diacritical

Sorry, but I'll take experience over artistry

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 10:49:56 -0800

Professional sports has more money than God, and they spend more to attract and entertain fans than anyone else. So how does the NFL sell itself? Not by touting the quality of its games. They sell the contest. They sell the experience.

And they have to work to keep making the experience better. How many perfectly functional stadiums were discarded in the 1990s/00's to be replaced by facilities with better amenities? And there's barely a moment during a game when there isn't something going on to entertain fans whether there's a play on the field or not. The game brings people in. The experience keeps them coming back.

The NFL gives away a lot of its product; almost every game is broadcast live to millions of fans for free. And there are endless bits of related free content that are produced around the games and the culture of pro football. So how do you keep improving the experience? This about the new stadium in the Meadowlands:

In recent years, television coverage of the National Football League has become so rich and detailed that teams and stadiums have no choice but to respond with their own technology plays. Last spring the league's commissioner, Roger Goodell, said the experience for fans in stadiums needed to be elevated to compete with television broadcasts, to keep fans engaged -- and to keep them buying tickets -- in a challenging economic climate.

To do that, stadium officials here have taken steps few other N.F.L. stadiums have. About $100 million has been spent on the stadium's technology, and a former television production executive was hired to oversee the fan experience to offer more than fans can get sitting at home on their couches in front of their high-definition television sets...

For those fans who do not have smart phones, 2,200 televisions with 48,000 square feet of screens have been installed in and around the stadium, the most of any N.F.L. stadium. The applications and stadium video screens will access video feeds that can be used only in the stadium because of the N.F.L.'s television agreements. If the fan leaves, the application will no longer work and will direct fans to the teams' Web sites, which will offer less...

The introduction of the smart-phone applications comes as teams confront an increasingly difficult environment to attract fans to stadiums. The images of N.F.L. players blocking and tackling on high-definition television have become increasingly life-like at the same time that the price of attending a game in person is higher than ever.

So why keep the TV broadcasts free? The broadcasts not only bring in a lot of money but they also eliminate barriers to fans encountering the NFL. Without that broad base, built on free content, you don't have fans committed enough to spend money for tickets. There is something unique about the live experience. But the NFL is also realizing that it has to enhance the live experience (if not necessarily the games themselves) to compete with the free stuff they produce to draw people in the first place.

In the arts we don't think this way. We sell the "quality" of the orchestra, the "sublimeness" of the music, while the experience itself is left to take care of itself. In some more rigorous camps it's considered almost tawdry to focus on experience over music, as if taking care to carefully create the experience cheapens or detracts from the artistry somehow. Why is that? Too many arts experiences aren't enough fun, even if they're very good.

The Lang Lang Experience, Live And In 3D

Mon, 24 May 2010 06:19:07 -0800

Is the future of live classical music recitals to turn them into a multimedia experience that is somehow more "familiar" to a generation raised on video screens. Here's a report from Lang Lang's concert in London over the weekend:

He is not the first classical pianist to give a solo Albert Hall recital but few of his predecessors brought along in-your-face amplification and multiple screens relaying close-ups of his hands at work. The sonic perspective rendered his Steinway clangorous and the only way to make the sound seem "natural" was to watch the screens, transforming the experience into a TV broadcast rather than a live performance.

How many True Fans do you have?

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 07:15:03 -0800

How do you make a living as an artist? In the old mass-culture model you needed a distribution and marketing engine that could fire up on your behalf to reach as many people as possible. Sell a million albums and if your take after the record company, agents and managers get their share is a buck or two, you're doing pretty well.

In the new economy, how many fans do you need to make a living? If you can produce and distribute your own work, Kevin Kelly suggests, all you need is 1000 true fans.

Instead of trying to reach the narrow and unlikely peaks of platinum hits, bestseller blockbusters, and celebrity status, they can aim for direct connection with 1,000 True Fans. It's a much saner destination to hope for. You make a living instead of a fortune. You are surrounded not by fad and fashionable infatuation, but by True Fans. And you are much more likely to actually arrive there.

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day's wages per year in support of what you do. That "one-day-wage" is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that. Let's peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.
One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000. If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years. True Fanship is doable. Pleasing a True Fan is pleasurable, and invigorating. It rewards the artist to remain true, to focus on the unique aspects of their work, the qualities that True Fans appreciate.

