This Week’s Top Stories About Audience: When Popularity Gets In The Way

This Week’s Insights: When too much audience gets in the way… Can large orchestras learn about audiences from little orchestras?… Twitter’s dumbing-down effect… More small bookstores… The secret art of regular patrons.

1. Popularity Is Good Right?… Maybe Not: If we think about a successful event being not just the performance or exhibition but the combination of the presentation/work AND the experience we have in being there, then the audience – the size, type, circumstances of that audience – is of enormous consequence. Overcrowding or bad behavior or a bad fit with the venue or the art can spoil even the best art. An example of the concerns: In the planning for New York’s Figment Arts Festival, moving from Governors Island to Roosevelt Island this year, “‘Everything was fine,’ Judith Berdy, a longtime resident said. “And then came the catastrophe of the cherry blossoms” which attracted enormous crowds and made neighbors question the whole venture.
2. A Small Orchestra Hits A Home Run. But Will Large Orchestras Pay Attention? The tiny California Symphony is 1/25th the size of the Pittsburgh Symphony. But the smaller orchestra has seen the size of its audience and its support explode in the past few years. The growth is based on research and data. So what could an orchestra like the Pittsburgh Symphony learn from the success? In the past, large orchestras have tended to ignore examples of success at small orchestras.
3. Does Twitter Kill Brain Cells? Well, not literally, of course. But intuitively we expect connective platforms like Twitter to make us smarter. But a new study by a team of Italian researchers finds that it is not necessarily that the crush of hashtags, likes and retweets that destroys brain cells; that’s a question for neuroscientists, they said. Rather, the economists, in a working paper published this month by the economics and finance department at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, found that Twitter not only fails to enhance intellectual attainment but substantially undermines it.
4. More Signs The Analogue Audience Experience Is Gaining Popularity: New figures on independent bookstores: “The booksellers association again gained membership, rising from 1,835 individual companies (all but a handful independently owned stores) a year ago to 1,887, an increase of more than 20 percent since 2009. The number of store locations is now 2,524, compared to 2,470 in 2018, as independent sellers such as Shakespeare & Co. in New York continue to expand.”
5. The Art Of The Regular: Small businesses thrive on regular customers. So how to cultivate them? “No matter the establishment — cafe, trattoria, dive bar, coffeehouse, doughnut shop, pharmacy, even — those who make themselves permanent fixtures almost all say the same thing about what makes a regular. When they walk in, the people behind the counter know who they are.”

Image: Pixabay