Jessica Ryan
@jessicaryan
Piratical pioneer of experiences live on the Internet (circa 2013) // CEO Broadway Unlocked, your friendly theatre on the internet // Indefatigable advocate for arts
Jessica Ryan
watch.broadwayunlocked.com
It’s not just that creators use the internet
It’s that they were raised by it.
They’re more attuned to thinking like product designers than studio executives
They test ideas, respond to feedback, and ship what connects.
They understand... See more
It’s that they were raised by it.
Their feedback loop is instant
They understand internet culture
They publish, adapt, and evolve in real time.
They’re more attuned to thinking like product designers than studio executives
They test ideas, respond to feedback, and ship what connects.
They understand... See more
The Entire Hollywood System Explained in Tech Terms
It’s not just that creators use the internet
It’s that they were raised by it.
Their feedback loop is instant
They understand internet culture
They publish, adapt, and evolve in real time.
They’re more attuned to thinking like product designers than studio executives
They test ideas, respond to feedback, and ship what connects.
They understand momentum.
They’ve already absorbed the logic of bottom-up SaaS, intuitively.
This is why the next great storytellers won’t come from film school.
They’ll come from YouTube, Discord, & Substack
All thats missing is proper infrastructure.
You can think of it like this:
Fast Company • fastcompany.com
Broadway Unlocked and IP Strategy
Gavin puts the current state of FAST in perspective: Crowded. Fragmented. Very good for aggregators. Less good for channel publishers.
Last year, Barlow had watched the first season of Netflix’s saucy period drama about the elite marriage market of Regency England, along with millions of others searching for escapist entertainment during the pandemic. A 22-year-old aspiring pop singer with a sizable TikTok following, she posted a song that she wrote with a simple but, she thought,... See more
Julia Jacobs • TikTok to the Grammys: How a ‘Bridgerton’ Musical Beat Broadway (Published 2022)
Future of the Arts and Broadway Unlocked
The notion that non-profit culture is much smaller than for-profit because fewer people participate is flat wrong. What sticks out in the comparison is the disparity in culture monetization. Per-attendee economics, in round numbers, are instructive. Disney’s domestic parks pull about $190 from each guest in admissions and in-park spending. An NFL game with concessions runs $150 or more. A movie ticket: roughly $11. A nonprofit theatre seat: $25 to $50. A museum visit: $0 to $25, average closer to $10 once you weight free admission and discounted hours. a single Disney park visit is monetized roughly twenty times as aggressively as a museum visit. An NFL game extracts about fifteen times what a museum visit does.
The commercial cultural economy isn’t bigger because more people show up. It’s bigger because each attendance gets monetized at a very different scale. This isn’t a moral judgment: extraction at scale is what for-profit models are built to do and they do it well. But it means the non-profit sector’s economic “smallness” is structural on purpose, not evidence of marginal cultural standing. The free museum, the priced-for-access regional theatre, the subsidized concert ticket — these aren’t bugs in the design, they are the design.
Everyone is obsessed with short form right now. But the data is telling a very different story. Little Dot Studios and Evan Shapīro recently analyzed hundreds of YouTube channels, nearly 100,000… | Alex Fernandez
linkedin.com
As the spark of an idea started to build, she sought help from a collaborator, Emily Bear, a 19-year-old composer and musician who had been introduced to the world as a 6-year-old piano prodigy but was hoping to prove herself as more than just a former spectacle for daytime talk shows.
Julia Jacobs • TikTok to the Grammys: How a ‘Bridgerton’ Musical Beat Broadway (Published 2022)
Conversations with numerous Broadway producers have revealed consistent complaints: outside a few “mega-producers” with sufficient market power to negotiate independently, the League is functionally dominated by theatre owners.
The math supports this. Examining the League’s Board of Governors reveals multiple executives from Shubert (Chairman/CEO,... See more
The math supports this. Examining the League’s Board of Governors reveals multiple executives from Shubert (Chairman/CEO,... See more
A Landlord and a Tenant Walk Into a Union Hall
IP Strategy and
The scale of differentiation necessary to produce an MVIP has historically been determined based on the past behavior and preferences of demand. People liked to consume IP via books, movies, TV shows and comic books, not via an outline, or a few chapters, or a single picture.
Now, however, the disruption of traditional IP distributors via streaming and social media networks allows IP owner to have more flexibility in terms of production and distribution.
Lil Nas X, for example, is able to distribute his music (his IP) instantly by publishing a song (‘Old Town Road’) on SoundCloud and have it explode in popularity via remixing and UGC on TikTok. Previously, he would have had to wait to be discovered by a record label, who then would decide when to release his music and in what form factor — most likely as an album rather than a single.