Quick, which category has seen the sharpest drop in sales over the last ten years?
• Plays at nonprofit theaters
• Broadway theater attendance
• Music albums/CDs
• Rap albums/CDs
• Movies
While you’re thinking about that, I might explain that I’m a box office data nerd. Having spent over two decades as a show producer, ticket sales were my version of oxygen, and we all know what happens when there isn’t enough oxygen. Obsessions aren’t easily retired; I continue to pay outsized attention to ticket sales. Of course, I have the added incentive of hoping that someday my plays will put at least a little bread and wine on my table.
Okay, back to the opening question. If you guessed rap music, you win the grand prize, a pair of center orchestra seats at my play’s Broadway debut.
Ten years ago 785 million music albums/CDs were sold in the U.S. and 106 million of them (13.4%) were classified as “rap.” By 2010 total album/CD sales had dropped by half. Ouch. As for the rap segment, it had a bad-ass tiff off its rhyming cliff: 27 million were sold last year (6% of the market). That’s a 75% decade-long plummet.
Meanwhile on theatre stages, where there seems to be a nonstop chorus of despair, here’s the “butts in seats” data. Over the past decade nonprofit theatres (surveyed by Theatre Communications Group) reported a 7% attendance decline. And Broadway? Over the same ten-year period the pricier, uptown sibling has suffered a calamitous drop of one percent (source The Broadway League). That’s right, one whole percent. And in 2010 Broadway attendance actually increased 2% over the prior year.
Now let’s pan to the movies, that much bigger narrative art form for the masses. Attendance in 2001 in the U.S. and Canada was 1.43 billon. And last year: 1.34 billion, a 7% 10-year decline. (Source Motion Picture Association of America). Hold on, wait just a minute. 7% decline? Isn’t that the same as for nonprofit theaters in the same period? Yes, it most certainly is.
And anyone in the film industry counting on 3-D technology to goose ticket sales and revenue, as it did last year, might want to read a business story in the New York Times titled “3-D Starts to Fizzle.” In the first half of 2011 overall movie box office performance has been dismal. Revenue has fallen 9% compared with last year and attendance is down 10%. And 3-D films account for a disproportionate share of that decline. In other words, consumer enthusiasm for 3-D films appears to be already fading.
My take on this data: live theatre is not in the ICU and movie folks might want to dial down their smugness. Oh, and for the playwrights in the audience, things could be worse. We could be rap artists.
