Every time I go to a show, it’s a full house, it seems that people really go to concerts and spend money on live performances. Of course, it is my lone experience in Los Angeles, a city where there are more music shows in one night than in a month in certain other places of the country, but what does this abundance of shows say at the end? That there is a real demand for live performances! I presume this is a general tendency, since these giant music festivals always sell out extremely fast, and people don’t seem to be stopped by the ever-rising prices. Wikipedia lists 177 music festivals in the US only, and they are not even counting the ‘small’ ones like the Jubilee Music Fest or the Sunset Strip Music Festival or even the FYF Fest!
Every time there is a hot ticket going on sale, I anxiously sit in front of my computer, ready to log in on ticketmaster at the announced time the tickets go on sale, and I worry about not being able to get one,…everyone knows that feeling!
The amount of money spent on concerts is considerable. According to Pollstar, which collects sales data from promoters and ticket vendors, the top 100 North American tours boasted a combined gross of $1,125.9 million in 2012, and the top 100 tours in North America last year sold $2.34 billion in tickets, a 6.3 percent increase from 2010, when the lagging economy and the weak summer lineups caused sales to drop by as much as 15 percent, the concert industry’s first decline in 15 years. The top attractions in North America last year were U2, with $156 million in gross ticket sales, Taylor Swift with $97.7 million, Kenny Chesney with $84.6 million, and Lady Gaga with $63.7 million. According to Pollstar, Kenny Chesney alone has sold 9.8 million concert tickets for a gross of $608.6 million since 2003!! In comparison, Bruce Springsteen has sold 5.5 million tickets over the last 10 years for a gross of $460.5 million.
All these numbers to document how concerts are part of our lives, we spent so much on shows, whereas we could have thought it would just have been the opposite when any piece of music or any live performance is just a click away, when you can watch almost everything that has been recorded on YouTube for free.
So where does our obsession with concerts come from? I got to read a excerpt of David Byrne’s book ‘How Music Works’, when I was precisely waiting for a live performance at Amoeba! And what he says about the connection between technology and live performances is simply brilliant:
‘As music becomes less of a thing – a cylinder, a cassette, a disc – and more ephemeral, perhaps we will start to assign an increasing value to live performances again. After years of hoarding LPs and CDs, I have to admit I’m now getting rid of them. I occasionally pop a CD into a player, but I’ve pretty much completely converted to listening to MP3s either on my computer or, gulp, my phone! For me, music is becoming dematerialized, a state that is more truthful to its nature, I suspect. Technology has brought us full circle.’
That exactly explains everything! I too rarely buy a CD anymore, I always listen to MP3s these days, and I have never fallen for this current vinyl craze! Music has dematerialized, how true!
David Byrne continues:
‘I go to at least one live performance a week, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. There are other people there. Often there is beer, too. After more than a hundred years of technological innovation, the digitization of music has inadvertently had the effect of emphasizing its social function. Not only do we still give friends copies of music that excites us, but increasingly we have come to value the social aspect of a live performance more than we used to. Music technology in some ways appears to have been on a trajectory in which the end result is that it will destroy and devalue itself. It will succeed completely when it self-destructs. The technology is useful and convenient, but it has, in the end, reduced its own value and increased the value of the things it has never been able to capture or reproduce.’
So does he mean that, since technology has brought us full circle, without a material object to hold in our hands, we are back to the primitive times where listening to music live was the only way to really listen to music, to really palpate the sound?
Music is free on the internet, there is almost no value to a MP3, a total paradox for people which value music. And this may be a reason why we don’t hesitate to spend a fortune on concert tickets. Furthermore, we are social animals and we crave for these social interactions that the digital age has erased, and the dematerialization of music has brought us back to the pre-historic start when we were listening to a singer around a fire, technology has brought us back to live performances.