues have tried in vain to limit ticket scalping. We thought that armies of bots buying up available tickets were the biggest challenge. But scalping has entered a scary new phase in which sophisticated data analysis and distributed communities of fans and opportunists have discovered profit in fans’ passions for their favorite performers. There are markets, sub-markets, and even consultants who school those looking to get into the scalping game. What to do? Not much, so far.
2. When Popularity Is A Liability: Every arts organization wants to be popular, wants to be successful, wants people to pay attention. And museums have become sophisticated at getting people in through the doors. But popularity in some cases now actively degrades the experience of actually seeing the art. And who are all these people coming to see it and what are they trying to see and are they getting it? Here’s an example where “success” as traditionally defined by popularity may not actually be “success” as defined artistically.
3. Why Is The Visual Art World Turning To Performance? “Performance and installation pieces are now the preferred media of just such moments at biennials and museum shows. For the second edition in a row, the top prize for a national pavilion at the Venice Biennale was won by a performance. And this doesn’t even count the “yoga in the museum” movements and performances held around art. Is this about needing to enhance a static space or creating a more heightened sense of “occasion” in coming to the museum? There may be a sense that in an always-entertainment culture it’s no longer enough just to offer a quiet experience.
4. All Of Me – Fans Want “Constant” Content From Their Stars (Even After They’re Dead): Is this the next evolution of music and stars as brands? It’s no longer enough just to make an album and tour. Fans want continuous touch points with their stars, hungry for details about how their heroes live and what they think. This extends now even after death, with holographs touring in concert. Where does the artist end and the brand begin?
5. Piggybacking Culture: After New York City’s success in giving free access to the city’s arts organizations with its Culture Pass, Philadelphia will let Free Library of Philadelphia cardholders reserve one free entry per year at some of the city’s cultural institutions. Is this kind of offering one kind of cultural experience to those who use another kind of experience a good way of expanding both audiences?

Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

1. When The Audience Says “Traditional,” What Does That Mean? An observation about fans of opera in Ireland: “Over the years I’ve had many opportunities to question people gently about their personal identification and tastes in operas and opera productions. And it turns out that traditionalists don’t like only traditional productions. Whatever it is they like, they just call it traditional, and vice versa.” So does “traditional” really mean things we’re familiar with as opposed to established canon in an art form? Worth considering when thinking about how far you can lead an audience.
2. LA MoCA Is Making Admission Free, But It’s Difficult: MoCA revealed plans to go free at its annual benefit in May, a switch made possible with a $10-million gift from board President Carolyn Powers. So why did the change take eight months to make? Free, it turns out, is complicated. Why? Dealing with many more visitors, for one thing. That takes bulking up the infrastructure to deal with it. then, of course, making admission free changes the expectations people have when they come in the door. Admission, it turns out, is also a culture, a mindset.
3. Globalism – USA No More: It wasn’t long ago that globalism meant the spread and dominance of American pop culture. While American music and movies still find international audiences, the rise of K-Pop, Bollywood and Turkish soap operas and Spanish-language telenovelas has diversified global fare. There are many reasons American pop culture on longer rules the world.
4. How Disney Has Stumbled With Audiences Over 25 Years: Disney’s new streaming service has been billed as a new major player. But the company hasn’t had a great track record getting technology and the internet right. Kara Swisher has been writing about companies and the internet for even longer than Disney has been trying to figure out how to deal with the contemporary world. Swisher: “Forget the dashing Mandalorian. Do you remember Starwave? Infoseek? Go? Daily Blast? Spoonful.com? Club Penguin? Tapulous? Maker Studios?
5. Small Theatre Is Small Potatoes, Right? Look At The Economic Impact: “What of the storefronts, those famous Chicago institutions where a full house can mean 80 people and where artists frequently toil for little or even no compensation? Can they claim a significant economic impact?” Oh yes, writes Chris Jones. And a new study of impact of New York’s Off- And Off Off- theatres commissioned by the mayor’s office and released on Wednesday, finds that the city is home to 748 Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway theater organizations responsible for 3,000 jobs. But there is also quite a bit of churn: The study reveals that more than 280 theater organizations were established in the city since 2011, while more than 100 closed.

