“The first challenge is to convince prospective audiences that there should be no fear of embarrassment associated with coming to a performance. Decades of research have shown that the best demographic predictor of attendance to all performing arts disciplines is level of educational attainment. … For many people, attending a performance is equated with shelling out big bucks to feel stupid in a sea of strangers, to be thrown out of one’s cultural comfort zone. How do we fix that?” Duncan Webb has a few ideas.
Category: AUDIENCE
2017 Emmy Ratings Weren’t All-Time Low (But Close)
“The final tally for the 2017 Emmys, hosted by Stephen Colbert on CBS, avoids the all-time low 11.3 million viewers that tuned in last year. In the key demo of adults 18-49, this year’s show did bottom out, slipping 10 percent from a 2.7 rating to a 2.5 rating. Overnight ratings are naturally below those of NBC’s Sunday Night Football, which took a 12.6 overnight rating among households.”
Millennials Are Sooo Yesterday. Here’s iGen
Coming to shoulder the burden is a generation the psychologist Jean Twenge calls iGen — like iPhones, but people. They love not only iPhones but also a number of other things beginning with i, such as individualism, irreligiosity, and (we’re straining a touch here) “in person no more.” Twenge defines them thus: “Born in 1995 and later, they grew up with cell phones, had an Instagram page before they started high school, and do not remember a time before the internet.”
Will Augmented Reality Change The Ways We Interact With Art? Facebook Is Investigating…
AR makes art — in different ways — both more and less accessible. On the one hand, art can be everywhere around you now. On the other, AR art can only be enjoyed by people who own smartphones. Around 5 billion people still don’t.
Why Big Musicals Have Become Big Business
“On the heels of its most lucrative season yet, with a record-setting $1.37b in ticket sales, Broadway has experienced something of a rebirth. From the success of La La Land on the big screen to Hamilton onstage, there’s a collective renewed interest in theater that’s been reflected in a wave of movie-musicals and televised live-concert experiences. All of this seems, to entertainment industry insiders, like the chorus following a crescendo.” How has this happened? Disney and Glee.
A Total Of 864 People Will Be Able To See Punchdrunk’s New Production – Is That A Bad Thing?
Lyn Gardner: “Access is always going to be a problem with small-capacity or small-scale shows. But does that mean we should ban artists from making shows that involve an intimacy of experience or one-on-one work because very few can get to see it? It would be odd if in the quest for access we started asking artists to censor the kind of work they might dream of and make.”
Does Theatre Need Its Own Rotten Tomatoes?
“The bottom line is that, in theatre, as in movies and restaurants, aggregation is just a new way of looking at opinions. Yes, it’s all reductive – even the opinions can be as well, in relation to work they assess – but instead of getting aggravated with these sites, theatre producers should just focus on creating great work, as I believe most do, instead of trying to kill the messenger, as their Hollywood brethren wish they could.”
What Explains Hollywood’s Summer Swoon? Structural Decline! (Sound Familiar?)
“To explain the bad news, movie executives are trying out fresh excuses (blame … Rotten Tomatoes?), while journalists are rehashing familiar criticisms (people are bored with sequels!). Both of these explanations are wrong. The subtler truth is that the domestic movie market is in a slow, decades-long structural decline.”
Stephen King Movie Opens With Biggest Box Office Ever For A Horror Movie
Warner Bros. and New Line’s adaptation of the Stephen King book is launching to $179 million worldwide, including a record-breaking $117 million North American debut. The movie is taking in an impressive $62 million from 46 territories abroad.
TV Ratings – We Have To Get Off Of Just Measuring The Linear (Live) Audience
“I don’t think the broadcasting narrative should be linear versus digital anymore, but rather linear plus digital,” NBC Entertainment Chairman Bob Greenblatt said during a panel. “I would love to get to a point where the live, same-day rating was the proverbial dinosaur instead of the broadcast network.” Executives from New York-based Nielsen, who appeared Friday at the press tour, acknowledged as much. They said they have answered the call by networks and ad agencies to provide “total audience data” that includes viewing on Internet-connected TV sets, digital devices and on screens seen outside the home.