Beware the mushy middle

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 05:26:28 -0800

The NYT's Charles Isherwood writes about what he calls the "odd-man-out" syndrome:

This can roughly be described as the experience of attending an event at which much of the audience appears to be having a rollicking good time, while you sit in stony silence, either bored to stupefaction or itchy with irritation, miserably replaying the confluence of life circumstances that have brought you here. ("Curse that Isherwood!")

I'd like to offer a related disorder, one that particularly affects critics. Go to a lot of dance or music or theatre and you might find yourself suffering from mushy-middle-itis. Really good performances are easy to write about. Ditto for horrible art. The easiest art to write about is art to which you have a strong reaction - good or bad. Death is having to manufacture a reaction to something that left you with no reaction at all.

I'm talking about the vast mushy middling center that clogs our stages and galleries. Dance that is merely adequate. Theatre that is competent but neither very good or really bad. Art that is thoughtlessly routine or formulaic. Performances that are indifferently staged. Music that mimics what's already been done over and over again. It is this kind of art that sludges the ears, glazes over the eyes and dulls our audiences.

Two things:

                          1. Why are we so afraid to call out the mushy middle when
                              we see/hear it?
                          2. Why must we set up expectations that performances are
                             going to be "performance of a lifetime" when we know they
                             probably won't be?

Not every performance can be transcendent. But doesn't there have to be room for the nobility of the routinely good as distinct from the merely indifferently routine?

We're All For Technology Except When...

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 10:38:51 -0800

Nick Carr has a great post about the course of technology development. Progress doesn't always go the way we think it ought to (even if we're right).

Progress may, for a time, intersect with one's own personal ideology, and during that period one will become a gung-ho technological progressivist. But that's just coincidence. In the end, progress doesn't care about ideology. Those who think of themselves as great fans of progress, of technology's inexorable march forward, will change their tune as soon as progress destroys something they care deeply about. "We love the things we love for what they are," wrote Robert Frost. And when those things change we rage against the changes. Passion turns us all into primitivists.

List of Blogs carrying National Arts Journalism Summit Today

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 01:43:38 -0800

Thanks to those who volunteered to host a webstream of the Arts Journalism Summit at USC today. Streaming begins at 9AM pdt. See you in a few hours. (Looking for more information about the Summit? Go here.

www.minalhajratwala.com/blog http://www.bendofbay.org

http://www.palmbeachartspaper.com

http://www.centerscene.blogspot.com/

http://www.sfcv.org/node/6909

http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/seeingthings/index.html

http://www.AnnieStrack.blogspot.com

http://www.mamaramabook.com/blog/

www.judithingolfsson.com

http://evansdonnell.blogspot.com/2009/10/watch-national-summit-on-arts.html

http://arts-america.blogspot.com/

http://moppenheim.com

http://24seven.blogs.heraldtribune.com/10354/usc-to-hold-arts-journalism-summit/

http://houseseats.uniontrib.com

www.ced.pro.br

wideningthei.wordpress.com

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-classical-beat

http://www.chloeveltman.com/blog/index.html

http://www.joycegehl.blogspot.com

http://blogs.tampabay.com/art

www.HelloBeautifulBlog.com

www.imamuseum.org/blog

http://clevelandclassical.wordpress.com/

http://www.artsengagementexchange.org/resources/entry/national_summit_on_arts_journalism/

http://www.belfry.bc.ca/news/webcast-national-summit-on-arts-journalism/

www.theatrelouisville.org

http://movement-museum.blogspot.com/

http://www.newmusicbox.org/chatter.nmbx

http://cseries.typepad.com/celebrityseries/

http://dancealamode.wordpress.com

http://bosccoartbuzz.blogspot.com

Need Your Help: Let's Make Arts Journalism Viral - UPDATES II:

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 05:44:46 -0800

UPDATE: The first blogs are beginning to sign up to stream: www.createquity.com, www.artsDC.com, http://gatheringnote www.seattledances, www.salvadorcastillo.wordpress.com. One blogger has already tried to embed the feed in Blogger and got back an error. Anyone familiar with embedding in Blogger? Leave a note in the comments at the end of this post and we'll figure it out.

