cixelsyd Posted April 23, 2013 Share Posted April 23, 2013 The first DCI Finals had a live audience in Whitewater of about 11,000 people. DCI went live on tv in 1975, and immediately added several million people viewing the Finals night. After six years of being on live television, DCI's audience in the stands at Montreal was 34,000 people, a 200% increase over the first non-televised event. That is quite an overreach. By the time DCI first got on TV in 1975, the finals audience was up in the mid-20s. In 1983, it was 16,000. We could just as easily say that after eight years of live TV coverage, finals attendance decreased 33%. Despite the fact that many corps from the early 70s didn't make it to the end of the decade, the audience for DCI 's work increased. While no one can definitively say that televised Finals was responsible for this, clearly being on live tv every August didn't hurt the size of the audience for Finals and the amount of income generated by drum corps events. Well, you had the underlined part right. Anyone looking for a revival of small town, local drum corps who can compete at the DCI level is wasting time. So the Blue Devils are wasting their time running those feeder corps? School marching bands are filling that niche already, and most of the kids participating at that level don't have the interest in doing it at the DCI national touring level. How do you conclude that the niche is "filled"? I understand how marching band provides a similar experience to certain people with the built-in "sponsorship" of the schools. But only 1 in 5 high schools have a competing marching band, and there is no comparable activity for college kids. Maybe the niche is nowhere near "full". The better question is what can be done to increase the overall audience and the net revenues for DCI, so that the organization can do a better job of promoting and paying the corps that it already has. If they can't do that, they'll end up losing some of those corps either through exhaustion or attrition. Oh, I get it now. You would prefer that any time, effort or money be directed toward the top corps. You don't worry about adding teams to your league if the first concern is losing teams who are already playing. Adding a live tv component to the mix right now would have the ability to start re-building public awareness of what DCI does, and give DCI a rationale for seeking major corporate sponsorship. Failing to do it will continue on the path of simply peddling the product to the same dwindling audience every year, and you can do your own projections on the net result of that approach. How does live TV change that? Maybe back in your formative years, getting on live TV was that big of a deal. With no smart phones or Facebook/Twitter, and only four TV channels to choose from, getting time on one of those channels made it very likely that you would be seen by a large number of people. But today, we have so many channels that they need four-digit channel numbers. As a society, we no longer sit down to the same few TV shows. The media universe has expanded. Viewership was far more passive when there were few choices. Today, it is not just the Internet, but also those thousand TV channels that make our media expereience much more active. Our youth demonstrate the shift in behavior that these changes bring. Choosing our entertainment has become a more social process. A viral video on YouTube can attain the same level of viewership and chatter as a popular TV show. Broadcast time, in and of itself, is no longer the holy grail of public exposure. Voices from your side of these debates often speak of the need for this activity to remain "relevant". I think there is no better measure of relevance than the number of people who participate in the activity. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cixelsyd Posted April 23, 2013 Share Posted April 23, 2013 (One side note regarding Montreal attendance. What's often forgotten about the DCI attendance zenith in 1981 is how many corps from Canada competed those years and never before or since. The number of corps competing jumped by a nearly a third from 1980 (Birmingham) to 1981 (Montreal). That factor as much as anything else - not that there’s anything wrong with it - explains why attendance peaked as it did.) 1981: 98 corps, 35,000 at finals. 1983: 51 corps, 16,000 at finals. Wish I had the numbers to plot a graph of finals attendance against number of corps, and see just how strong a correlation there is between them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeD Posted April 23, 2013 Share Posted April 23, 2013 How do you conclude that the niche is "filled"? I understand how marching band provides a similar experience to certain people with the built-in "sponsorship" of the schools. But only 1 in 5 high schools have a competing marching band, and there is no comparable activity for college kids. Maybe the niche is nowhere near "full". But that is still a 1,000% increase in competitive marching/music ensembles as compared to the pre-DCI era of drum corps. Voices from your side of these debates often speak of the need for this activity to remain "relevant". I think there is no better measure of relevance than the number of people who participate in the activity. More kids march and compete today than ever before between band and corps, by a factor of 10, as compared to the old mostly local drum corps days. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
