[tobtoh]

As someone who moonlights in the theatre industry (as a theatre photographer), I'm vaguely familiar with the economics of putting on shows - the article is very interesting and tallies with my experience.

However, I do question one line in the article:

> The average income of Broadwaygoers in 2018-19 was $261k — roughly 4x the median household income in the US.

$261k?!? the average income of attendees?!? That's can't be right can it?

[chii]

if there's a number of ultra-high net worth people there, it would push the average up, by a lot probably. Median income is a more representative number than average, when there would be outliers like that.

[tobtoh]

Oh of course. I forgot about the difference between median and average!

For the purpose of the point the article was making in that section (about how the efforts to 'make Broadway more affordable and more democratic come up short.', the 'average' income seems particularly useless as a metric to gauge success.

As you point out, the median is a much better metric.

[lotsofpulp]

I think we need a law that all data needs to be presented in deciles, or at least quintiles.

It is incredibly annoying to know that someone had the data and chose to not show its distribution, when it costs them almost nothing to do so. I assume any use of the word “average” without specifying mean or median, or really any use of mean average, to be clickbait because there is no reason to use it when you know the underlying distribution is skewed.

[sandworm101]

How many Broadway tickets have you bought recently? Not many regular people can afford to go regularly. I'm not broke, but spending 400+ on a pair of tickets, plus other costs ... That is not something I would do every month.

[mbg721]

If Jeff Bezos (in a disguise) went to one show, how long would it take to bring the average back down?

[krallja]

Not a hypothetical: https://pagesix.com/2021/10/11/amazons-jeff-bezos-has-date-n...

[dehrmann]

As others have said, median is more interesting, but also remember that there's a selection bias: these are people traveling to or living in one of the country's most expensive cities.

[throwaway55421]

Why not?

I don't know the stats in the UK, but anecdotally, everyone I know who regularly goes to the theatre (as opposed to occasionally e.g. once every year or two) isn't far off financial independence.

Poor people will just watch it on TV.