Read: Unless People Pay, They Don't Pay Attention

I'm sure most of the social media users are aware of this phenomenon of famous musicians busking on the streets and people just walk past them without even noticing.

At the same time, similar, maybe even the same people, are paying high prices for their concert tickets. I have noticed, that price you are paying for cultural experience doesn't necessarily mean quality. It is like looking for a rental apartment in Sydney, Australia. You can get the great view and top location, but the windows let the cold in and building materials behind the decoration are worse than at Soviet time in Tallinn. But that is another story.

Australia Day, Sydney, Australia

I worked recently with Stockholm based performance company. Most of their performances are happening in public space and it is free for the audience, usually the buyer for the show is the municipality or the owner of the location. They bring their high quality shows to small towns and big cities. I'm sure if they would promote themselves via costly ad campaigns the performances would be packed with audience. But they don't. So quite a few arrive. Even if they know when and where.

ReAct! - actions moving, Moving City, Motala, Sweden

I looked into my own behaviour and noticed that this applies to myself as well. If I buy ticket to somewhere, the higher the price, more certain it is that I will be there. I tracked myself to this thought; the free stuff feels like it's always available, I can go there whenever, but the thing I'm paying for will be once in a year/summer/week etc. But then again, if there is no audience for the free or pay little culture events then their quality will get lower with the artists' motivation to bring it out to you and soon there might not be this kind of events available.

Bali Arts Festival, Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia

Sometimes I hear myself and others talking about not having enough time for all the cool stuff available. I'm sure it's more about the laziness than real busy life where you can't even put in some culture event to enjoy your time. Just to note here; I'm writing about the people who usually enjoy culture events.

As a small theatre company “ON teater” sometimes has to wonder with the issue of putting a price tag on things it produces. This is how we do it: most of it is pure mathematics, how much it costs to produce, divided with how much audience we are expecting. But then we of course check what are the similar things on the market costing and adjust the price to that. Sometimes it means rising or lowering the price a bit, if you don't do it, then it might seem suspicious, like there might be something wrong with it. Which is funny, people are used to pay a certain price for certain experience. But people forget that when talking about the arts, it can give you the super feeling just for free as well. What is paid for is a tiny part of the effort of the artists to show it to you. You can pay back with money and your attention. Depending on the show, either or.

How do you select the culture events you attend? How much does the price matter? How much do you think you are influenced by advertisements and media about the events you attend?

Street art, Takua Pa, Thailand