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

1. Will Streaming Wars End Pop Culture? Our larger culture is defined by common pop culture, the culture we all see and debate and talk about. TV and blockbuster movies get in front of us. But streaming is fragmenting culture behind paywalls, and inevitably we have less common culture between us.
2. Will Streaming Fragmentation Help Or Hurt The Movies? Increasingly, movies are debuting behind the paywalls of streaming services. “Abundance can be its own kind of scarcity. Without a sense of occasion, without the idea that a given experience is special, even rare, all experiences become equivalent, and our attention follows the path of least resistance.” So will movies lose their sense of occasion when they’re only seen on the couch in your living room?
3. Should Audience Data Include Social Class? We seem to want to measure everything about audience these days. But somehow we’re squeamish about social class. On the other hand, cultural organizations have reason to be wary. “As long as we continue to make vague generalisations about the social background of our audiences and users, we further the conditions in which a culturally entitled minority can continue to benefit from the majority of publicly supported arts and heritage.”
4. Classical Music’s “Decade Of Reckoning”: The world of classical music has been changing quickly in recent years. Anne Midgette: “The music isn’t the problem, it’s the way we’re offering it.” Big, inflexible institutions take away the “oxygen and funds” from the smaller organizations, she argues, which typically have a stronger vision and take more risks. Audiences, she adds, prove time and again there’s no lack of interest. “I think the only reason orchestras are struggling is that not everybody wants to go and sit in a concert hall and have that experience. It’s not that people don’t want to hear Beethoven.”
5. Theatre Versus Screens – Where Theatre Is Winning: In France, the timeworn art of French marionette theatre “continues to capture minds and hearts in this country in ways that smartphones, video games and the most seducing technologies can’t.” So what is it about this most analog of arts that still captures hearts and minds?

Image by Stefan Coders from Pixabay

1. If Algorithms Shave Off The Edges, What’s Left? It begins with a good impulse – people want to be able to find things they’re interested in. Content makers also want to get their work in front of people who will appreciate it. So algorithms facilitate this process. But over time, content makers adjust to make their work better feed the algos. And consumers over time narrow their choices as their innate taste is reinforced and refined. Writer Zadie Smith identifies a problem: “The key with the unfreedom of the algorithm is that it knows everything and it feeds back everything. So, you can no longer have this bit of humanity which is absolutely necessary — privacy: the sacred space in which you do not know what the other thinks of you.”
2. Publishing Is More Dependent On Mega-hits Than Ever: Though the hits-driven nature of publishing has not changed in recent years, the nature of those hits has. Due to a number of coalescing factors—including a shrinking physical retail market and an increase in competing entertainment driven by the proliferation of streaming TV platforms—book publishing has watched as a handful of mega-selling titles have begun to command an ever-larger share of its sales. This doesn’t mean smaller titles will disappear, but it’s the content that is selling that is being impacted.
3. Netflix Is About To Change. The Audience Will Change: The vast majority of Netflix’s viewers (upwards of 80 percent, according to him) watch licensed content (“Friends” and the like) and in order to create a library of programming audiences will pay for, the company’s gone massively in debt: “Netflix is currently in the hole for about $20 billion. This is unsustainable. Additionally, a lot of that licensed content will go away and streaming services melt away. So Netflix will have to fundamentally adapt.
4. Is The Solution To Ringing Phones In Theatres A “Cellphone Prison”? Some believe so, and some theatres are locking up phones as patrons arrive. It’s effective sure. But does it address the wrong problem? People forget to turn their phones off, so aren’t effective reminders better? Evidently not.
5. Eliminate Library Fines, Increase Returns: Will public library users return books on time if they aren’t under threat of overdue fines? Turns out yes. The Chicago Public Library dropped fines and found the return of late books increased by 240 percent. “It’s a big piece of evidence countering a major argument used by those arguing against ditching overdue fines for library books.”

