This Week’s Insights: YouTube is where the audience is happening… Will making tickets free get you an audience? (some experiments)… Neuroscience aims to explain music’s appeal… The biggest gateway to theatre?… Impact – Netflix show led to increase in suicides.
- The Biggest Online Platform? There’s a case that it’s YouTube. It’s a search engine (videos on how to fix or learn anything). It’s a recommendation engine (those “suggested videos” that auto-play after your video) and it’s a social network. “Creators are driving record audiences to YouTube,” YouTube Chief Business Officer Robert Kyncl told the presentation audience gathered at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan. “Two-hundred million people come to YouTube every single day just to watch gaming videos. That’s twice the audience of this year’s Super Bowl.” Now YouTube is making more of its premium content free.
- Theory: Make Your Tickets Free And Grow Your Audience: Well, it’s worked for museums in the UK. And the performing arts? Citizens Theatre in Glasgow offers 100 tickets for 50p for every production, writes artistic director Dominic Hill — and there are also £2 tickets for neighborhood residents and the unemployed and £10 for people under 25. (Their top ticket price is only £26.50.) And a Seattle theatre is making the tickets for one of its productions free: “Frankly, I’m sick and tired of seeing empty seats in our theaters,” says Intiman Theatre’s artistic director Phillip Chavira. “I think we do a disservice in the nonprofit arts: We ask you to participate in this amazing art, but ask you for a fee.”
- Neuroscience Tries To Explain Why Music Affects Us: “We’re starting to comprehend how melodies affect our feelings, why certain music makes us want to get up and dance and why some harmonies trigger fear. Some studies have already had direct applications in the field of music therapy, which uses music to treat neurological, emotional and physical disorders.”
- What’s The Biggest Theatre Producer In America? Cruise ships. Consider: Royal Caribbean International’s cruise line directs 134 shows in 50 theatres on 26 ships around the world, including seven Broadway-originating shows, eight aqua shows, 18 ice shows and dozens of original musicals. It’s an audience of 100,000… every night. Considering that theatre may not be part of the average cruise ship audience’s diet at home, this may be one of the biggest ways people get exposed to theatre.
- Measuring Audience Impact – A Rise In Suicides? Netflix’s “13 Reasons Why” about teen suicide was disturbing for many. Now a new study has measured the impact of the series on teen suicides: “We estimate that the series’ release was associated with approximately 195 additional suicide deaths,” concludes a research team led by Jeffrey Bridge of Nationwide Children’s Hospital.
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