Re: Putting your whole act online - why not?

Posted by Norbi, 2012-04-16 20:48 BST

Well I thought you already touched on some great points. I'd like to elaborate on them and maybe I'll go off on a tangent into something similar. We'll see...

These days, with anything and everything being so readily available on the internet, the delight and surprise of seeing something live is rapidly dying. I'm not saying it's losing interest to everyone, but it's pretty obvious especially in the younger generations. Instead of hearing about something through word of mouth, posters, articles and old books, now you can just search for it on YouTube. So the "I am really excited to one day see that act live" has turned into "oh I love that act, I'll go watch it on YouTube". This isn't just apparent in circus, it's everywhere. People filming rock concerts with pencils mobile phones and putting it online, sneaking a camera into a show to film it from your pocket with the most terrible shaky badly set-up image ever! Why? Because, sadly, people will watch this, and often in the place of actually going to see it for real.

I'd love to say I'm impervious to such things but I'm not. I watched every video of Kulakov's act I could find, which did indeed excite me about seeing it live...but when I saw it it was more like playing bingo. "Matrix overheads? check. Reverse cascade flats? check". Sure I felt something when watching it, but I couldn't help wondering how incredible the feeling would have been if I hadn't watched the entire act 20+ times prior to seeing it live for the first time. 

In short, I believe putting an entire act online can significantly diminish the enjoyment of seeing it live.


Now, from a business side of things (which I think is more where this topic is really important)...If you have your act, in it's entirety, available online - then agencies/show producers/etc can search for you, watch your act, and make a choice on booking you or not right there without ever making any contact with you. If they don't book you, you haven't just lost a booking, you've also lost a potentially useful contact for the future. However if you have a small teaser, say a minute and a half long, which presents and sells your act nicely - then the people with money are more likely to contact you to ask for the full version and/or more information. In this situation you are now in direct contact and can actively sell your act. As a bonus, you now have an extra person in your address book for future mailouts/newsletters.

As a side-note (as it didn't fit nicely in the paragraph above) - the people you are selling to will often have a limited amount of time/attention and will often only make it through less than a minute of your video. But most of my best parts are near the end? If they only watch the beginning then they won't understand the whole number!!! Exactly why a short, powerful, representative demo video is the most important thing to have hanging out on the internet.


That pretty much sums up my thoughts on the matter and welcomes me nicely to The Juggling Edge,

Norbi | Juggler | Circus Artist | Geek