Three New Year’s Eve galas, one night: how the acts get booked and how viewers choose
Three cities, four broadcasters, one evening. The new thing this year is performers taking two shows in a night.
The New Year’s Eve galas have collided again: Taipei, Taichung and Kaohsiung all run main stages, plus two smaller events, all starting after 7pm on 31 December.
For performers that is not bad news. The distances make a two-show night workable — high speed rail plus a shuttle puts Taichung and Taipei about two and a half hours apart. At least six acts are doing both this year.
Audiences are choosing a broadcast, not a venue
The venues hold roughly 120,000 people between them. The broadcasts reach millions. So the running order is built for the broadcast: the closing act is not necessarily the biggest name, it is whoever holds ratings from 23:30 to 00:10.
That is also why the act before the countdown almost always gets three songs or more. It is the highest advertising rate of the night.
{"q":"We build the set list against a clock, not against the songs. Nothing slow in the last ten minutes.","by":"A gala producer"}
What is different this year is streaming: all three simulcast on YouTube with no region lock, which means each broadcast’s real competition is the other one’s comment section.
