Category: AUDIENCE

Record Number Of Cable Cord Cutters

This year, the number of cord-cutters in the U.S. — consumers who have ever cancelled traditional pay-TV service and do not resubscribe — will climb 32.8%, to 33.0 million adults, according to new estimates from research firm eMarketer. That’s compared with a total of 24.9 million cord-cutters as of the end of 2017, which was up 43.6% year over year (and an upward revision from eMarketer’s previous 22 million estimate).

What Orwell Knew: We’d Be Eaten By Our Screens

What’s most striking about the telescreen’s ubiquity is how right and how wrong Orwell was about our technological present. Screens are not just a part of life today: they are our lives. We interact digitally so often and in such depth that it’s hard for many of us to imagine (or remember) what life used to be like. And now, all that interaction is recorded.

Is Lyn Gardner Suggesting That Theatres Pay For Developing A New Crop Of Critics? Or For Turning Audience Members Into Critics?

“A new approach to theatre criticism, in which theatres see developing critical voices as part of audience and artist development and invest in it accordingly in terms of both time and money, is needed. … Particularly when The Stage survey indicates that word of mouth and friends is a more trusted source of opinion than mainstream publications. Could audiences be those friends too?”

Twitter Piles On Writer Who Suggests Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries

A Forbes contributor wrote a short piece titled “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money,” arguing that libraries should be shuttered in return for Amazon opening bookstores in local communities. At the gist of the writer’s argument is that Starbucks has replaced libraries as a friendly place to go and read and streaming services like Amazon Prime Video have replaced video rentals, which many local libraries had provided.

The High-Stakes, Highly Combative World Of Amazon’s Self-published Romance Authors

A genre that mostly features shiny, shirtless men on its covers and sells ebooks for 99 cents a pop might seem unserious. But at stake are revenues sometimes amounting to a million dollars a year, with some authors easily netting six figures a month. The top authors can drop $50,000 on a single ad campaign that will keep them in the charts — and see a worthwhile return on that investment. In other words, self-published romance is no joke.

Baltimore’s Independent Popular Music Artists Are Rewriting The City’s Sound

It’s all about local in Baltimore, and musicians know it as well as anyone. “The city’s emerging musicians represent a collage of perspectives, aesthetics and reasons for being. Some of them are decidedly activists; others wear their political views more lightly, or express skepticism about art’s ability to effect change. Most of the artists acknowledge the influence of jazz and hip-hop in their music, even as it defies categorization. And each in their own way believes Baltimore informed their creativity.”

History – And A Lot Of Music – Gets Lost When Writers Think Women ‘Play Like Girls’

The problem starts with access to audiences and continues with the way women who produce, conduct, and play music get described in the media – which ends up leaving women, including an integrated all-women’s swing group that was a direct precursor to the Freedom Riders in Mississippi, out of the histories of their eras.