UPDATE II: There's a fix [ONLY NEEDED FOR BLOGGER - OTHERS USE THE CODE AT THE END OF THIS POST] Rosie Gaynor at SeattleDances found for the Blogger embed:

Video chat rooms at Ustream

This Friday - October 2 from 9AM-1PM PDT - we're holding a first ever National Summit on Arts Journalism at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles. We're presenting ten projects in arts journalism from around America, and each we think has something to say about the future of how we cover the arts. It will be in the auditorium of the journalism school in front of an audience of 200, but it's primarily conceived of as a virtual online event. You can read more about it here.

We need your help.

We'll be streaming the Summit from www.najp.org/summit, where you can go to watch and read about what's happening. And comment and Twitter and chat. But why not host your own Summit on your own blog or website? People can come to your website and see the live webcast and participate in the chat. You'll get visitors to your site, and they'll maybe stick around for a while. The point is - we want as many people as possible to see this, and we don't care where they see it.

But it would also help us out. This Summit is a big ambitious experiment. We're trying to start discussions beyond just a one-time conference in a room somewhere. And there are an awful lot of moving parts. There are so many ways the technology can go wrong. There are bandwidth issues, streaming issues and server issues. There's the equivalent of producing a live TV show at Annenberg. There's coordinating all the social media. And there's trying to design an event that actually has something of substance to say. We don't know if it will all work - part of the fun of this is in trying to invent something new and seeing what works. We're learning a lot. A lot.

One thing I do know. Mobilizing large groups around something always makes it better than what just a few can do. Our big choke point in all this right now is the streaming broadcast. If we do it all through one site at najp.org/summit, it's a big load. If that one site freezes or goes down, no one sees the live webcast (not too worry too much - everything is being recorded and we'll be posting it all on UStream and YouTube in addition to the Summit site). But why not spread the bet around?

So we thought - why not ask arts journalists and artists everywhere if they would help out and post the live webcast in their own blogs? It's as easy as embedding a YouTube video in a blog post. If you want to be ambitious, you can even embed the chat and Twitter feeds as well.

Drop us an email before Thursday night, and we'll even publish a list of who's hosting streams. Then - if there are any technical problems on the official site, viewers can look at the list of other webcasting blogs and tune in there.

We don't know how many people will be tuning in on the day itself. We expect most people will watch after the fact, looking at the archived presentations. But the (free) seats for the live audience at USC sold out in a flash. And we've got a least a dozen live satellite events around the country where groups are gathering to watch and discuss.

So I hope you'll join us by tuning in to watch. And if you can, please consider participating in a little piece of history by hosting the webcast on your own blog or website. There are no bandwidth issues for you in hosting - it's being fed from UStream and they pay the bandwidth charges, like YouTube does.

You can see our Ustream channel here http://www.ustream.tv/channel/a-national-summit-on-arts-journalism and you can pick up the embedding code there as well. Or you can copy the embed code below and paste it into your blog - just the way you would embed a YouTube video. Thanks for the help. See you Friday (I hope).

To embed the webcast window in your blog or website paste in this code:

Live video by Ustream

If you want to embed the chat as well, paste in this code:

And if you want to host the Twitter feed:

Thanks everyone. Drop us a note at summitinfo@najp.org if you're going to do this and we'll post a list. Or you can write to me directly at mclennan@artsjournal.com (though if I'm a bit slow in answering I hope you'll understand). See you Friday.

ArtsJournal Turns Ten Years Old

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 18:32:24 -0800

This week I gave a talk in San Francisco and I mentioned that Sunday - today - ArtsJournal is ten years old. In web terms, that makes us pretty old. Except, in the room were the editors of at least a couple of other arts sites that are older than AJ. Lori Sparrow of Voice of Dance and Patty Gessner of San Francisco Classical Voice run sites that are at least a couple of years older (also there was John Trippe who runs the very fun FecalFace.com; Zoneil Maharaj, who runs OhDangMag.com; and Marianne Stark, who writes the Stark Guide to San Francisco Art).

The first year or two of AJ, we didn't have a content management system. Every time I wanted to add a story, I had to go into the code of the page and add it there. This made for all sorts of odd formatting issues. And every month, to make archives of our stories, I had to spend a couple of hours cutting all the stories out of our pages and pasting them into new ones. Here's an example of one of our early pages.

Over the years things have changed enormously. When AJ started, there weren't really any
arts blogs. Now, Technorati tracks some 300,000 of them (depending on how you define the search). A couple of years into AJ, we started adding blogs - Terry Teachout, Greg Sandow, Andrew Taylor and Tobi Tobias were the first. Now we have some 64 bloggers working on the site.

