Slop.

A smidge tangential as it was more about classical symphonies, but a few months back Dave’s Classical Guide did a video on the changes in classical music and his take was that the boom in venues for “high culture” music in the late 19th and 20th centuries was always unsustainable. Thus the contraction in recent years is less a death of these media and more a return to a reasonable level.

That being said, I think a lot of this goes back to, as usual, the economic factors. Opera and ballet tickets are fucking expensive so yeah, no shit average joe schmo is going to pick the $20 a seat movie tickets over the $300 a seat opera tickets. Which means the houses are motivated by the ticket sales and benefactor donations from the blue haired socialite crowd who care more about the ritual of the thing that supporting the new artistic expression so of course they turn out more for the classics. (Ballet has one exception though: The Nutcracker, a lot of companies make all their money for the year off doing that for a month and a half around Christmas.) If the funding structure wasn’t so market driven then it could be more accessible to people outside the well to do.