This Week in Audience: Boston Ballet’s Dive Into Data

This week: Boston Ballet has done some serious data diving to produce a successful season at the box office… NPR is finding gold in podcasts… When news becomes unmoored from its sources, do we care?… A “young” (didn’t know it was a noun, eh?) declares what will get “youngs” to the arts… Will the machines eventually determine our tastes in art?

1. Better Dance Through Data? Boston Ballet just had its best season ever at the box office. How? Smart use of data. But it wasn’t just one thing – more an approach to how to target potential audiences. “Crediting a host of new techniques that include variable pricing, alternating repertoire, and an enhanced social media presence, Boston Ballet is reporting that last season marked the company’s highest attendance levels in more than a decade and its best ticket revenues in the company’s 53-year history.”
2. NPR Mines Its Podcast Data And Finds A New Audience: NPR’s structure is at tension with itself. It was set up as a terrestrial radio collective with hundreds of member stations. But it’s seeing strong growth in its new podcast businesses. “The demographic that went up the most in the first quarter of 2016 was the 18 to 24 year-olds [average quarter hour listening was up 20% according to Nielsen]. To be fair, it’s not a huge audience. But I point it out because it’s the direction we want to go. It didn’t come at the expense of any of our journalism either.”
3. Does The Audience Care Where Its Information Comes From? Look at your Facebook feed. Used to be your friends shared links from bona fide news sources. Increasingly though, they’re sharing from sites that look like news sites, but really aren’t. Do you look at sources? And are you careful about who you trust? “Magazine stories are increasingly unmoored from the outlets that published them, and from the brands that once all but guaranteed their legitimacy. In the US, more than 60 percent of social media users now access news through platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and news organizations harvest nearly half their traffic from social media.”
4. What Do Young People Want In The Arts? Here’s What One “Young” Says: I’m really a nobody. But I believe that we have arrived in a world where if we want to be relevant, we must “art” as big as we can. We must be overly ambitious, and damn the consequences, because if we aren’t, our souls die for sure, and if we are we may simply fail and hit another mark.
5. When AI Takes Over Will It Really Decide For Us What To Read/Watch/Listen To? The machines are getting better. They’re guiding us more and more as we sort out what’s available to us. But can they determine what’s a hit? Maybe we shouldn’t believe the claims just yet: “The algorithm looks at themes, plot, character, setting, and also the frequencies of tiny but significant markers of style. The ‘bestseller-ometer’ then makes predictions, picking out which specific combinations of these features will resonate with readers. The authors claim that it is correct ‘over eighty percent of the time’.” But the only book to score 100% from the algorithm has had only middling sales. Then of course, there are the inherent biases of the programmers built into algorithms. “Sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination are being built into the machine-learning algorithms that underlie the technology behind many “intelligent” systems that shape how we are categorized and advertised to.”

Image: Boston Ballet