Broadway Can’t Survive Without Radical Change

23 Sept 2025 · 1 min

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1:04

TJ Walker argues that Broadway musicals face imminent disruption driven by economics and changing audience habits. He warns investors will stop funding loss-making productions, predicts competition from short-form video economies of scale, and proposes radical changes: non-unionized productions, electronic/digitized music, and AI involvement to create much lower-cost Broadway-style shows (as low as 1/10 to 1/100 the current cost).

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Disruption is coming for Broadway, specifically Broadway musicals. You can't put yourself out as a real business when virtually everybody, 100 of their time loses all their money. At some point, investors are going to say, absolutely not. We're going to see the same thing that's happened to network television news comedies being replaced by TikTok videos and YouTube shorts. We are going to see new economies of scale taking over Broadway. And I hate to say it because I'm a big fan of unions. It's going to be non unionized. It's going to have electronic, digitized music. There's going to be some AI involved, and we're going to see sprouting up things like Broadway shows throughout Manhattan and other places, but at 1/10 the cost, sometimes 100th the cost. It's the only way musical theater. Can really thrive.