By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Chris Dalla Riva about his new story on the decreasing size of Broadway orchestras published on his newsletter Can’t Get Much Higher. Here’s what I wrote about it:
Broadway’s orchestras have shrunk and scaled back over the past several decades, a new analysis found. For musicals that debuted from 1990 to 1994, the median size of the pit was 23 musicians, a figure that has gradually shrunk to 14 musicians in the 2010 to 2014 classes of musicals and down slightly more since. That’s due to the total demise of the large orchestra; for the shows that came out in the 1990 to 1994 cohort, 54.1 percent had at least 21 members; in the 2020 to 2024 cohort, that’s down to 8.9 percent.
We also spoke about how the concept of the album has evolved, Billboard messing around with what counts as sales, and Chris’ adventures in listening to one album a week. Chris can be found on his newsletter and…