The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #113071 Message #2414732
Posted By: Nick
15-Aug-08 - 01:02 PM
Thread Name: Where have the audiences gone?
Subject: RE: Where have the audiences gone?
I do think a lot of this is far more fundamental than being a "folk" problem.
When I was teens-30 there were stacks of pubs around that played music and it was accepted and normal. There were limited specialities. Life was broadcast and millions of people watched The Morecombe and Wise Show and people accepted what little entertainment was on hand because there were fewer choices.
People travelled less. I've been down to Sidmouth recently to play and will be at Whitby next week now and then when it fits in with work and will think little of a 100mile evening roundtrip. This would have been almost unthinkable in the 60s.
People didn't spend their life watching hours of TV.
We didn't live in a cocooned world where people moved to a narrowcasted world where individuals stayed at home in their little 'safe' worlds and browsed the internet for the nooks and crannies of their interests.
It's a wonderful world that we now have so many choices. It does mean however that audiences everywhere are smaller for most things.
It does however mean that audiences who come to things are usually more positive to what they are at and - as long as they come in sustainable enough numbers - all these things will survive. In a digital age and increasingly video age the mass of historical material in the future of the legacy of our present will be enormous.
It's just different than it was.
In the late 1970's/early 1980's I worked for a large global advertising agency and went to a presentation by a 'future' predictor (a la Faith Popcorn and the like) and they were stratingly accurate in many things. The main predictions being that media would fragment to narrowcasting rather than broadcasting and the effects this would have on culture and choice; the increasing coccooning of people to be more home/community/security based; the increasing isolation of folk from each other. I'd be interested as to what they are predicting now as - if the trends of our present were so obvious to a few in the past - presumably our futures are also.