Optimal listening conditions

[Slothrop]

Reading an article about Taylor Swift, how she evolved her sound to fit the arenas "she was now playing" - and wondering what that means, in practice (the abandonment of subtleties that a smaller crowd might pick up on, the simplification of melodic lines, the use of more sustained, capacious chords?)

This is a thing I suddenly grokked about "big room techno", too - I'd always thought of it as being about pumping up the cheese and bypassing the subtlety because that'll attract the sort of audience who can fill a "big room", but it's also just that broad-brushstrokes stuff will work sonically in some massive turbine-hall where subtle little details are just going to get lost in the acoustic. The flipside being that if you're in some 200 capacity basement then you absolutely shouldn't be playing a style that's been optimized for massive Berlin megaclubs.