Ten years ago newspaper websites were pretty rudimentary. One of the most difficult jobs in putting AJ together at first was just finding where the arts stories lived. Now, sadly, the number and quality of arts stories in newspapers have declined precipitously and it's difficult to find them for different reasons. Many newspapers we used to draw stories from have cut their coverage. In many cities, good arts stories in newspapers are a rarity.

The good news is that there are lots of amazing people and projects out there creating new ways of covering the arts. In the past year as arts coverage in the traditional press has declined precipitously, dozens and dozens of independent websites have stepped up to fill the void. But it isn't just that the new is replacing the old. The very nature and definition of arts journalism is changing. The emphasis of coverage is changing, and ethically, it's a Wild West out there at the moment.

Nonetheless, the breadth of what's being written/videoed/recorded has expanded enormously. We've gone from single critics at local newspapers to a cacophony of voices debating and drawing attention to a much wider range of culture.

There are so many people I want to thank who have helped on ArtsJournal. I'm reluctant to make a list of names because I'll forget people, but I want to give a special shout out to Sam Bergman, who for nine years was a major part of AJ's success as associate editor. And I'd also like to thank Laura Collins-Hughes and Matthew Westphal, who now help to choose and write a good part of the site.

And the future. We're working on the next version of ArtsJournal, which we hope to launch in the next month or so. As the media world changes from newspapers to other sources, we want to make sure we're casting our nets in the right directions. And we want to make it easier to find the stories they're looking for. Here's to another ten. Thanks to you for reading.

The Upgrades That Make You Feel Worse

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:13:12 -0800

I've been on a lot of airplanes recently. Flying isn't much fun, but I like being in other places. So in the process of travel I tend to see those around me as either obstacles to my getting where I need to go, or neutral (other passengers) or helpful (hopefully, airline personnel).

Airlines have been having a bad year, and they've cut back flights and amenities, so traveling this summer has been more difficult. But there's something else that's made it worse. One gets the feeling that some airlines are working against their passengers having a good experience. That's not true, of course. But it often seems so.

Want to check a bag? There's an extra fee. Want a seat with decent leg room? Another fee. A window or aisle seat? Fee. Hungry? Now you pay for the bad snacks.

I'm not opposed to paying for extra service. If you told me that the price of a ticket from Seattle to LA was established at $300, then gave me the opportunity to upgrade various services, I'd be fine with it. But there are no set fares. Every time I go, the price is different. Sometimes it's $469. Sometimes $269. And then you want me to pay extra fees for checking a bag or getting a decent amount of leg room? It feels more like a penalty fee than an upgrade. And charging for checking bags now ensures that the aisles and bins are jammed with passenger luggage that ought to have been stowed below. So the bag fee results in degrading every passenger's experience.

While many airlines now impose these fees, United seems to be the most aggressive. Riding United is now an unpleasant experience not because their service is so much worse than other airlines, but because you feel that their fee policies are punitive and designed to make your experience more arduous, not less.

Something similar has happened to frequent flier programs. It's obvious that airlines want to make it more difficult to take advantage of the rewards. For example, technically it's possible to track every passenger and add their frequent flier numer automatically when they book. But they don't. And if for some reason your number didn't get added to your ticket, it's difficult to get it added after the fact. Let's leave aside that the number of available award seats on flights is tiny. But on Northwest, there's a hefty "booking" fee (it can be $150 a ticket) that bears no relationship to the cost of processing the booking and that hardly makes the award travel free. What ought to feel like a reward for being a loyal customer is turned into a hard-won rebate you had to work/fight for.

Then there are the expensive hotels that charge you for every little thing. Internet is $14.95. Bottle of water on the nightstand is $8. Why is it that good basic budget hotels provide free wi-fi, free water and breakfast but the hotels charging premium freight consider it a license to gouge you for more?

Upgrades and premium services are great ways to incentivize customers, but airlines have neutralized their incentive programs. In fact, these policies incentivize customers to feel resentful about the service they are not receiving or now have to pay for.

Last year I was given membership in a premium VIP ticket holders' club at a local theatre in return for a talk a gave. VIPers get a private entrance to the theatre (very cool), a club room that offers food, and special premium seats in the first balcony. All of this for a considerable premium over the ticket price.

