The Economics of Theater and Theater as Experience

Here is a good post on the economics of theaters. If you read his earlier post he links to, you can see that he is no libertarian and, likely, no Austrian. But that doesn't mean that he doesn't have some great insights into the economics of theater. He most certainly does. Consider one of his final points:

if I asked you to come up with a worse business model than that [of theaters], it’d be pretty hard: high monetary costs, high temporal costs, high waste, low income, few efficiencies, an inability to scale, little consistency, little demand.

All of which is true. How does one overcome the problems he points out?

One of the problems he points out in the piece is that it's hard to get people to pay for an experience. Richard Florida in his several books, however, has pointed out that this is not true, and that experiences are in fact what the creative class is looking for. Perhaps theaters need to play up the fact that each and every performance is a unique experience.