For anyone that thinks a classical music competition is small potatoes, you obviously haven’t been following the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition lately.
The competition has just released the viewership results across various digital media channels between June 2–18, 2022 and the results are astonishing.
By the numbers
Digital
- 25M views
- 5x increase from 2017
- 50x increase from 2013
- 177 countries
Social media
- 300M impressions
- 80K new followers across platforms (a 141% increase)
- 4M engagements
The biggest hit was the Youtube video of Yunchan Lim: Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 3 (with Marin Alsop and the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra). The video trended in the top 24 videos globally with over 7M views.
Cliburn’s Youtube channel quintupled to 100K subscribers.
Why it matters
Using Yunchan’s Rach 3 video for comparison, these numbers put the Van Cliburn competition viewership well above some of the biggest television show premieres in history.
- The Game of Thrones — 2.22M Viewers
- The Walking Dead — 5.35M Viewers
- The Flash — 4.8M Viewers
To name a few…
P.S.
The numbers suggest mainstream-level popularity. Why is no one is talking about this?
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