Here's how it was implemented, though. The private club room was a dark converted storage room in the basement. There were a few grapes and a slab of cheese from Costco spread out on a table, and the (cheap) wine was overpriced. The seats were two distant floors away, so there was a breathless dash before the curtain went up. The seats were completely unremarkable, indistinguishable from regularly-priced seats. Rather than feeling like we were treated special because we were part of this "premium" club, we left feeling like the theatre had used the "club" as a way to wring more revenue out of us. And the theatre staff wonders why it doesn't have more takers.

So what is really the point of these programs? Companies spend lots of money to try to convince you they have your comfort/interests at heart. Then they penalize/inconvenience you all the while trying to convince you they're rewarding you in some way. Uh huh.

Great Expectations (Except When They're Not)

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 17:53:46 -0800

Ken Brecher tells this story about Alexander Graham Bell. The inventor of the telephone apparently spent the last part of his life railing against the way people were using his invention. When greeting someone on the phone, he insisted, the proper protocol was to exclaim "ahoy!" Saying "hello" was a misuse of his work.

You can't predict how people will use things, and you can't force people to use them in the ways in which you've conceived of them, even if you're the inventor.

Actually, you can force them. But you forfeit the potential that what you made could be something bigger or more interesting. Bigger and more interesting is when you release software in the wild (open source) and thousands of developers think of things to do with it that the original author never dreamed of. More interesting is when you give up some control of what you made and let others make things around it. TV ended up being something entirely different than what its inventors initially thought it would be because it was a tool others could be creative with, not an end product with one defined way of using it.

The corollary is trying to impose expectations on things that weren't intended to address those expectations. After a flurry of media attention, Twitter has recently come under attack for things it doesn't do and never pretended to. Jon Friedman in MarketWatch: "I object to Twitter's idiosyncratic cap of 140 characters for writing messages and the inherent inability of its users to go into any real depth about any subject."

Depth is hardly the point. At its best, Twitter can be an incredibly efficient way to monitor a topic or see what stories are flashing into the public consciousness. Much better than blogs. As a news device, Twitter can function as a stream of link blogs that points followers to things they're interested in. It's like having a personal web of friends who work on your behalf in real time. No more waiting on traditional publishing schedules. As I wrote in a recent post after Twitter starred in coverage of the Iran election aftermath, short texts proved remarkably effective at organizing multimedia coverage.

So expectations can get in the way of your own potential, either to create something or to use it effectively. Sociologist Barry Shwartz says that with greater expectation can come less happiness, and that we're happier when expectations are exceeded. The telephone was an amazing thing that revolutionized communication. Imagine thinking it a failure because expectations for its etiquette were disappointed.

The Theatre Experience: Time for an Upgrade

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 10:21:02 -0800

The latest new-generation movie megaplex recently opened near us. It's got stadium seating,

reclining extra-wide luxurious seats with cup holders in the armrests, and so much legroom you could park a Winnebago. A couple of the 14 screens in the megaplex are Imaxes that surround you with giant images and wrap you in sound. In the lobby they sell real food, the kind you might conceivably want to consider eating. All in all, the experience is a treat, one that elevates the ritual of going to a movie (ugly outside architecture notwithstanding).

In the 1990s we spent $25 billion on new concert halls, theaters and museums in America. Handsome buildings most of them. One thing though. While much of the exterior architecture tries to be distinctive (Disney Hall being an obvious example) the insides (Disney an exception) are for the most part entirely predictable. And despite the fact that the average concert hall was many times more expensive to construct than the new-generation movie complexes, the customer amenities inside the halls constructed over the past 20 years - how can I put this kindly - kind of suck.

Narrow aisles, cramped leg room, utilitarian seats that if not uncomfortable are hardly luxurious. There's an austere formality to the rows of perches lined facing the stage. Nothing particularly wrong with formality. And many of the auditoriums are pleasant enough to be in. But how is it that virtually all of the halls built in this era more or less follow the same bare aesthetic when it comes to amenities?

The movie theatre industry realized with the explosion of infinite choice that they had to compete to make the theatre experience competitive with the home flat screen and surround sound. They had to make the live experience of watching a movie in public a better deal. At a minimum that meant making the watching experience as comfortable as possible, then delivering state-of-the-art picture size and quality.

