Category: AUDIENCE

Study: Rural UK Residents Will Embrace Diverse Work (But It’s A Tough Proposition)

White and retired audiences in rural areas will happily go and see diverse work – and wish there was more of it – but more support is needed to create and tour it, new research has concluded. Academics at the University of Lincoln found performances in non-traditional spaces that dramatise narratives from diverse communities, rather than presenting “culturally foreign” performances, attract larger rural audiences.

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 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?’”

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.”

How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming The Music Business

Youtube, fueled by their parent company’s artificial intelligence division, Google Brain, has successfully accelerated their recommendation capabilities through a series of micro-improvements. For example, roughly four years ago, YouTube made its first significant improvement to its recommendation algorithm when it decided to value the number of times users spent watching a video more than the number of video clicks per person. With this one move, creator’s saw their view counts decline, who had originally profited from misleading headlines and thumbnails. All of a sudden, higher quality videos which were directly correlated with long watch times came to the forefront. As a result, watch time on YouTube grew 50% year over year over the next three years.

A Short Story Exposes Huge Gaps In The New Universe Of Literary Criticism

In this case, the media has been thrust in the position of the literary critic, drawing lines between the artwork and the broader culture. This isn’t a bad development, exactly—it’s great that a short story is making headlines. But it is also worth noting that the boundaries of literary criticism, at least as they are traditionally conceived, are being exceeded across the internet. The response to “Cat Person” is the latest evidence that we have entered new territory for online criticism, and no one quite knows what to make of it.

Neil LaBute, Katori Hall, Quiara Alegría Hudes, And Other Playwrights On How They Think Of Audiences

Hudes: “If you write solely to suit the audience, you’ll be chasing your tail. That being said, I study them very closely – where they laugh, where they lean in, where they ‘go fishing’ in their minds.”
LaBute: “I want to get close to them and make them feel the events in a real way – to break the fourth wall, to look them squarely in the eye, and challenge them to leave, but force them to stay.”

Chatelet Artistic Director Ruth McKenzie On Producing Culture For A City (Or An Olympics)

“The thing that’s frustrating about doing the Olympics is that you get to the end and then you understand what you should have done. When you’re running a theatre or an opera house or a festival, you can learn from your mistakes. You get to the end of London 2012 and think, ‘Damn, I’m never going to get a chance to apply this wisdom that I have now acquired.”