1. Department of Let-The-Consumer-Define-Their-Experience, Part I: Netflix says it will introduce a feature that audiobooks have offered for a while now – the ability to speed up or slow down playback of video. So you can double-time through “Seinfeld” perhaps? Presumably this is for people who just want to get through things in an efficient way, but movie producers are appalled at the idea. Many of them are already not happy that their movies are shrunk down to TVs, phone or tablet screens, believing that they should be seen in theatres on the big screen as intended. But consumers have shown they’re more interested in convenience and portability than being in theatres. The question: Is this smart audience strategy giving the consumer what they want or does it ultimately compromise the art form?
2. Department of Let-The-Consumer-Define-Their-Experience, Part II – Should Bookstores Charge Admission: Many is the reader who go to bookstores for entertainment, browsing the shelves, trying out a book or two. In recent years bookstores have tried to make themselves more alluring, cultivating communities of readers. So would it make sense to charge a small fee for admission? Why not monetize the intangibles? The Strand, and stores like it, could charge an admission fee. Something token, like a dollar. For a buck, you’re granted access to everything the store has to offer. You can browse to your heart’s delight. There’s no pressure to make a purchase. Sounds risky, when you are trying to encourage as many customers as possible to come in. On the other hand, if it really were a small fee and people felt they were supporting the experience?
3. Streaming Is About To Get Very Messy (And Expensive): Dozens of streaming services are coming online. In a couple of weeks, you’ll have so many options to pay for content à la carte, you won’t really know where to start. And yes, you’ll be paying extra for the inconvenience. Apple is first out, with its new service and a raft of high profile shows. But with each streamer turning out original series and movies, it will be hard to decide which services you want to subscribe to. And more and more expensive. All of which will mean that our a la carte access will mean we won’t have access to some of the shows we might be interested in. Ah, but it was so much simpler in the old days of cable TV bundles.
4. The Explosion Of Streaming Will Bring The Golden Age Of TV To A Close: The Golden Age of TV, the halcyon period that dates from the premiere of The Sopranos in January 1999, has been drawing to a close for a while now, but as the streamers lay out their plans for the 21st century’s third decade, it’s increasingly clear that it’s well over. Streamers are spending big on content, but as audiences for these various services fragment, it will be more and more impossible to support the cost. And with each streamer in effect erecting walls around their content, it means content will fragment, appealing to more and more niche audiences.
5. What’s The Point Of A Public Library? Interesting piece in the Baffler. Libraries have done a fascinating job of reinventing themselves in the digital age. So what now is really their purpose? “If public libraries are not for the rich, they probably are not otherwise for the poor. To understand the public library as a benevolent form of welfare would be to entirely miss the radical potential of the institution as a political project. It isn’t utopian, nor is about culturing the masses, nor offering the marginalized a space where they mustn’t ‘pay for coffee’.”

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This Week’s Insights: When art falls into the commodity trap… Diverseity in movies leads to bigger audiences… The nine-year-old who became celebrated for her theatre manners… Facebook’s difficulties with deciding who gets seen… Conde Nast’s faltering glossy magazine model.

1. When Art Is A Commodity: It becomes more about getting an audience than making the art. And when we understand the algorithms that “scale” audience, we squeeze out the extraneous and narrow the ideas. “The current streaming culture we find ourselves in marks music and wide open spaces of exploration into nothing more than a commodity, and because of this, we’re increasingly driven away from music’s way of connecting us all, that deep resonating force that helps us experience and process the weird.”
2. A Study Reports That More Diverse Movies Attract Bigger Audiences: In its latest data drop, analytics firm Movio has discovered “a correlation between a minority group’s representation on screen and that group’s audience turnout, with some groups attending in numbers at more than twice the usual rate.” The report also shows that consumers less inclined to head to the movies will turn up to the multiplex if they see themselves projected on screen. In short, diversity is just good business.
3. Why A Nine-Year-Old Became A Theatre Manners Sensation: In June, just before leaving for sleepaway camp, she put Magic Marker to paper and laid out what she calls her Broadway Rules, and the manifesto made the rounds. Her ten do’s and don’ts include some items that seem obvious (“Stay in seat until intermission,” “Listen to the Ushers”) as well as a few that rarely make it into etiquette primers (“NEVER sing along,” “No ‘gas passing.’ ”). Since then, her guidance rules have caught the imaginations of theatre fans who are celebrating the common sense rules. Lesson? Fans like it when someone debates or sets down markers for how to enjoy or elevate the experience they care about.
4. Facebook – Free Speech? Amplification? The social media behemoth is under a lot of fire recently for helping to spread rumors and lies. Some cast the problem as a matter of free speech. But is it? “The problem is that Facebook doesn’t offer free speech; it offers free amplification. No one would much care about anything you posted to Facebook, no matter how false or hateful, if people had to navigate to your particular page to read your rantings, as in the very early days of the site.” Where Facebook gets into trouble is its algorithm that promotes some kinds of content over others. Facebook has become very good at observing behavior and blowing it up big. Problem is, that behavior isn’t always positive.
5. How Conde Nast (The Man) Invented The Glossy Magazine: It was a brilliant business model. “The equation of upscale readers and upscale brands with profit, projecting an aspirational image of the ideal consumer through both editorial and ads so that vulnerable readers would chase it, made Nast’s fortune many times over. His company established the template of the editor as a heroic, godlike figure. Now that brilliant model has become a liability as the internet has upended the advertiser revenue model.

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This Week’s Insights: Pinterest Is Changing Its Algorithm… Why We need curators, not algorithms… Instagram gets rid of “likes”… Background dancers are becoming stars (thanks to social media)… Why orchestras shouldn’t do “free”.

