There is a great deal of discussion going on in various blogs and forums at the moment regarding the subject of audience numbers and whether they are dropping.
When I have time off and go around SL enjoying the music that is available it certainly does appear to be the case that numbers are down. I seem to be lucky in that my own shows have stayed the same regarding numbers. I have normally drawn between 20 and 30 to my shows and that seems to still be the same. There is the occasional poorly attended one and the occasional packed sim but on the whole I have had the same numbers if not slightly more. I have never really done any metrics on this. I have the Mystitool which is packed full of gizmos and I expect one of them would give me an accurate number of unique avatars and how long they were around. I'be never really used it to it's full extent so I'll take a look sometime. Then again maybe I won't. The main thing is that enough people come and we have a good time. I never felt the need to discuss numbers while I listened to folks boasting of their sim splitting audiences and I don't see any need now. I had to laugh recently when I saw someone who always boasted that they play to packed sims every time recently say their audiences have gone up! I
So what is causing numbers to be depressed elsewhere? If you surf this subject you will find a huge number of musings spread all over the net. I think it does stand up to some discussion and one of the healthy things about the SL music scene is that it can be galvanised on occasions to achieve something. Personally I think we should just keep on doing what we are doing and the market will come to its own conclusion as to whether there is a future in this kind of online performance. My gut feeling is definitely yes and if there is any reduction in numbers its because during a world wide recession then leisure time gets squeezed. If you are having a tough time making ends meet then you are more likely to spend time ebaying stuff you found in the attic rather than messing about on SL. If you are in SL then you are more likely to be spending you SL time on business projects than leisure projects.
One awkward thing about the debate is that it has become fragmented across a whole load of individual blogs. Blogs are great for getting your own feelings across and perhaps entertaining a couple of comments but they are useless for hosting any worthwhile debate as they disperse the interest across multiple locations and result in people have to wade through alot of extraneous information in order to find the salient points. There is the perfect tool already available for this kind of discussion at the Second Life Music Community Forum ( http://slmc.myfastforum.org/ ) . It seems crazy to me that people don't see it that way, as the most obviously productive tool for topics such as this.
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