We've Moved!

Okay, I've moved. In an electronic sense -- Theatre Bay Area has consolidated all of our blogging onto the Chatterbox, which I really recommend you take a look at. So for now and evermore, this blog is retired!

Free is the Way of the Future, says Chris Anderson. How Can Theatre Channel That?

Chris Anderson has just come out with a new book called "Free: The Future of a Radical Price." In the most recent issue of The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell reviews it and reacts to it, using his trademark psychological analysis. Free creates more demand, yes: People respond to Free far more than they do Cheap. Money in the Free world is made on advertising. Anderson credits the new abundance of information for making Free lucrative, and he says that the old economy based on scarcity can no longer function.

Free does create a user base, however. So how can we apply Free to the theatre world?

Advertising is the key business model for Free. But what happens when advertising can't work? Herein lies the conundrum of YouTube, a free service that Gladwell says has made Google absolutely no money: YouTube does not have to make a judgment on content quality because it's all free, but advertisers won't buy space on pages with user-generated, poor-quality content, so YouTube had to purchase the rights to professionally-produced content and thus had to spend lots of money to lose less of it on its free service.

Theatre faces the same dilemma, not because of quality but because of scarcity, again. In theatre, advertising opportunities, one of the only ways to make money on Free, are few and far between. There are programs, which provide a little bit of space. We could try using some product placement. But the reality is, theatre attracts a very set amount of people, a smaller audience than you would find for a brand of food, a billboard on the side of a heavily-trafficked highway, or a movie seen across the country at thousands of theatres seven times daily. Advertising cannot sustain a theatre. Donations and ticket revenue can -- if business is good. We cannot go Free all the time, not with capital costs for productions.

What we do have is Free Night of Theater, and it does bring in a lot of people. Theatre is not a waste of time if no resources are spent to attend it, so FNOT allows people the freedom (pun intended) to be adventurous and go out of their comfort zones. But what with the costs of putting up a show, Free all the time wouldn't make a lot of business sense. FNOT's value to theatres lies in creating an audience base that will come back and will pay for what they once got free. Because the Free Night is a scarcity, people are willing to pay for it if they have a positive experience - or so goes general thought. Theatre follows the old market model, then. We should not sound the death knell for a market based on scarcity yet.

But theatre is also abundant. Theatre Bay Area as an organization shows that, what with our hundreds of member theatre companies. What theatre relies on is the vast differences between different companies and different productions. You can see your theatre in an intimate black box or a large, grand theatre. You can go to a comedy or a drama. You can experience niche theatre or mainstream theatre, avant garde or traditional, with puppets or live people. Whatever you want. So theatre tries to counteract its abundance. Perhaps that's our salvation. It is where the journalistic world is falling -- sure, there are different voices, but objective hard news is pretty much the same all over; hence, there is an abundance that cannot be counteracted with variety.

So the way to use Free for theatre is as a scarcity. It's the logic of Free Night and why Free Night is such a boon for the industry. It appeals to the psychological appeal of Free without costing companies an arm and a leg, and if the theatres put on successful shows, will bring in paying customers. The key is to make sure it stays a scarcity, and to make sure that the customers still see the value of a live performance rather than a taped one on the money-losing Free YouTube. Here is where marketing comes in.

Gladwell writes at the end of his article, "the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws." So Free, Gladwell says, can't be an iron law. Free can't be universal, and this is clearly evident in the theatre industry. Theatre can use Free, but sparingly. But it must be used to expand the audience.