troopers1 Posted April 23, 2013 Share Posted April 23, 2013 (edited) Look at cheerleading, an activity that we often cite jealously when we talk about TV. At least one of the top cheerleading organizations has taken competitive dance into its circle. Both championships are broadcast now on ESPN. I'd argue that drum corps and marching band have more in common than cheerleading and scholastic dance teams. Or at least they should, if only in the sense that nothing, especially not dance, should resemble cheerleading. My point is drum corps and marching band ought not compete against one another for the few resources we might tap. You could even say competive dance belongs with us too. Cheerleading? Never. HH Cheerleading and competitive dance fit nicely on a stage that, in turn, can be completely captured on a TV screen. "Marching Arts" do not fit on a TV screen. So, in addition to reducing the overall time of performance, we would also have to reduce the scale of the performance. Maybe indoor drum lines have a better shot at TV since they fit on the screen, now that I think about it. Edited April 23, 2013 by troopers1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cixelsyd Posted April 23, 2013 Share Posted April 23, 2013 But that is still a 1,000% increase in competitive marching/music ensembles as compared to the pre-DCI era of drum corps. Where do you get that number? More kids march and compete today than ever before between band and corps, by a factor of 10, as compared to the old mostly local drum corps days. Where do you get this other number? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeD Posted April 23, 2013 Share Posted April 23, 2013 Where do you get that number? The History of Drum Corps book noted 440 competitive corps in existence in 1971, according to what has been posted here and in RAMD over the years, by people on all sides of just about every topic we discuss. 1 in 5 competitive HS bands, your number, is around 5,000. I have seen 4,000 posted as an estimate. I once counted up some of the Northeast circuit bands and got around 1,500 bands, with some overlap, of course. Where do you get this other number? See above corps/band counts. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slingerland Posted April 23, 2013 Share Posted April 23, 2013 Is that included in the nine-minute window? No. A minute of intro time, nine minutes of performance, and another minute or so of cleanup, then cut to break (assuming it's on cable), coming back in time to lather/rinse/repeat with the next corps. In the ESPN years, DCI was already showing cut versions of every show - the winning shows were cut down to 5 minutes or so as it was. While it sounds short to us now, if you watched some nine-minute productions in an actual tv environment, you'd probably find that it felt like a comparably long time of uncut coverage. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slingerland Posted April 23, 2013 Share Posted April 23, 2013 (edited) Maybe back in your formative years, getting on live TV was that big of a deal. Believe it or not, for people who are doing drum corps now, if you asked them if they'd like to be on live tv with their work, vs being seen by no one except their friends and family and the next wave of high school kids watching YouTube vids, they would answer "yes." Anyone who thinks that not having a television presence isn't a mark of 'fail' is someone who has decided to disconnect with reality. What was the first thing Rocky Wirtz did with the Chicago Blackhawks once his father died and he took over as the CEO - get a deal to put The Blackhawks back on broadcast television. All of a sudden his franchise went from being the Chicago sports team that no one in the Chicago market watched except for the die-hard hockey fans, to being a brand that was all of a sudden on par with the other four major league sports franchises. Hm...no one watching his team but those who already know about it....change to having a television presence.....greatly increased visibility and profitability and success for his team. Nah, there's no connection whatsoever, right? Afterall, what does a professional entertainment company chairman know about media, visibility, and viability, right? Edited April 23, 2013 by Slingerland Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cixelsyd Posted April 23, 2013 Share Posted April 23, 2013 The History of Drum Corps book noted 440 competitive corps in existence in 1971, according to what has been posted here and in RAMD over the years, by people on all sides of just about every topic we discuss. 1 in 5 competitive HS bands, your number, is around 5,000. I have seen 4,000 posted as an estimate. Then I am baffled. You say there are 10 times as many marching units today as in 1971. You say we have 4,000 bands today - add in 40 DCI and 20 DCA corps, and we have 4,060. 10% of that is 406. But we had 440 corps in 1971, plus whatever number of bands we had back then. You have not yet mentioned how many bands there were in 1971. Regardless, I do not see what number of bands would bring the total down to a tenth of today. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeD Posted April 23, 2013 Share Posted April 23, 2013 Then I am baffled. You say there are 10 times as many marching units today as in 1971. You say we have 4,000 bands today - add in 40 DCI and 20 DCA corps, and we have 4,060. 10% of that is 406. But we had 440 corps in 1971, plus whatever number of bands we had back then. You have not yet mentioned how many bands there were in 1971. Regardless, I do not see what number of bands would bring the total down to a tenth of today. No, the 4,000+ are the competitive bands...there are over 25,000 HS in the US. What I said was this... 1 in 5 competitive HS bands, your number, is around 5,000. I have seen 4,000 posted as an estimate. I once counted up some of the Northeast circuit bands and got around 1,500 bands, with some overlap, of course. All of that refers to competitive bands. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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