Broadway Fansites: The Marketing of the Future

            To follow the theme from my last post, I’m going to continue talking about the money side of Broadway.  I already touched on the many problems producers are having with finding investors.  Now I’m going to focus on the marketing difficulties that Broadway is facing. 

            Since the advent of the Internet, Broadway, as well as virtually all of the entertainment industry, began taking advantage of the online marketing opportunities opened up by the mass use of the web.  Whenever a new show was announced, an “official” website was created for the show, featuring biographies of the cast members, information for ticket sales, and sometimes critics’ reviews of the show.  More recently, however, Broadway’s attention was caught by the ever-expanding communities of Facebook, Myspace, and other networking websites.  Broadway couldn’t help but want to leave its mark in this revolutionary cyber-world.

            Fan sites for Broadway shows began springing up all over the Internet, and Broadway encouraged this trend by creating its own fan pages in Facebook and Myspace.  These sites allow fans to comment on the shows, write messages directly to the individual cast members, read critic reviews, and even buy tickets for upcoming performances.

            And it’s not just that the fansites are like Facebook and Myspace—they almost try to be their own Facebook or Myspace.  One such site, broadwayspace.com (and here’s my friend Brynn again), even tried to make their name sound like Myspace. 

            Here’s a good example of a fan site: http://13musical.ning.com.  It seems like it would be just another website made by a fan—in this case, of the show 13—but after a closer look you’ll see that it actually was created by the show’s producers.  And even when shows like 13 close, their fansites are kept up and are still being used by their loyal fans.  If you take a look at the site’s forums, the entire first page of post topics were created just this month alone.  The curtain may have closed on 13’s stage, but its fans are still not willing to give it up.

            I think these fansites are a brilliant idea, and hopefully will help get Broadway up and running again.  But it’s hard at this point to see exactly what effect this new type of marketing is having on the public.  It will take some time before we can tell how many more ticket sales the sites are promoting.  But one thing is clear: the fansites are definitely being used. 

            Even in November of last year, Broadway was already on the way down—“A Tale of Two Cities,” which had a November 16^th closing after a run of only two months, lost its entire $16 million capital—and Broadway hopes that its “new and improved” marketing techniques will help bring it out of the hole the economy has dug for it.