Tom Vanderbilt, author of the new book You May Also Like, says that taste is partly “a way of filtering the world, of ordering information” and partly “another form of social learning” – but “always a mixture of exposure, of culture, of a person’s personality. And none of these are particularly static or fixed.”
Category: AUDIENCE
Could Theatre Ever Unite Cities The Way Sports Do?
“Just as we need to widen and diversify the stories we tell on stage and who is telling them, so we need to do the same about conversations around theatre. Otherwise we are only ever talking to ourselves. Why do some people go to the theatre and why do so many people never go, thinking that it’s some kind of exclusive club that’s not for them?”
Can The Ticket Resale Racket Be Stopped?
“Most ordinary fans simply don’t stand a chance. Within seconds of an event going on sale, the tickets are harvested in their thousands by a small but ruthlessly efficient army of touts, many using multiple credit cards to bypass the limit on the number of tickets that one person can purchase.”
Could You Survive Without Your CDs?
“The Herculean task of searching through the rack, putting a disc in a machine, ejecting it to wipe the fingerprint that made it skip through track two and then putting it into the machine again felt so arduous in this new world that it may as well have predated the industrial revolution.”
When Every Book Suddenly Had To Get Five Stars
“I was shaking my pom-poms for books. However, I wasn’t doing so because I was an industry shill, shallow, or self-interested. I failed to provide meaningful criticism, information, or recommendations because I was, like so many of my colleagues, frightened about the future of books and publishing. In desperate times, the desperate tilt at windmills.”
Will – Or Should – People Buy Two Seasons Worth Of Theatre Tix In Order To See ‘Hamilton’?
“Is this price gouging, or the arts equivalent of blackmail? The problem is a by-product of the escalation of ticket prices for theatre everywhere. The result is that it now costs many hundreds of dollars for a single subscription to a Broadway touring series, let alone a pair for those who don’t like to see theatre alone.”
This Week In Audience: New Audience V. Old Audience Edition
A confluence of stories this week that rocket between new and old, digital and physical. Physical books making a comeback while e-book sales fall. Downloads collapsing as streaming takes hold. Transitions sure are messy…
A Museum In Colombia Tries To Take On A Complicated Troubled Past
“A walk through the museum shakes visitors out of the passive mode, making them participants rather than viewers as it leads them through rooms of literal and figurative darkness into open, well-lit spaces. The experience is a reminder that the complexity of memory — how it can nourish our identity or encumber us, trap us in the past and paralyze us, or provide tools for our futures — rarely gets discussed as a crucial component of social harmony and well-being.”
So E-Books Are Down And Paper Books Are Up. What Happened?
“What went wrong? Clearly publishing, like other industries before (and since), suffered a bad attack of technodazzle: It failed to distinguish between newness and value. It could read digital’s hysterical cheerleaders, but not predict how a market of human beings would respond to a product once the novelty had passed. It ignored human nature. Reading the meaning of words is not consuming a manufacture: it is experience.”
Analyst: The End Of Music Downloads Is Near
Midia Research founder Mark Mulligan, who’s spent more than a decade scrutinizing the digital-music market, predicts the music download business will stutter at around $600 million in 2019—a depressing fall from $3.9 billion in 2012, when Apple’s iTunes Store (the world’s preeminent downloads platform) was at its revenue peak. In 2015, downloads declined by 16%, and they look to slide as much as 30% more this year.