This Week’s Insights: How music streaming has changed the music audience… how to double your museum’s attendance… How “Roseanne”‘s monster ratings might change TV… How selfies are creating a new “museum” model… Can Cambridge Analytica algorithms really change what you believe?
- How Subscription Streaming Is Changing The Music Consumer: When the entire recorded output of music is available with no effort (and little cost), it changes the way people discover, seek out and consume music. Our music genres have become more diverse. Our tastes have become less defined by chronology. And artists are changing the kinds of music they make, the ways they name it and the ways they locate themselves in the landscape. Streaming data has largely replaced the “gut feeling” instincts of recording producers. (for good and bad).
- Case Study: How To Double Your Museum’s Attendance In Four Years: Paris’s Musée Guimet had seen its attendance decline precipitously over the past decade. In 2013, Sophie Makariou took over as the director, and changed the museum’s profile. “The museum staff had to think differently and “belong to the public”, Makariou says. “Our team had worked well doing research but not necessarily thinking how to make the museum as open as possible. It was stuck in the 20th century but I wanted to make the staff feel part of a 21st-century museum. Bringing in more visitors, and younger visitors, was something we all needed to work for and be proud of,” she says.
- The Meaning Of “Roseanne”‘s Big Ratings? Sitcoms have declined over the years. And it’s been even harder to find sitcoms with conservative points of view. The reboot of “Roseanne” won huge (and unexpectedly high) ratings. Much of the analysis that followed focused on the show’s politics: Star Roseanne Barr is an eager champion of debunked right-wing conspiracies, and the premiere’s storyline hinged on her character’s support for President Donald Trump. And since the 2016 presidential election, television programmers have been working to find ways to reach working-class whites who voted for Trump. The success of “Roseanne” only reaffirmed those efforts. But looking ahead to 2018-19, “Roseanne” may be a harbinger of a less titillating, more significant programming shift — the revitalization of the broadcast comedy after years of emphasis on drama.
- The Profitable Museum Model – Driven By Selfies: The very word “museum” is being stretched with these places. An ice cream museum? A color museum? Experiential selfie spots like Color Factory, 29Rooms, and Dream Room? They revolve a highly successful business model: sell tickets for $35 to people itching to Instagram themselves, then immerse them in hyperpigmented landscapes funded by corporate sponsors. And these are “museums” because? Still, does the success of these roadside attractions have something to say to more traditional museums looking to win more visitors?
- In Which The Big Bad Algorithms Exert Mind Control (Really?) On The Audience: The scandals of Cambridge Analytica have social media users wondering how the company used their data. Can psychographically-targeted ads really make people believe messages the company wanted them to? By rewording the ads to appeal to the respondents’ underlying psychological disposition, the researchers were able to influence and change their opinions. According to researcher Sumner, “Using psychographic targeting, we reached Facebook audiences with significantly different views on surveillance and demonstrated how targeting . . . affected return on marketing investment.” Psychological messaging, they said, worked.
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