This Week’s Insights: Classical music has a fundamental tech infrastructure problem… Why “Roma” could be an audience game-changer… CBS uses AI to better understand its audiences… How Netflix found an audience for global ideas… How arts organizations are changing their purpose and connecting with their communities.
- Classical Music’s Infrastructure Problem: It’s this – try to find classical music on any of the streaming services and it’s an exercise in frustration. The metadata system that tags and classifies music just wasn’t built for classical. The problem? “We’re treating around 300 years of music from various countries, forms, philosophies, and so on as one genre. As far as modern commercial music, we don’t group the past 50 years together” It may seem like a minor inconvenience, but consider how much time and money online companies invest in even minor tweaks in their user interfaces to make them more useable.
- Why The Movie Industry Has Been Anxiously Watching What Happens To Roma At The Oscars: The mere fact that the movie made the Best Picture category is an existential threat to the very definition of what a movie is. If a film primarily distributed online wins, the debate in Hollywood about what constitutes cinema is over. It would strike a blow to the big multiplex chains, which have refused to show “Roma” because Netflix offered them an exclusive play period of only three weeks; three months is the norm. As far as box office figures, Netflix has said the film has appeared in about 250 theaters in the United States since it was released on Nov. 21, but it refuses to disclose ticket sales. A win by “Roma” could embolden old-line studios like Universal and Warner Bros. to shorten their own theatrical “windows.”
- How CBS Is Using AI To Find Out What Its Audiences Think: This will be happening more and more. We’re awash in data about how audiences interact with content. The bigger issue is sifting through it and figuring out what it means. CBS is using AI to sift through millions of comments and descriptions and reactions and learning to translate comments into meaningful data. The tool measures and categorizes consumers’ responses to characters, plot lines and other topics (like related shows), using a standard set of emotional tags such as “love,” “excited,” “bored,” “sad” or “anxious.”
- Netflix Has Discovered An Audience For Global Ideas: In the past, American pop culture was a vehicle for presenting American ideas to the world. But Netflix’s strategy is fundamentally different. Instead of trying to sell American ideas to a foreign audience, it’s aiming to sell international ideas to a global audience. A list of Netflix’s most watched and most culturally significant recent productions looks like a Model United Nations.
- What Do Arts Organizations Exist To Do? It’s a complicated question, actually. And the obvious answer might be to present shows, exhibitions, art, right? But in this era of community engagement, merely presenting is no longer enough. Take a look at Battersea Arts Centre, which “no longer focuses on creating the ‘future of theatre’—a laudable purpose, but not one of much interest to the many who doubt theatre is for them. Instead, it concentrates on inspiring and supporting people to take creative risks to shape their own and their communities’ future, whether those people define themselves as artists or not.”
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