Articoli taggati con ‘Performing Arts’
Music Industry: between indie productions and innovative startups
In these times we used to talk about every kind of art expression as performative acts: for visual arts and also for music. Like all performing art, also music introduces itself as a theatrical experience, an all encompassing and communal experience – the involvement of spectators for first, feelings, the emotional power from the rituals surrounding these shows, the experience. In this cultural landscape, in our times, two things seems in opposition, but they don’t: on the one hand, the introduction and the diffusion of new technologies creates open space to experimental form, sort of mash up between music, video and interactive systems ( it results from the tradition of the experimental music from 1970, with personality as Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, Robert Wilson, Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno and many more), even introducing AI (artificial intelligence[1]) or VR (virtual reality), the simple streaming vision of a live show, and also more relevant implications for music business. On the other hand, economic crisis put every musicians in the necessity of embracing new ways of sharing, creating and selling music. This necessity often is a translation of a new kind of diy (“do it yourself” practice) for musicians, producers, promoters, helped by digital technology: this is not valid only for live events (different places from the institutional ones, as record store, Blutopia [2] in Rome for example, or clubs, different tour management or self-promotion with the use of social media and video sharing) but also for single musicians, emerging bands or labels and associations. As an interesting article writes about music business – which we can extend also to music and musicians in general: “the music business has been through a number of changes in the last fifteen years, and has often found itself at odds with emerging technology (…) Decimated by piracy and services like Napster, record companies tried to adapt, first by selling mp3s and then finally agreeing to join forces with commercial streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music. Those services represent an ever-growing portion of revenue for labels and artists, but one big problem remains – they fail to make up for the loss of income due to declining CD sales. Fortunately, there are a number of new technologies that will bring major changes – and significant financial gains – to the music business.[3]”
What will remain of the Days ?
Free entrance to museums on the first Sundays of each month seems to have been a great success till its launch in July 2014. It has seen the average increase of visitors throughout Italy of some 260thousand units per month in 2016. More or less as half the yearly visitors in region Marche museums for the same year, following the data of the Mibact or as if the same number of population of the Greater Milan area visited museums or archaeological sites and parks during the twelve free Sundays. Surely it looks like a great success. Overall, it demonstrates that museums arise interest and curiosity in a large number of population. But these numbers don’t tell us anything about the people they represent or about the related “visitors’ journey”. What is the level of loyalty to these events? Are the same people traveling throughout the country planning a free visit to the Italian museums or is mainly a locally-based phenomenon? Can the visitors be profiled at least on the basis of the traditional demoscopic categories? Above all, these numbers don’t say anything about the kind of experience the visitors live and what remains of it, to both actors involved: visitors and museums. It should be time for the national cultural policies to clarify the meaning of success pursued, since the investment required for running the Sundays free entrances or similar openings (i.e. last March 8th ) on national or local level is significant for the public administrations and since lately it has been replicated in other sectors of the cultural production. In facts, the trade-off of this kind of operations is highly worthy if they can help defining further cultural strategies in audience development and in cultural production, and if they can collect valuable feedbacks and data on which cultural institutions can improve their cultural offer and develop new creativity.
