This Week’s Insights: Getting real about crowd psychology… TV networks plan to cut the number of commercials… NPR is pulling in record ratings… Why we really need negative reviews… How Nashville lost its soul to “experience tourism”.
- The Psychology Of Crowds: Any performer can tell you how different one audience is from another. Perform the same lines or play the same music night after night and you see that no audience responds in exactly the same way. But for the most part, there’s been little work on analysing differences. Crowd psychology has been around since the 19th Century. But it’s only in the last few decades that there’s been a major shift to seeing crowds as more than mindless masses. “The crowd is as psychologically specific as the individual,” says the University of Sussex’s John Drury, an expert on the social psychology of crowd management.
- TV Networks Scramble To Keep The TV Audience: By most creative measures, television has never been better. There’s more of it, and the quality is high. So good in fact that TV draws A-list production talent more than movies do. Nonetheless, network TV continues to lose audience to streaming services. And ad rates are collapsing as online rates also plummet. What to do? Strongly being considered: Fewer commercials to interrupt shows, and higher rates for those ad spots. “Airing fewer commercials could mean less revenue for the networks — unless they can convince advertisers that it’s worth it to pay more to have their spots running in a less cluttered program. The topic is being debated ahead of the upfront market, where most of the advance ad time for the 2018-19 TV season is sold.”
- Public Radio Ratings At All-Time High: Local NPR stations dominate radio ratings in many of America’s biggest markets, and the national NPR is getting (and keeping) more listeners than ever. “According to Nielsen Audio Fall 2017 ratings, the total weekly listeners for all programming on NPR stations is 37.7 million people – a record that has been maintained since the Spring of 2017. NPR’s Newscasts, updated live every hour, can now be heard on 947 broadcast stations by nearly 28.7 million listeners.” Why the surge? In a hyper-partisan landscape, NPR’s down-the-center coverage seems to appeal to educated audiences.
- Let’s Be Real: Here’s Why Negative Reviews Are Important: There’s a lot of bad stuff out there, writes Bill Marx: “Because they reflect an eternal truth: all the blurbs in the universe will not eradicate the fact that much in the arts is mediocre. Pans also provide the means for the reader to evaluate the critic: we learn as much about someone from why they dislike something then why they like something. And negative reviews prove that the critic takes the arts seriously enough to risk defining success and failure, to draw an aesthetic red line, to proclaim to the Parrotheads that the emperor has no clothes.” Yet, some publications still only run positive reviews, thinking that with limited space, why waste it on art that isn’t worth your time?
- I used To Love Nashville – But It’s Turned Into Ghastly “Experience” Tourism: Nashville was always a contradiction – the Athens of the South, then a capital of music. It was gritty, a bit seedy, but glamorous in its own way. But “Nashville is cool now. Which is to say, there are parts of Nashville that serve and appeal to and are filled with members of the so-called creative class and promise a different “experience” than your day-to-day life. The draw wasn’t major attractions, like the Opry, but attending a quaint show at the Bluebird Café. Like Austin or Portland, the draw to Nashville isn’t to go and be a tourist, but to go and spend a weekend sort of pretending that you live there — and, who knows, maybe one day make it a reality, and bring your friends and business.” The reality? An endless bachelorette party filled with faux Disneyesque amusements that have stripped the city of its most important asset, its authenticity.
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