The company is going through a boom period: MoviePass saw 150,000 new signups in just two days when it dropped its price back in August. But if it does go under, those subscribers will have to return to paying between $10 to $15 for a single ticket. After three months with the service, I don’t think I could do that. MoviePass changes almost everything about the theater experience, when the cost of entry is virtually zero.
Author: Douglas McLennan
The Met’s Complicity In Ignoring James Levine’s Abuse Points To Big Problems In The Classical Music World
“Now, Levine will become a convenient scapegoat, and institutions will race to condemn him with prurient finger-wagging, piling on almost gleefully in their eagerness to aver that they will never, ever, not ever work with him again. Meanwhile, orchestras and opera houses and conservatories and choruses all across the country continue to harbor and protect leaders who egregiously abuse their power, who harass musicians who can’t speak up, who assault and rape in the self-satisfied knowledge that they can get away with it.”
After Sale Of Entertainment Assets, What Will A Smaller Fox Look Like?
“The biggest and most immediate changes are likely to be felt at Fox Broadcasting, which will be divorced from studio 20th Century Fox Television. Fox will thus become the only broadcast network not affiliated with a television studio.”
Why Write Fiction In The Age Of Endless Story?
“As much as we carp about the increasing digitization of our lives, this isn’t really a new problem. Writing required cord-cutting long before the computer. It’s an act of refusal, of relinquishment, and of retreat, a decision to turn away from the world and its noise of possibilities, to chase instead a signal down the quiet of a page. That work—the deep, sustained kind that yields poems and essays and fiction—can only happen in solitude, and in silence. And that’s the trouble.”
Why Classical Music Audience-Building Strategies Don’t Work
“Working toward greater diversity in new music is necessary and right. The problem is that we’re putting the cart before the horse. Greater inclusivity isn’t an audience-building strategy—it’s an audience-building outcome. Making inclusivity the focus of strategy actually hurts our efforts. All we do is muddle classical music exceptionalism with easily disproven assumptions about musical taste, in the process blinkering ourselves to certain truths about how people use music in pretty much any other context.”
How Our Neurological Wiring Informs Our Aesthetic Taste
“Scientific evidence suggests that most of what we think we see comes from visual processing, perhaps just 20% comes from the actual input to the retina. Again, what is the evolutionary purpose of this? If we encounter a predator and had to construct what we’re seeing from scratch each time, we’d get eaten. So the brain searches the closest match that is already constructed in memory and modifies it with new input from the eye so we can figure out fast if we need to run for it. Looking at art exercises our ability to innovate images.”
How YouTube Stars Are Making Millions Off Their Fans
The type of shameless promotion that YouTubers engage in on a daily basis is radically different from what Vaccarino had experienced with traditional artists. “When it comes to selling something, with bands and traditional musicians, it’s not their priority. They’re like, ‘How do I make good music?’ And just assume the money will follow. They will be apologetic about selling merch. YouTubers are like, ‘How can I sell as much as possible to these fans who want to be sold to?’”
Want To Be Jealous Of Alex Ross? Here’s What He Got To Hear This Year
The list of remarkable performances and recordings will give you some idea of the musical creativity out there.
What Is “Culture” Anymore? The Answers Are Surprising
“The study found that more than a third of art museum-goers did not think art museums were a cultural experience, and over half of theatergoers felt the same. Audiences were more likely to consider a street fair or exotic food and drink a cultural experience than opera or ballet. Eighty-one percent of respondents said they attend cultural events for fun, while “interest in content” and “experiencing new things” ranked second and third.”
Kurt Vonnegut’s Basic Story Arcs
This archival video features Vonnegut using a chalkboard and his famous deadpan wit to map out three highly familiar narrative arcs that seem to have lost none of their popularity despite countless iterations.