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Price Of Disruption

February 9, 2026

by:

Joe Patti

Seth Godin had an interesting take on pricing and market disruption. He noted that books, records, and other products often have uniform pricing that doesn’t really reflect the demand. You might have found a Harry Potter book was a little more expensive than another novel with the same page count on another shelf, but generally the pricing was in an expected range with similar books. That is still pretty much the case now.

The same holds for ticket prices at the movies. There may be some popular movies where the theater won’t allow passes and the IMAX screening may be more expensive than the conventional screening of the same movie, but the ticket price is pretty much the same for every movie you want to see.

Godin says that when a company disrupts the stability of a market, the backlash generally isn’t based on economics but at the introduction of instability.

When concert tickets went dynamic, the backlash wasn’t about economics. It was moral outrage. Artists who adopted surge pricing weren’t just changing strategy; they were declaring themselves to be a different kind of person. The fans noticed.

Amazon didn’t share publishing’s allergy to profit. Ticketmaster didn’t share the old promoter’s loyalty to fans. They weren’t optimizing within the culture—they were violating it.

[…]

… But if you want to understand why things cost what they cost, don’t ask what’s efficient. Ask what kind of person would be embarrassed to charge more. Or embarrassed not to.

Source

There is definitely a lot that arts and cultural organizations need to do differently to shift to post-digital business model. It also bears considering that there may be a benefit in positioning aspects of the experience you offer in contrast to those things causing outrage.

Clearly, there are some people who value an experience enough to hold their nose and swallow their outrage long enough to achieve the desired end or companies wouldn’t continue to operate in this manner. There is also the issue of a situation persisting long enough it becomes a norm everyone accepts.

But the norm can allow quite a bit of space in which to operate. When you are able to promote an experience as an opportunity to relax and unwind, or a time to stimulate your kids’ imagination and creativity–and legitimately deliver on that promise–you are offering something of value. Often it is the loyalty to fans and customers other companies discarded.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Audience Relations, Business Models, Marketing/PR, Pricing

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Digital Ticketing Has Resulted In Broader Fraud

February 3, 2026

by:

Joe Patti

Last month Fast Company had a piece about how digital ticketing hasn’t really stopped fraud as well as people expected. The article talks about how prior to the NFL going to digital ticketing, a really sophisticated counterfeiter managed to re-create the tickets of many high profile athletic competitions. These counterfeits had the holographic features, heat sensitive ink, and invisible printing that the authentic tickets did.

Once the NFL moved to digital ticketing, the instances of hard ticket counterfeiting nearly disappeared, but it was replaced with other types of fraud involving stolen credit cards, cash app transfers, multi-factor authentication scams. Granted these type of fraud plague other types of transactions than ticket sales.

However, the move to digital means the fraud is able to occur internationally rather than locally and regionally. In a scheme that targeted big tours like Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, a couple of people in Kingston, Jamaica working for a Stub Hub contractor were able to divert the delivery of links that allowed access to purchased tickets away from the buyers to their accomplices who would then resell the tickets.

StubHub has since revamped their ticket delivery process and have AI analyzing how tickets are changing hands in order to detect further fraud. Services like Ticketmaster are using digital bar codes and QR codes that change every few seconds to prevent screenshots from scanning as valid

But of course, only the largest venues can afford the technology to read those dynamic codes leaving smaller venues vulnerable to fraudulent ticket use.

Arts Facilities, Audience Relations

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The Joy Art Is Bringing May Not Be Reflected On The Face

February 2, 2026

by:

Joe Patti

This weekend a newsletter from the Master of Management in International Arts Management program caught my eye with a research piece titled Predicting Museum Visitors’ Intention Through Nonverbal Cues.

I was initially pretty excited thinking they were able to predict people’s actual museum visits based on non-verbal cues. What the study actually found was that there was a correlation between a person’s facial expression and their expressed intention to visit a museum or gallery.

