NAC survey on digital arts consumption: Local content preferred, free content is still king
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Animals Of Flowers, Symbiotic Lives, an interactive digital installation, at Gardens by the Bay in 2019.
PHOTO: ST FILE
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SINGAPORE - At least one in four consumers is willing to pay $20 or more for home-grown digital arts content. But 85 per cent of the consumers in the National Arts Council's latest survey on digital arts consumption opted for free content while only 15 per cent paid for digital content.
The results, released on Friday (March 26), compiled findings from three full and nine dipstick surveys conducted from Aug 31 last year to Jan 4 to better understand arts consumers' behaviour during the pandemic. In total, 3,314 people were surveyed.
According to the findings, audiences were marginally more likely to spend on local artists (25 per cent) versus foreign artists (22 per cent). Heritage, theatre and dance attracted the highest proportion of consumers interested in local content, between 22 and 24 per cent.
Online digital arts consumption dipped when phase three began and live performances, which could seat up to 250 audience members, resumed. The survey noted the pent-up demand, with almost one in two of the 1,218 respondents indicating they will attend the same number of live performances as before the pandemic.
Video platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and TikTok were the most popular channel, attracting 81 per cent of the viewers while on-demand streaming sites such as Netflix and Spotify came in second with 30 per cent.
Music remained the most popular digitally consumed art form, commanding more than 70 per cent of the respondents' attention across three surveys. Theatre, dance, film and visual arts each attracted between 34 and 39 per cent of the audience's digital consumption.
Digital arts consumption shot up to between 78 and 88 per cent during phase two of the circuit breaker period, with 80 per cent of audiences saying they would continue with online consumption after the pandemic.
These trends were also evident in the biennial Population Survey On The Arts released in July 2020, which found music to be the most popular artform accessed digitally and a 17 percentage point increase from 2017 in people going online for the arts.