1. Pinterest Rode To Success With Its Algorithm. Time To Move On: The social media platform has soared by driving massive numbers of users to viral content. But viral content. It encourages users to behave in certain ways, to portray themselves in ways that are rewarded by views and likes. And it may not be… healthy. “The company’s leaders say they want to map a different route to success in Silicon Valley, one that’s less meteoric and more humane. But in its first year as a public company, it faces a pivotal challenge: How to grow beyond a user base that has historically skewed toward white, suburban women without alienating loyalists, stereotyping newcomers, or potentially allowing for the spread of misinformation and radicalization.”
2. Algorithms Versus Taste-makers: Radio station WNYC cancels a show that explored new music, giving listeners opportunities to find new artists. The station says it doesn’t want to have “playlist” shows, but host John Schaefer argues that leaving music choice to algorithms is not so much exploration as it is reinforcement of the taste you already have. As more and more of our choices in an exponentially more crowded world are driven by algorithms, we’re seeing the downsides.
3. Instagram Removes “Likes” As It Looks For Different Way To Value Content: It’s easy to “like” things. Takes almost no effort, in fact. But perhaps too much emphasis on high “like” numbers measures the wrong thing. That in turn promotes certain kinds of content – content that inflames emotional response, for example. So all the platforms are looking at different ways for users to express how they feel about content. It’s a difficult proposition.
4. Backup Dancers Are Becoming New Media Stars: Backup dancers used to be part of the background, and anonymous. But they aren’t very “backup” anymore; instead, like the 16-year-old who began touring with Janet Jackson at age 12 and is now a major social media influencer, they’re at the center of the conversation. That’s thanks to Instagram. “Internet popularity can be a dancer’s entree to choreographing and starring in their own videos.”
5. Why Orchestras Shouldn’t Give Free Concerts: “Giving it away for free, whether by regularly scheduled programming or by striking or locked out musicians, is not getting the job done. It’s not growing audiences, it’s not building tons of new support, and — please hear this — it hurts us when people don’t see how much it costs to produce this art. [Here] are five reasons why free concerts are not serving us well.”

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This Week’s Insights: Hacking your arts experience… When audience controls live-streaming of course there are issues… Why Netflix on Broadway is a win win… And another Facebook metrics scandal – why don’t we learn?… How projections are changing live theatre.

1. Hacking The Museum Tour: Does the standard audio-guide tour through the museum seem… a bit dull? Conventional? There are many ways to tell stories with art – which pieces to look at, what to say about it… For several years now, private tour companies have reshuffled “official” tours in attempts to retell museum collections’ stories in ways suited to people with specific interests. Making tours fun and participatory and irreverent and topic-specific is nothing new. But do these tours deliver on their promises? “I found some of the interactive portions of the tour superficial and a bit corny, but the younger, millennial members of the group seemed to enjoy them. Bringing games, imagination and creativity into the art viewing experience certainly makes the museum seem less stuffy and more relatable.”
2. The Manifest Problems With Live-Streaming: The video game platform Twitch has become the go-to for live streaming – more than YouTube or Facebook. But how do you police live streams? How do you stop all manner of noxious, illegal and horrifying live behavior from being broadcast to huge audiences? Leaving such decisions to users is problematic in the least…
3. A Netflix Movie In A Broadway Theatre? Why? It seems counter-intuitive. These theatres were designed for live performance. They’re expensive. And why would you want to see a movie in a theatre theater? The streaming giant Netflix is renting the Belasco Theatre in midtown Manhattan for a four-week, eight-shows-a-week Broadway-style run of its latest major feature, Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. Howard Sherman explains the benefits that Netflix, the Shubert Organization (owner of the Belasco), and Broadway more generally could get from the unusual arrangement.
4. Another Facebook metrics Scandal: A proposed settlement says Facebook would pay $40 million for falsely inflating video metrics. Where to start? First $40 million is insignificant to a company that generates billions as a matter of regular business. Second, haven’t we learned by now that trusting metrics of views and clicks is a dumb way to measure value? “The suit accused Facebook of acknowledging miscalculations in metrics upon press reports, but still not taking responsibility for the breadth of the problem. “The average viewership metrics were not inflated by only 60%-80%; they were inflated by some 150 to 900%,” stated an amended complaint.”
5. How Projection Is Changing The Theatre Experience: Projection design is that cool part of theatre where – poof! – an entire kingdom can freeze over, as in the Broadway and touring versions of Frozen, or where, in Anastasia, “a stage-spanning LED wall displays landscapes that move in tandem with [a] train.” And it’s more portable than a physical set that has to be moved. It’s a melding a physical and digital experience that is becoming more common.

Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay