SYDNEY, N.S. — There may have been no sitting audiences in the island’s concert halls last week but thousands were online watching this year's Celtic Colours events.
While numbers are still being assessed, preliminary figures have left festival executive director Mike MacSween confident about the festival’s future going into its 25th year.
“We’re doing pretty good,” said MacSween. “We had a great week. We’re feeling pretty happy about how things went.”
As of Monday, around noon, the festival’s 11 concert offerings had received just over 250,000 views on several platforms, including Celtic-colours.com and Youtube.com.
“When we measure the total number of views for the week, these are qualified views we can call them of a magnitude where we can say these were definitively people tuning in and watching the show, not just browsing through and moving on to something else,” said MacSween. “So last year, our number was 104,000 for the whole week. This year, right now, based on our math, we are at just over 250,000 so that is an over-doubling of the number of qualified views. That is certainly a significant increase.”
MacSween expects that number to grow since this year, unlike the past when the livestreams were only up for the day of the event, people can watch the concerts until Oct 31.
“We’ll be encouraging people to continue to watch and tune in during that period of time, so we expect that number to grow over the next few weeks.”
Concert viewership peaked during the opening event on Oct. 9 which featured fiddler Ashley MacIsaac.
“We’re right now estimating that we’re in the realm of about 100,000 unique viewers or screens for that opening night which means in terms of the number of viewers that could be considerably larger,” said MacSween. “When we looked at the balance of the week, we were, in terms of concurrent viewers, at any given moment on all of our platforms, we were able to maintain in the realm of about 3,500 on average of people tuning in. Some people tune in and some people tune out. But we were able to maintain that number.”
MacSween said the online audience geographically tended to mimic where audiences come from during a normal year with about three to five per cent coming from overseas, about 20 per cent from the United States, about 25 per cent from parts of Canada outside Atlantic Canada and the rest from within Atlantic Canada.
As you might expect, live-streaming will remain an important part of the concert series but hopes remain high that more traditional concerts will be able to return next year for Celtic Colours 25th anniversary.
“Most performers are accustomed to perform for people, not just for cameras,” said MacSween. “I think the artists got into it and understood that despite that lack of applause from folks in the venue, there were lots of folks at home cheering them on and giving them that gratitude through social media and the like. I think it was a great week in that respect for artists in what has been a very challenging year.”
For some artists, it may have been one of few opportunities to perform during a year which has seen the COVID-19 pandemic close most performance venues worldwide. High online viewership may indicate that audiences will return to those venues once it’s safe to do so.
“We’re very humbled by the response and the numbers of people tuning in and the responses we have gotten from folks online through our social media,” said MacSween. “It’s been really encouraging. There have been responses from folks who felt that they needed a little bit of light in a dark time and Celtic Colours and Cape Breton Island have been able to provide that.”
