Taylor Swift is a cultural phenomenon. Whether it’s her plane journey to the Superbowl overshadowing the game itself, or the economic impact of her Eras Tour on cities being so significant that she’s mentioned as a specific factor in a recent Fed report in the U.S.A, she is impossible to miss. But where did all this incredible attention from fans, audiences, and pretty much everyone come from?

Facebook and Instagram’s owner Meta has unveiled its long-awaited competitor to Twitter. Already boasting millions of sign-ups in the first few hours and being backed by the world’s largest social media company, it will be hard to ignore. But what does this mean for people and organisations in the classical music world?

We’re going to get to the bigger problem by the end of this blog, but first, here’s a scenario for you.

Imagine that your run an orchestra… and make it a big one. You have a concert coming up and you decide to task your entire marketing team to come up with a print campaign, to advertise at bus stops all over the city.

The company that owns the advertising spaces at bus stops tells you the exact dimensions you would need for your poster. As well as telling you the specific size, this also tells you that they the poster should vertical.

But you already knew that the poster at a bus stop should be vertical. You’ve walked past countless bus stops over the years and seen the advertising there. And not just in your city, you’ve been all over the world and seen this.

You even walk past a bus stop on your way to work. As your marketing team are organising the campaign you stop to look at the advertising there, picturing your orchestra filling the display board.

So, it then comes as a shock when it comes to launch day of your big advertising campaign, you walk past the bus stop on your way to work to admire the new poster and you see this…

The digital age, social media, and smart phones have changed so much of the world we live in and how we interact with it. This creates a particular challenge for all of us in the arts when people now want to interact and engage with art in a totally different way to what we’re used to and the format we’ve created.