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
Abigail, what was it about “Bridgerton” that made you want to turn it into a musical?BARLOW The opening scene is so theatrical. I could just see each part of the stage lighting up in my brain. And then I kept writing down lines of dialogue that sounded like song titles. The phrase “ocean away” was the first one that made me run to my piano.
Julia Jacobs • TikTok to the Grammys: How a ‘Bridgerton’ Musical Beat Broadway (Published 2022)
On Sunday, with about six years of musical-theater writing experience between the two of them, the Gen Z songwriting duo beat out a list of powerhouse Grammy nominees that included Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cinderella”; Conor McPherson’s “Girl From the North Country,” built around Bob Dylan songs; and a Stephen Schwartz musical.
Julia Jacobs • TikTok to the Grammys: How a ‘Bridgerton’ Musical Beat Broadway (Published 2022)
Digital technologies can be powerful instruments of growth in artsand culture, capable of catalysing innovation and widening creators’and consumers’ access to publicly funded cultural activities. Prepandemic reports, sectoral overviews and digital strategies fromcultural organisations often demonstrated significant optimismin this respect
Adrian Leguina • Digital Access to Arts and Culture
The original videos remain on TikTok, and the independently produced album is on Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming services, but the musical has yet to actually be staged. (This is far from the norm for the musical theater album category, which has typically gone to big-name Broadway musicals such as “Hamilton,” “Jersey Boys” and “The Lion K... See more
Julia Jacobs • TikTok to the Grammys: How a ‘Bridgerton’ Musical Beat Broadway (Published 2022)
In hindsight, the reasons for the failed promise seem somewhat obvious: the Creator Economy was never really meant to be a solution for 99% of the hundreds of millions (or quite possibly billions) of creators that exist today; instead, it was designed to operationalize the financial infrastructure for the top 1%–the creators who have already broken... See more
Fast Company • fastcompany.com
If you can set up a system where anyone can publish anything, and dynamically allocate more resources to the ideas that seem most promising, you're much more likely to produce a lot of surprisingly awesome output. This is important for reasons deeper than just "people are bad at predicting success"—I think there's something about surprise that audi... See more
Every • Recursive Publishing
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.
