This Week’s Insights: Following clickbait to doom… Why music is losing its genres… So Netflix doesn’t care about ratings?… Correlations between funding and audience… Weaponizing classical music is a result of commodification.
- Can You Clickbait? (Do You Really Want To?): Chasing audiences is a never-ending escalation of attempts to hijack our attention. And what gets attention? Not simple information. Things which arouse you, make you mad, stir your ire. This constant flurry of moral-emotional content has turned much of Twitter—and, by the looks of it, other platforms—into what writer Samuel Ashworth described as “an endlessly self-renewing bonfire of outrage and confusion.” And given how profitable it has become, social media companies have little financial incentive to scale it back. Scale it back? No – actually, they’re built specifically to addict you to the emotionally juiced state. And we play along, rising to the challenge. But is such emotional mainlining honest or desireable? And as the outrage escalates, how does an artist – or for that matter, anyone looking to have a nuanced conversation or examination of ideas – navigate the attention drug?
- Music Is Losing Its Genres: As genres spill into one another, as all music is available to audiences whenever and wherever they are, trying to classify music is becoming more and more difficult. Recommendation algorithms further blur categorization by pulling out characteristics that aren’t confined to one genre or another. And yet, look at listings in the performing arts and you see that they’re still organized by traditional genres. And what happens if your work doesn’t fit any of the obvious categories? “Our large-scale shows contain elements of opera, musical, lyric theatre, but none of these accurately characterises their form.” It’s an increasingly awkward problem.
- Netflix, Ratings And Production Decisions: Netflix says it doesn’t care about ratings. And it doesn’t reveal how many people are watching its shows. Yet the streaming giant spends tens of billions on producing, and there have to be some metrics that work. Analysts and industry sources think that for all its public disdain for ratings, Netflix is more like a conventional television network than it cares to admit. If a Netflix show had a large viewership, it would make no sense to cancel the show. So is Netflix working off the same popularity indexes that everyone else does, or is it something different?
- A Direct Relationship Between Funding And Audience?: Today’s example is from Minnesota, where something called a Legacy Amendment was passed in 2008. Since 2009, Legacy funding has provided more than $440 million to historical, artistic and cultural projects and events, with about $200 million going specifically to artists and arts organizations across the state. In 2009, before that funding began, Minnesota ranked ninth in the nation for per capita public funding for the arts. Today, it ranks first. The state spends about $6 per person on the arts, according to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, pulling well ahead of states such as Hawaii and New York.
- Weaponizing Classical Music (It Was So Inevitable): Weaponized classical music is just the next step in the commodification of the genre. Today, most young people encounter classical music not as a popular art form but as a class signifier, a set of tropes in a larger system of encoded communication that commercial enterprises have exploited to remap our societal associations with orchestral sound. Decades of cultural conditioning have trained the public to identify the symphony as sonic shorthand for social status — and, by extension, exclusion from that status. The average American does not recognize the opening chords of The Four Seasons as the sound of spring.
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