Page 152 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

Cultural business models on the Internet152record industries. On the contrary, digitisation provides both creators and institutions with new opportunities for interrelation.During the late 1900s and early 2000s museums surpassed the cultural boundaries to become part of other socioeconomic environments connected with mass culture and interlinked with other sectors such as tourism and even town planning.With the property boom and rise of showpiece architecture of the 1990s and early 2000s,the museum model became linked to local economic and land development. Since the bursting of the museum-architecture bubble and the advent of digitisation, museums have found a path for growth and development by using new technologies. During this stage their visitor numbers have steadily grown, and the arrival of digitisation has afforded them a new opportuni- ty for developing initiatives that enhance users’ experience and provide alternative sources of income.In the art and museum sector, digitisation provides both creatorsand institutions with new opportunities for interrelation.The study Los museos en la era digital (Museums in the digital age)12 reports a considerable num- ber of initiatives by national and international museums that have incorporated technologies analysing the customer journey, i.e. how they are used “before” the visit, in which the social networks and the web help discovery andplanning, “during” the visit, when technologies such as apps help innovate and enhance the user’s experience, and “after” the visit, when the bond and loyalty with the user are deepened.Nevertheless, irrespective of the unstoppable functional use of technologies, digitisation raises new questions and requires more thorough reconsideration. From a more conceptual angle, digitisation calls for new responses to the future role of museums. In this connection Pepe Serra, director del Museu Nacional de Catalunya, 13 foresees a digital revolution of cultural centres as a whole:Today’s public publishes content, compares and creates new content. Therefore the museum cannot be just an emitter; it must be a meeting point, a locus of dialogue. I believe in the museum as a public agora... We no longer have sole control over the media or sole authority over the works; authority has come to be shared and so have the distribution channels.Performing artsViewed from a digital perspective, the per- forming arts take on a new dimension as they offer new channels for creative and business development. We have witnessed more changes in the past ten years than in the previousone hundred and fifty. On the one hand, the emergence of cutting-edge technology on the stage, such as virtual reality, holograms and 3D stage sets, is modifying the works themselves and having an obvious impact on organisations and professionals. New business opportunities are also arising in subsidiary sectors. CompaniesThe challenge of the digital transformation of the culture industries