April 25 Archive Highlight; ""T2000 Part 2; Price Tag"

This month I’m continuing Last Month’s Archive look at the Dataset I created in celebration of 5 years of operating and 2000 Telelibrary calls; a group of 1,655 calls that I thought best represented a “typical” Telelibrary call. If you haven’t read it yet, be sure to give it a glance so you know what I mean when I say “The Sample” — or don’t, if you like statistics without context and are mostly just here to see if there are any additional punchlines related to that meme above. Otherwise, if “business talk” makes your eyes cross, you’ll want to skip this one.

~

Whenever I tell people I do “theatre for audiences of one,” the standard set of replies includes polite nodding with vacant smiles[1], some classic double-takes, occasional genuine enthusiastic curiosity, and the ubiquitous non-committal “that’s crazy.” However, in the presence of the more canny or production-minded listeners (read: those scarred by admin duties) , an inevitable follow-up question emerges: “so, does the show cost, like, $600 a ticket?”

Which as far as I can tell is not a question about the value of the work, but rather a presumption of what the baseline cost of making theater is. In the end I do some version of explaining how we generally skip or diminish traditional overhead with my tiny scale our scale, and normally the conversation sails ahead without actually addressing that crucial question:

“How much does it cost?”

Which I’ll remind you in the Telelibrary looks a bit different: Users sign up for a wait-list (free), register for a time when notified (free), and then are asked to make a contribution after the session is complete. At the end of their call they receive payment instructions by email, and a reminder email the next day, and then somewhere between 60 seconds and several months later they send payment. This happens by Paypal (33.73% of payments received) or by Venmo (66.27% of calls received), or not at all. 

So maybe for the Telelibrary it’s better to ask “how much do people pay for it?” 

In an Archive Highlight at the end of 2022 I ran the numbers on 1185 performances to ask whether the Payment System was achieving my goals, least but still undeniably among which is making enough profit to keep the library sustainable and me fed. At the time, I found that the total average contribution was about $26.40, and that the average amount contributed was steadily rising over time ($23.30 in 2020 to $26.71 in 2021 to $29.18 in 2022).

Now after 2000 calls I’m curious to see if those learnings have changed at all, and what other questions might emerge

So - how much did people in The Sample pay?

Which looks pretty similar to how it looked in the last survey of 1185 calls. Still, our new dataset of The Sample offers us both more data points and a more consistent population to draw them from, so let’s tease this out, starting with averages.

If we look at the last year for which we have full data (2024), we see the average price that year was $34.88 per performance. Over the course of the entire existence of Telelibrary, that average is $28.35, which suggests that the trend upward in price year by year has continued. 

Just as in the previous analysis, a critical factor is the significant number of participants who pay nothing at all: 22.55%, or more than 1 in 5 of the calls in the Sample. $0 is the Mode of this dataset by a wide margin, appearing more frequently than any payment amount, and drastically skewing the math on averages. Indeed, when you look at the average among participants who did pay, it is nearly $10 higher across the board ($36.31), and as high as $42.92 per performance in 2024.

The question of non-payment remains thorny in every way: What does it mean? How much is intentional (meant to convey some specific disinterest or displeasure), and how much is accidental, from people who simply forget to pay afterwards? 

And philosophically - is it more helpful to think of this as a $30 show on average, or a $45 show that a fifth of guests don’t pay for? 

For now, I don’t have any data on those $0 payees, so let’s focus on what we do have, and explore some of those bottom columns of the chart to see how payment amounts are distribute across the range.

98.91% of payments in The Sample fall under $125, so to graph this again let’s zoom in on those.

From this vantage, we begin to see some clusters emerging. Let’s make a histogram to inspect those:

As always, $0 looms over the whole data set. But some more novel findings also emerge; across the 5 years of The Sample, there are as many participants paying $50-55 as there are $20-25 (in fact, the Mode payment among participants who actually pay is currently $50). 

As is fairly evident from my process (and frankly, my results), I am what my dear friend and collaborator Peter Droste refers to as “a Market Agnostic Artist”; while I admit the existence of an economy may be possible, and that it’s invisible hand might be slapping me around, I do what I can to align my actions and intentions with a different set of guiding principles. Still, I find producibility to be a fundamental question that determines which artists get to make work that is seen by audiences today, and how often they can do so, and so I find exploring models rebalancing upfront costs/potential profits always worth investigating. what's more, I’m frankly I’m a generally curious sort who spends more time with spreadsheets than live music (though I’m working on that). As such, as I sit with all these numbers, I have a few questions I want to explore:

• How could I get more information about what those $0 payments represent? I hesitate to contact Users who don’t pay to ask for more information, as I have yet to think of a way of doing so that doesn’t also feel like me attempting to coerce them into paying for their session (which would make the choice I presented them initially to set their own payment less valid).
  
  

• Are there better ways to keep barriers for entry low and invite participants to set their own price than having no registration fee?

• What is the impact of last-minute cancellations or no-shows on my experience?

• How are these clusters of payments changing over time?

• How much of the increase in average payment amount is accounted for by inflation?

• Since 2023 I’ve been quite actively touring another one-on-one performance that has a set “ticket price” (Down Payment, technically, but that’s another Archive Highlight) of $100; has that defined value had any effect on how participants in the Sample set the amount they pay? Or do they not even think to compare the two 50-minute performances?

• What other questions should I be asking with this dataset? What other tools could I be using to do so?

I guess we’ll all have to wait for future months to find out.

~

[1] on "polite nodding with vacant smiles" - further investigation has revealed these people are having a variety of experiences; some think I’m joking; some think I am so unsuccessful that only person attended my play, some heard “theatre” and on instinct tuned out the rest. Which is relatable.