There's an argument to be made for preserving formal rituals in going out to see a performance. But things change. I like some of the rituals, but I have to admit I often resent the degree to which it is imposed by rigid seats and cramped legroom. And why can't I bring my drink back in to the show? Some theatres just work better as formal spaces. But others? The fact that there seems so little innovation or re-thinking of the physical experience of going to concerts seems like a missed opportunity.Recently, Adam Kenwright, who markets West End shows in London, said that the uncomfortable seats and poor amenities in West End theatres was seriously deterring people from buying tickets to shows.

Tickets to arts performances can cost many times more than movie tickets. Yet from an amenity experience, there's no question which is the first-class seat and which is steerage economy.

The new generation of baseball stadia are amenitiy-rich. The new generation of coffee shops (Starbucks, et al) concentrate a lot of their resources in developing customer amenities. Go to a House of Blues or other perfoming spaces such as LA's Knitting Factory, and the seats are removed altogether or pushed to the sides. People rock out while the performer is on. I'm not saying take out the seats, but if movie theatre owners figured out they had to deliver a better seating experience to compete, doesn't it follow that the performing arts ought to consider how they could upgrade?

The Tyranny of Choice

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 17:17:57 -0800

Choice is good right? Malcom Gladwell does a great talk on how Howard Moskowitz revolutionized marketing by understanding the dynamics of choice. His example here is spaghetti sauce. Traditional marketing strategy had been to get together focus groups and ask them what they liked in a good sauce. Then groups were asked what characteristics they liked in a sauce - should it be chunky? Zesty? Authentic Italian? The results would be tallied and a sauce that matched the most popular characteristics would be produced.

But this is wrong. The mushy middle is nobody's favorite, it's merely the version that the most people will tolerate. Furthermore, the characteristics don't really match consumers' true preferences. You're asking for opinions which are not based on individual research. People often don't know what they want until you tell them and they're happier when you do. We know this in the arts. Inspire with something great and unexpected and people will cheer. Arts organizations that follow the crowd rather than lead are not only less interesting, but they get hooked into a feedback loop that leads to artistic rot.

Note in Gladwell's story that some choice leads to happier customers. For the flip side and a cautionary tale about choice, watch sociologist Barry Shwartz's talk about the tyranny of choice. If choice is good and we can more and more get what we want, why do we seem less satisfied with our choices? He suggests that too much choice is paralyzing and leads to incoherent decisions. Choices inflict the work of having to evaluate and choose. Choices set up higher expectations which are difficult to meet. Consequently we are less satisfied.

As an example, Schwartz cites employer 401k plans. When employees are offered few choices they invest in the programs. Plans with a high number of investment choices see much less employee participation, even though the plans directly benefit those who join. Why? Too hard to choose. Fear of making a bad choice results in paralysis.

Extrapolate this paralysis out to cultural choice. How are you sorting out the noise? We look for trusted guides who can sort it out for us and give us a framework that makes sense. Narrow the choices down to two or three best possibilities and I'm grateful. This is a dynamic that has tangible currency in the Attention Economy.

Ticket Sales, Business Models & Community - Five Ideas To Build Community

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 18:32:19 -0800

I was a bit surprised by some of the reaction to my last post on the unsustainability of the ticket sales model in the Attention Economy. Boil down my argument and it's essentially this: products used to compete primarily with other products in their sector. Jazz competed with other jazz, dance competed with other dance. In the Attention Economy, dance competes with video games competes with YouTube videos competes with online courses from MIT competes with the Cuban Hooked Rug Society Online. The typical consumer transaction decision is a weighing of the available options at the point of sale and buying based on the needs/desires of the moment. Given infinite choice and a rising complexity in figuring out what one wants, getting people to pay attention to what you have to offer is increasingly problematic.

I don't think the the answer to infinite choice is anything new. We're most comfortable choosing things on the basis of relationships, and any good sales person knows this. In the past, building relationships was an analog task; social networks take it digital. This is a good thing

What surprised me is that Andrew and Kelly and others who emailed seemed to suggest that this is something of an either/or notion; that to implement a community-building strategy either requires taking focus off of traditional efforts to sell tickets or involves some risk to current strategy. As Kelly Tweeddale puts it:

What would you do differently if the transaction was the outcome, not the goal? Our current non-profit model does not provide a financial safety net for such bold thinking or experiments, but it should. Any early adopters?

