"After months of relative normalcy, Europe’s opera houses, concert halls and theaters are reintroducing measures all too familiar from earlier phases of the pandemic, restricting audience numbers and mandating testing, if not canceling shows outright." - The New York Times
A museum in Benin offers free bus rides to students and recruits popular musicians to help with publicity. MACAAL in Marrakech invited taxi drivers for a Friday couscous lunch, and they started telling family, friends and customers. Those are just a couple of examples. - Hyperallergic
"Wading through the streaming menus felt akin to babysitting hundreds of small children, all of them clawing at me, desperate for my attention. … Of course, that sentiment was wholly irrational and entirely wrong." Anne Helen Petersen explains why. - The Guardian
The nonprofit company producing Lynn Nottage's new Clyde's, which opens this week and closes in January, will offer viewers the opportunity to watch a real-time stream of one of the last 16 performances. The price: $59, the same as the cheapest in-person tickets. - The New York Times
The 19th century brought about the popularization of the proscenium arch: an architectural feature that effectively separates the audience from the actors on stage. Alongside this structural shift, a change in lighting also reinforced the separation between audience and performers. - The Conversation
Netflix has released its Top 10 lists. But "the obsession with the numbers generated by films in the first few days of their release has had ... a negative effect on the quality of the films themselves, squeezing out the offbeat in favour of franchises and sequels." - Irish Times
BookTok, as it's known, is an unusually lively corner of the mini-video app's subculture: the most popular reviewers can get a couple hundred thousand followers, the most watched videos rack up a million or more views, and yes, they can affect sales. - The Guardian
Let’s be clear: Netflix’s bigger bucket of Top 10 lists, even if they’re independently verified, is ultimately self-serving — designed to promote its most popular titles. - Variety
"In this blog, we first examine the historic impact of COVID on performing arts ticket sales and then we use the data to simulate three plausible 'what-if' scenarios – realistic worst-case, realistic best-case, and idealized best-case – to predict the impact of each scenario on ticket sales." - SMU DataArts
Fewer people than back in The Time Before will be able to swing by the theater or concert hall after leaving the office. Will they come in from home? In no American city does the question loom larger than in San Francisco. - The New York Times
Patrons attending A Christmas Carol were seated and ready for the 7:30 p.m. showtime when a woman began screaming in the crowd. According to social media posts from witnesses, the woman ranted for upwards of 30 minutes. - Bring Me The News
Deaths are rare, but they're hardly unknown; however, music promoters like Live Nation, for instance, say that the rarity "proves that most shows are perfectly safe." - The New York Times
The two most-attended are the same as most years, the Louvre and the National Museum of China; below them, pandemic closures changed the rankings considerably, with the Met falling to eighth and the most popular Smithsonian museums gone from the top 15. - World Economic Forum
In all, the 30 productions had a combined paid attendance of 193,309, about 82% of total capacity. The previous week’s attendance was 78% of capacity. - Deadline
"Audio is hard, from both a publisher and a consumer perspective. … And if Google couldn't figure out a way to assemble the sort of audio news packages that users want, that's a decent sign that we have a lot more hard thinking left to do." - Nieman Lab
