Should I stay or should I go?

Performers, artists, and venues have seen livelihoods decimated by Covid-19, leaving them high and dry without a paying audience or a clear way to make up for the shortfall in income. So how are consumers talking and thinking about the creative industries, and what does that mean for the future of the arts?

Using our Consumer Research platform, we looked at English-language mentions of theatre, arts, and music (excluding the term artist) from January 2017 to June 2020. The buzz has been consistently strong, but it’s been especially loud in the last two months.

In fact, mentions about creative industry events have been unseasonably high in May and June 2020 compared to the average volumes for these months in the last three years.

To dive deeper, we broke down that data by music, theatre, and art and then looked specifically for mentions regarding the short- and long-term challenges for cultural events.

People were the most concerned about music, with 20 million mentions since March. In particular, the conversation was focused on promoting virtual concerts (6m mentions), ticket sales (2m mentions), and how social dancing would work at a gig (3m mentions).

There were 9m mentions in the same time period that were worried about art. 5m of these were from people who were particularly concerned about independent venues like galleries and small stores.

Meanwhile, we found 5m mentions about the future of theatres. The complete closure of Broadway until 2021 drove nearly half of these worried mentions.

Despite Broadway’s bleak announcement, people on social media were ecstatic when they learned the UK government pledged the equivalent of $2bn and Australia pledged the equivalent of $180m in relief packages for creative industries. These mentions were driven by well wishers – 85% of sentiment-categorized posts were positive.

Despite the support for the arts online, we’ve also found that many people won’t be choosing to attend events in-person now or in the near future, purely because they don’t feel safe.

From March 1 to June 31 2020 our Consumer Research platform found 4m mentions from folks stating that they wouldn’t feel comfortable attending a cultural event like a gig or an art gallery so long as Covid-19 isn’t contained.

And a June 22 – 29 Brandwatch Qriously survey of 7,555 adults from Australia, China, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the USA showed that only 14% of respondents said they’d feel comfortable attending a concert. Meanwhile, only 17% of respondents said they’d feel comfortable visiting a museum. Neither of these stats are positive for the music or arts industries.

There is a whole lot of support out there for the creative industries, but there is (currently) very little intent to participate in the ‘IRL’ events that fund it. While we can expect confidence to pick up as the virus is contained and government money can hopefully keep venues afloat in the meantime, it could be a while before the industry is able to generate anything like the income it has in the past.

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Brandwatch Response Team