Andrew Taylor suggests that:

The deeper challenge for arts organizations is that they DO sell a product, even as they DON'T. That is, an important segment of any arts audience doesn't recognize the complex bundle they're seeking when they buy a symphony or theater ticket. They've come to use that event as a placeholder or proxy for that bundle, without even knowing it. To this core group (often the most passionate about the art form, the most loyal buyers, the most committed donors) the bundle IS the product. And as you innovate around the delivery or context of your creative work, you challenge their passionate connection to the discipline's tradition.

The shift to the Transportation Economy Model didn't mean there was no need for manufacturing. The Experience Economy doesn't negate access to product in a timely way. And the Attention Economy assumes a robust Experience, Transportation and Manufacturing infrastructure. Product is assumed; without it, you're not even in the game.

So how do you implement an Attention strategy? Here are five ideas:

1. Set up a ladder of involvement that rewards increased participation. Come to every performance and maybe you get a free ticket to give to a friend. Bring in a dozen friends and you get your name in the program. Organize a club around our programming and maybe you get an insider pass to see how next season's lineup is put together. We reward people who donate money to our theatre; how about rewarding those who go out and bring in new recruits? Maybe membership on your board is one of those upper rungs of participation. The participation incentive ladder doesn't have to be formally structured like affiliate programs, but you get the idea...

2. Community isn't free. Every time someone decides to interact with you, you have to reward them in some way. Even clicking a mouse (believe it or not) requires a reward. Ninety-nine percent of web visitors are lurkers. That is, they come, they read, they say "Gee, that's interesting," and they move on. Same with those who come to performances. Why should I come to a post-concert chat? You have to do something to provoke me into a response. That response is worth something. That response must be rewarded in some way. Especially if it's a complaint.

3. These kinds of communities are extremely hierarchical. They don't want to be paid in money. They want status. Recognition. Validation. It can be as simple as identifying somebody as a friend of the organization. Reward them for answering other community members' questions. Cruise lines, for example, give repeat cruisers different color cabin key cards based on how many times they've come aboard. Those cards are status markers, and the community pays attention to them. Tech support in big online communities has largely become a community function. The community is better at solving its own problems, and people who log in with answers are accorded higher status by others in the community. This is a powerful driver of participation.

4. Twenty percent of your seats are unsold? What a waste. Create a club that gives members access to cheap surplus tickets with which they can bring others. Those companies (airlines, are you listening?) that throw up barriers to upgrades make members feel like the company doesn't want you to have a good experience. Be over-generous. Your community will feel like they owe you for it. And that generosity doesn't necessarily have to cost you anything.

5. Find ways to give people in your community opportunities to support you. I might not have enough money to give you a donation. But if you ask, I might bring a group of friends to the next concert. I might not have time to serve on your board, but I might know a good printer who could give you a break on programs. Public radio is available for free, but enough listeners value it so much that they're willing to give money to support it. We're not very creative about the ways we ask for support.

Pay Attention! If Selling Tickets Is Your Business Model, You've Got A Problem

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:33:18 -0800

Another lifetime ago we were in the Manufacturing Economy. We made things. Then we were in the Transportation Economy. We outsourced making things and brought whatever we needed to us. Then it was the Experience Economy. We created entertainment around the things we buy (how we justify paying $4.50 for a 50-cent coffee). Now we're in the Attention Economy. In the infinite choice marketplace, ideas and products only get traction if they get noticed.

The American arts economy is run as though we're still living in the Manufacturing Economy or the Transportation Economy. That is, most arts organizations and artists believe they're in the business of making things.

Of course they make things. But these days everybody makes things. There's an abundance of everything out there, so making things, even if they're very very good, means less than it did 30 years ago because there are many other very very good things to choose from.

In the Transportation Economy, scarcity dictated opportunity, and getting the word out about a product could build an audience. In the Attention Economy where we can get what we want when we want and how we want it (metaphorically, if not in actuality) we grab for what inserts itself in our path. The issue isn't access, it's overload. How do we sort out things we want from the overwhelming mass of "stuff" that engulfs us?

If you believe your business model is the classic consumer transaction (I make the performance, you buy the ticket) then you're done. Sorry. That's a Manufacturing Economy mindset, and while it worked when choices were limited, now that you're competing in the infinite marketplace offering 8000 or 8 million choices, it's increasingly unlikely that your "audience" is going to choose you as often as they did in the past.

