This Week’s Insights: Does demand-pricing alienate audiences?…The audience inside the orchestra… Redefining what it means to interact with an audience… Do people look at art in museums?… Reinventing the meaning of culture in a performing arts center.
- Demand-Based Pricing – Revenue Enhancer Or Audience Deathstar? Marketers are in love with demand-pricing as a way of trying to maximize revenue. Airlines and hotels have been doing it for years. Arts ticketers are more recent to the game. The latest industry to experiment with it is movie theatres – specifically Regal Cinemas. But as ticket sales at movie theatre decline – and people are less inclined to go out to see movies – the move seems likely to turn off customers who do venture out. Nickel-and-diming (now there’s an old expression!) customers suggests to them that you’re just trying to exact more from them rather than serve them, reversing any efforts to create community for your product.
- How To Make An Orchestra Concert More Interactive? One complaint people have about orchestra concerts is that they are static to look at. So one orchestra has begun inviting some of its audience to sit inside the orchestra and experience the concert from the inside. As anyone who has played in an orchestra knows, such seats don’t offer the best acoustics, so these seats aren’t the best place to hear the music. But as an experience of music? Might it offer a more connected experience?
- Interacting WIth Art For Interacting’s Sake Is Lame. But… “Poor interactive shows come across like a desperate plea for attention from Generation iPad. But this doesn’t have to be the case. We’re just scratching the surface of the technological possibilities. And as for the interactivity haters there will always be shows hat expect you to sit down and shut up rather than asking if you want Hamlet to a) be or b) not be.”
- Do People Really Look At Art – In Museums? There have now been a few studies, and the results aren’t encouraging. “These results suggest that cell phones haven’t changed the amount of time people spend in front of art that drastically. The big difference the study found was the birth of selfies—or “arties,” selfies taken with artworks, as the authors dubbed them. Though they hadn’t initially planned to measure arties, the authors witnessed the ‘selfie phenomenon’ on the first day of the new study and decided to begin tracking it. Of the 356 observations recorded by the study’s authors after they began tracking these art-selfies, they found that approximately 35 percent involved ‘arties.’ Two people were taking so many “arties” that they had to be excluded from the study, because they weren’t even looking at the art.” So what is the measure of engagement in a museum?
- The Changing Face Of A Performing Arts Center (As Led By A Jazz Musician) In the past few years, the Kennedy Center has redefined what it considers culture to be presented there. One of the forces leading that change is jazz musician Jerry Moran. “Not so long ago, Moran’s eclectic, adventurous approach to jazz would have placed him well outside the aesthetic boundaries of Washington’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts . But in the past few years, the big white box on the Potomac has opened its venues to jazz in tandem with skateboarders, stand-up comics, dancers, painters and rappers.”
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