Essentially, they showed people an image from the websites of various museums covering a range of artistic categories for 18 seconds, then showed a blank screen for three seconds as something of a palate cleanser and then moved on to the next image. They used a facial scanning software to evaluate the emotional intensity of joy people exhibited. They asked participants to give a thumbs up or thumbs down to indicate whether they had an intention to visit or not.

I was generally skeptical about the validity of the study in terms of sample size and other design elements so it is probably no surprise that was most interesting to me was their statement that demographic traits and inclination to participate in arts experiences generally determined the degree of facial expressions of joy people exhibited.

The effect is significant for visitors displaying moderate to high joy expressions but becomes insignificant at extreme levels. This distribution suggests that emotion primarily influences visit intention when individuals are in a moderate position, while it loses its predictive power when visitors are either highly disinclined or highly inclined to visit.

The analysis of individual factors also reveals disparities. The influence of emotion decreases with age, suggesting that young adults are more likely to base their decisions on immediate affective reactions, whereas working-age adults consider additional factors. Similarly, the effect of intensity of joy expression is more pronounced in women than in men, reflecting a heightened sensitivity to emotional experiences in cultural choices. Finally, differences observed based on cultural background indicate that facial joy expression does not have the same predictive power across cultural groups: it is a strong predictor for European visitors and a moderate predictor for Maghrebi visitors, but it does not significantly predict visit intention for African and Asian populations.

Source

They suggested the facial scan approach as an alternative/completement to surveys and post-visit interviews. This may be something to consider since demographic traits probably factor into a willingness to participate in surveys and interviews. A recorded candid, unguarded response by a visitor who declines to respond to a survey/interview may help to flesh out what a museum knows about its visitors.

The authors suggest that it may help make decisions about how to communicate about the museum. My thought is that they may discover the images they put in promo materials may not be what visitors are responding most to. They suggest that it may help with visitor flow management and staffing decisions.

They also mention “enabling dynamic adaptation of museum pathways” I am not sure what they mean by that, but I envisioned an app redirecting people through different galleries or through the space in a different order based on how they are responding. It might not necessarily be directing people away from art that seems to bore them. It could also involve directing people to galleries that may elicit more neutral response if they appear to be overwhelmed/overstimulated by the art they are seeing and then directing them back after a period of time.

Obviously one of the big concerns they raise as needing to be addressed is the surveillance required to enable any sort of service or evaluation.

Uncategorized

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Philly Art Museum Firing Provides Insight Into Large Cultural Boards

January 28, 2026

by:

Joe Patti

You may have heard about the abrupt and somewhat controversial firing of Philadelphia Art Museum director and CEO Sasha Suda back in November. Recently Philadelphia Magazine published a long article revealing many more details surrounding that event.

Other than finding out what the heck the story was behind all that, the article reveals a lot about dynamics between large, high-powered boards of directors and the leadership teams of large cultural organizations. It also illustrates the type of leadership board chairs are expected to exhibit.

On one hand, the article depicts a board chair who is quite overbearing and controlling and wields influence even after they have left that role. At the same time, there is also a suggestion that the board chair that replaced her lacked some of the qualifications required of the role.

The article also illustrates communications within the board. As might be expected with 70 members on the full board, there were many that were disengaged from organizational governance and keeping abreast of the situation.

But there was one instance where a sensitive personnel matter couldn’t be fully described in a meeting agenda so Suda expected the board chair to engage in back channel conversations to make the members aware of what was going to be discussed. When that didn’t happen, many on the board felt blindsided. In fact, that also seemed to be the case with Suda’s firing where some board members seemed unaware that was in the works even though Suda had some indications in weeks prior.

In many respects the whole incident is something of a cautionary tale about destructive board-leadership relationship dynamics. There are lessons to be derived about how things could have been done better. The article also provides some insight into how boards are generally expected to operate in normal, very mundane, operating conditions.

Boards, Working In The Arts

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