In the Attention Economy it isn't enough to be the best orchestra or theatre or dance company. People aren't comparing you with other orchestras or theatre or dance companies; they're measuring whether classical music or theatre or dance is something they want to choose at the moment. They're deciding whether they want an active or passive experience; they're trying to determine what level of social encounter they feel like today. They're weighing whether they want a predictable, known, comfortable quantity or whether they want to be adventurous and try something new. They're figuring out whether they want to learn something and are willing to work for that or whether they're looking for pure entertainment that costs them little. Price matters - if it's going to cost, it's got to be better than the free alternative. It doesn't matter that there are 47 varieties of spaghetti sauce on the shelf in front of me if what I really want is pesto.

The choice is bewildering. Paralyzing, even. You can't compete with such overwheming choice with a consumer transaction model, no matter if you're the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Metropolitan Opera or the Guthrie Theatre.

One of the big lessons of social media is that community matters. A lot. People make their choices about culture based on their community. Peer word-of-mouth is a much more powerful driver of cultural choice than newspaper reviews or advertising. How do you fight infinite choice? Build community rather than audience. Give people reasons to engage with you, care about you, so when they're making choices it's more than just a consumer transaction. Nothing new about this. Amway, the mega-churches, the Barack Obama campaign all understand this.

A Future For Journalism About The Arts

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:04:54 -0800

In the past couple of years, half of all the staff arts journalism jobs in the US have been eliminated. In some cases, newspapers offloading their staff critics have replaced them with freelancers. In some cases, the freelancers have done a better job than the staffers they have replaced. But mostly not.

Running a good freelance section requires editors who have the time and talent to know what's going on in the culture of their community, who are out listening for the stories they should be assigning. Most editors are even busier just trying to fill their sections than they were when they had staff critics paying attention to their beats. They don't also have time to be out trolling for stories.

And the way editors are moved around in newspapers, as time goes on, good freelance coverage wanes in favor of stories that are easier to do and have more immediate pop. Having someone whose paid job it is to cover a beat means a different level of scrutiny; covering culture in an ad hoc way means the coverage doesn't necessarily connect up stories over time.

So it's clear that the trend will continue to be a diminution in the amount and quality of arts coverage in newspapers even in the face of heroic efforts by remaining staff to do good work.

Traditional arts journalism did a great job - when it was practiced well - of covering certain kinds of art. Still does. Unfortunately, a great deal of arts journalism is poorly done. Over the past 20 years the pressure to concentrate on the consumer review function has trivialized much coverage. And the inability of most publications to develop longer story arcs that speak to a broader context has marginalized it. In an increasingly crowded cultural space, the traditional emphasis on the review as the primary form is suicide.

Moreover, traditional arts journalism never did particularly well at covering some kinds of culture. Coverage of dance, for example, was never very plentiful or imaginative. We never did figure out interesting ways to cover participatory community culture, which involves and engages enormous numbers of people. The old model of experts preaching to "the masses" had tenuous hold of an audience long before the internet came along. And in an expanding cultural universe, the scattershot way culture has been covered has been increasingly difficult to justify.

In short, the model we have used for arts journalism, the model that was developed in the 19th Century, has outlived its potency. It was broken long before the internet, and it probably wasn't going to evolve significantly until the structures (publications) that supported it could no longer do so. It's time for a change, and about time it happened.

So if the old model of arts journalism needs an overhaul, and the business model that has supported it no longer works, what's next? All over the country artists and journalists and entrepreneurs are trying to figure it out. Dozens of projects have launched in recent months, and Technorati currently counts 300,000 arts blogs.

Which ones are worth paying attention to? Which are not just interesting projects, but viable ones as well?

So the Annenberg School for Communication at USC and the National Arts Journalism Program, of which I am the director, are holding a summit on the future of arts journalism October 2. We're looking for projects that are trying to become that brilliant next model. We'll be showcasing ten projects, five of them chosen by competition. Each of those chosen for the summit will make ten-minute presentations to explain why they're great. The summit will be live-streamed and archived for later viewing. There is $25,000 in prizes for winning projects, plus lots of attention. Thanks to the NEA, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Flora & William Hewlett Foundation and arts and journalism schools at USC for their generous support.

So if you have the answer for what will be the next great arts journalism model, we'd love to find out more about it. Go here to apply.