Archive for September, 2010
You Can Choose Not to Be Affected by Market Forces…
…like you can choose not to be affected by gravity. It’s there, effecting the behavior of everyone you encounter. In their buying, in their giving, in their thinking. It’s not even really about money; it’s about dealing with scarcity in time, attention, love, and yes, money. It’s not some agreed-to game that we’re all playing, [...]
The Wisdom of the Soda Seller
Suppose I have a really simple business: I sell sodas on the beach from a little booth. (Actually, some days, that would sound kind of appealing.) My two expenses are the rent that I pay for the booth and the cost of the soda, which I pay to a wholesaler. And let’s say I pay [...]
Make it For An Audience, or Don’t Have the Nerve to Charge Money
Yesterday, I tweeted Derek Siver’s insightful post he called “Valuable to Others, or Only You?” In short, he describes the “starving artist” problem: “When someone creates something that is really important, powerful, and valuable to them, it’s hard to imagine that it’s not important, powerful, and valuable to others.” This creates a problem for those [...]
The 4% Rule
For non-profits in the live entertainment business, I’d like to suggest that no donor make up more than 4% of your total budget. This is a percentage that a lot of wealth managers set as the maximum you should hold in any one stock, and while there’s nothing magical about this number, you’ve got to [...]
Check Your Alignment
A few weeks ago, someone asked me what was going to happen with the concert business. Clearly, with a lot of artists out on the road and many of them having lukewarm (and I’m being generous there) demand, something had to give. Sure, prices will (and did) come down, but structurally, that doesn’t change the [...]
Do You Refuse To Pander? Do You Think You’d Be Good at It If You Tried?
Sometimes (as yesterday in the wonderful 2 Am Theatre Twitter conversation which you can find at #2amt) there’s a discussion among arts and theatre producers that goes like this: A: We have to think of our audience when we create our work. B: No, we must only think of ourselves and our art. Otherwise, it’s [...]
Everybody’s a Rock Star Somewhere, Part 2
(If you want, go back and catch up on what led into this story from yesterday. If you don’t, it’s ok. You’ll still get it.) Here’s a little story I want to share from two start-ups that I’ve been a part of. The first, which I won’t name, but those of you who know me [...]
Everybody’s a Rock Star Somewhere
A few months ago, it occurred to me that Andy’s Warhol’s thing about “everybody being famous for 15 minutes” had to be revised. He had been right, of course. When he said it, the world was one of 3 TV channels and serious journalists deciding what to use the limited and print resources to tell [...]
Unforced Error of the Almost Unbelievable Kind
First, I’d like to thank Ethan Siegel for telling this story. It takes a big person to cop to something like this, and I suspect he’s doing it because he’d like others to avoid such a terrible mistake. I don’t want anything I say to come across as a personal slam because, Lord knows, I’ve [...]
Is ‘Holy Sh*t’ the Best Theatre Can Do?
Last week, Lauren Gunderson wrote a piece in the HuffPo that got a lot of theatre-types talking and for good reason: She declared “an urgent age of badassery” for the theatre that would be known hereafter as “Holy Sh*t” Theatre. I’m extremely sympathetic to the impulse here, and I thought it was a fun read [...]
Subscribe
Popular Articles
- Our Story, and We’re Sticking To It
- Several Non-Opinions about Ticket Pricing
- Group Sales is Dead
- “Discounting Silliness” Presentation Now Live
- How Not To Discount, A Recap
- More Pie Now!
- Change is Only Dramatic to People Used to the Current Thing
- Audience-Oriented, It’s What’s For Dinner
- The Nutcracker is Bad for Ballet like Easter is Bad for Churches
- Awaiting the Great Pumpkin, er, Great Performance
Topics
- Live 2.0
- Live Nation
- Ticketmaster
- Goldstar
- Cirque Du Soleil
- TED
- Broadway
- Bob Lefsetz
- Greg Sandow
- Seth Godin
- Popular
- marketing
- Live entertainment
- secondary market
- Chris Anderson
- Springsteen
- Bruce Springsteen
- classical music
- NFL
- Advertising
- discounting
- Stewart Copeland
- dynamic pricing
- AEG
- price gouging
- Tickets.com
- Wall Street Journal
- theatre
- TED-U
- Amazon
- revenue per seat
- Comcast
- Trevor O'Donnell
- Anne Midgette
- L.A. Times
- Pantages
- niche
- U2
- audience
- Great Performance Delusion
- The Police
- baseball