Launching an artistic career during the digital revolution: are young performing artists well-equipped?

In this research, the author analyzes demographic and socioeconomic determinants of digital literacy level of young performing artists in Latvia in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution which is creating needs and skills gaps in the cultural sector. The determinants are chosen from various studies examining the diffusion of innovations theory and digital literacy, and a new digital literacy self-assessment questionnaire is created by adapting the methodologies of Vuorikari et al. (2022), Clifford et al. (2020) and Creative Skills Europe (2021). After the data collection is done in the form of an online survey, the impact of - age, gender, education, artistic profession type, parents’ job type and perception of the need to use digital technologies at their job – on the digital literacy level is analyzed with the help of t-tests, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and ordinary least squares regressions. It is concluded that age, education and parents’ job type have no significant effect on the level of digital literacy, and the artist’s perception of need to use digital technologies in their job has a positive statistically significant effect on the level of digital literacy. Gender and profession type show varying results of significance across different statistical methods with no significance in the t-tests and analysis of variance (ANOVA) but strong significance in the ordinary least squares regression. Within the regression, men exhibit statistically significantly higher digital literacy scores than women while classical dancers display statistically significantly higher digital literacy scores than classical musicians.