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DCI Attendance Figures Released


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If you use the 2004 number as a baseline

2012 should have 242,441

The average viewer per theater went from 400 viewers to 66. Something is not right with these numbers.

Theaters will start dropping the show if they are only selling 66 tickets. That is not very much popcorn and coke for the amount of time the audience is killing one of the theater halls.

I went to the first Big Live and Loud in my city back in 2003. It was a 30 minute drive for me on the other side of town because it was showing at only ONE theater in Austin. Needless to say the theater was packed. Fortunately, for me, the theater 5 minutes away from house had it so I didn't have to drive so far. So I went there. The next year, there were three theaters on my side of town that had it.

I'm sure with all the metroplex theaters out there with 50 screens ready to show the latest Batman movie that theater owners can find one screen of some crappy movie that's barely going to pull in 10 people that night to devote to Drum Corp.

Now, trying to get a theater owner to give up a Saturday night screen for a DCI Finals telecast is a totally different story....

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Regardless of the official announcement....let's all "think" whatever we want so we can stir up the pot on Drum Corps Planet.

What a fun group.

Criticize, diminish, cut to ribbons....as if there arent people in the equation doing a good job somewhere.

Can we all apply the same level of scrutiny to ourselves at our own jobs and so forth? Wont that make for a fun world to live in.

Everyone's incompetent, nothing is "true", everything is questionable and shady, Blue Devils suck, the numbers arent real, the judges are corrupt (that one really ###### me off) and this whole activity is going to hell in a handbasket and will be lucky to hit the field at all next year.

Great.

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Regardless of the official announcement....let's all "think" whatever we want so we can stir up the pot on Drum Corps Planet.

What a fun group.

Criticize, diminish, cut to ribbons....as if there arent people in the equation doing a good job somewhere.

Can we all apply the same level of scrutiny to ourselves at our own jobs and so forth? Wont that make for a fun world to live in.

Everyone's incompetent, nothing is "true", everything is questionable and shady, Blue Devils suck, the numbers arent real, the judges are corrupt (that one really ###### me off) and this whole activity is going to hell in a handbasket and will be lucky to hit the field at all next year.

Great.

I bet you are fun at parties.

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Regardless of the official announcement....let's all "think" whatever we want so we can stir up the pot on Drum Corps Planet.

What a fun group.

Criticize, diminish, cut to ribbons....as if there arent people in the equation doing a good job somewhere.

Can we all apply the same level of scrutiny to ourselves at our own jobs and so forth? Wont that make for a fun world to live in.

Everyone's incompetent, nothing is "true", everything is questionable and shady, Blue Devils suck, the numbers arent real, the judges are corrupt (that one really ###### me off) and this whole activity is going to hell in a handbasket and will be lucky to hit the field at all next year.

Great.

Don't forget that nothing's the same since they introduced 2 valves. And the prize in Cracker Jacks these days sucks.

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Who cares if the average attendance per cinema is down, the over all total is up. The over all finals week attendance at cinemas and LOS is up.

You can add political spin to the figures to suit your "DCI is dying" argument all you like but it won't change the fact that the numbers across the board are up this year.

DCI should ignore the "DCI is dying" movement here on DCP and keep doing what they're doing because it's clearly working.

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So the answer to your questions are yes, Quarters and Semis have been trending down, but there's very little data, and critically no pre-cinema, pre-fan network data (if anyone has any such data, I'd love to find out about it). So, I wouldn't read too much into these data points. It's far too few to be meaningful.

Thank you. I agree it's little data. I know in the early, early years, prelims were often in a different stadium. When I competed in Denver '77/'78, prelims were in Boulder. When I went up to Montreal in the early '80's prelims were at a separate stadium.

I did purchase a drum corps history book that said that attendance in Boulder for '77 prelims was 11,000. The book also said that "30,000+" people were at the Finals in '78. (Drum Corps International. The First Decade. 1972-1981).

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I went to the first Big Live and Loud in my city back in 2003. It was a 30 minute drive for me on the other side of town because it was showing at only ONE theater in Austin. Needless to say the theater was packed. Fortunately, for me, the theater 5 minutes away from house had it so I didn't have to drive so far. So I went there. The next year, there were three theaters on my side of town that had it.

I'm sure with all the metroplex theaters out there with 50 screens ready to show the latest Batman movie that theater owners can find one screen of some crappy movie that's barely going to pull in 10 people that night to devote to Drum Corp.

Now, trying to get a theater owner to give up a Saturday night screen for a DCI Finals telecast is a totally different story....

I see the good numbers. I just happened to see the bad numbers first and 400 people per screen compared to 66 people per screen is a good relevant question.

If I want to sell doom and gloom - trust me - I could sell you some doom and gloom. I could have stated it government style and told everyone that there was a

average loss of 41.75 people per screen each year

when projected growth should be an average of 54% higher per person.

These numbers are not a lie - but it does not tell the positive numbers - nor does it give you the entire picture - it also does not state that the number of screens increased by 562 screens

Be careful when you read into numbers because there are many ways that they can be twisted to best suit a need.

You just have to look at all the numbers, not just one column. No Gloom... No Doom...

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I'm sorry if some of us come off as negative, but we're drum corps people. When we get an 83, we want to strive to get an 84. When we get a 92, we want to strive to get a 93. We have it ingrained in our psyches to want to perform better.

So, yeah, we get a little grumpy when things don't perform better.

I think the theater numbers are merely showing that there's a point of diminishing returns where adding more theaters doesn't necessarily add a lot more ticket buyers. The 606 theaters are probably providing decent coverage of the U.S. population and gotten to the point of cannibalizing each other for the same pool of potential attendees.

BTW--when DCI Finals aired on ESPN2 in 2007, Nielsen estimated the number of viewers at about 508,000.

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To be clear, DCI says the number "does not include thousands of corps and staff members who entered the stadium after performances with wristbands or staff/VIP credentials." But that's not the same as "paid attendance".

Still, whatever this number is, it appears to be the same they gave us last year, so things are comparable.

Prelims: 6,903 -> 6,647, down 3.8%

Semis: 12,351 -> 12,027, down 2.6%

Finals: 17,363 -> 17,820, up 2.6%

Total: 36,617 -> 36,494, down 0.3%

Cinecast: 38,722 -> 40,000, up 3.3%

Finals numbers for the past several years:

(ATT = "attendance" as reported by DCI, tix = "Tickets sold" as reported by DCI; "attendance" will always be greater than "tickets sold", for example in 2002, DCI reported attendance of around 26,000 on 20,230 tickets)

1994: 24,513 tix *

1995: 19,100 tix

1996: 13,771 tix

1997: 13,773 tix

1998: 12,693 tix

1999: 19,931 tix

2000: 18,423 tix

2001: 16,406 tix

2002: 20,230 tix

2003: 18,865 tix

2004: 22,047 tix

2005: 20,542 ATT

2006: 21,232 ATT

2007: 24,309 tix

2008: 20,534 ATT

2009: 17,865 ATT

2010: 15,900 ATT (estimated based on percentages given)

2011: 17,363 ATT

2012: 17,820 ATT

* 1994 number as reported in Drum Corps World. All other numbers directly from dci.org.

I find it interesting that while DCI touts Indy as centrally located for the majority of fans, Pasadena and Denver have had the two highest ticket sales since 1996. Even those two pale in comparison to Montreal.

Garry in Vegas

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