Chronicling Concerts

 I read an interesting article this week, "You should have been there, man: Live music, DIY content and online communities" by Jessa Lingel and Mor Naaman. 

In summary, the article explores how people record concerts, what parts of concerts they record, and where these concerts are posted. This article is from 2011 and I find that some of their findings still hold true today. The key takeaways were:

1. Balancing inhibited present (by recording) for future gains (reliving recorded content)

2. Replication of attendance

3. Provide a point of contacts between fans

I have been to two concerts in the last 2 months, and I had truly different experiences at both of them. The first concert was in April, where I attended the Taylor Swift concert in Tampa. Here, I did not record any videos save for the first 2 minutes and last 2 minutes of the entire show. I knew that the 'future gains' for myself did not outweigh the cost of recording in the moment. Other fans disagree - there are regular 'live streams' where people can watch the concert 'live' as it is happening. I also knew that because of others doing it for me, I could watch other people's videos. Finally, there are so many "Swifties" it seems you could through a rock and would hit one. There are plenty of points of contacts between fans. 

The second concert I attended was in May. This artist has a fraction of the followers on Instagram as Taylor Swift - 123k compared to Taylor's 261M. Scene Queen was not the headliner at this concert, but one of the opening acts. Here, I knew she was smaller and I wanted to share her music with others who might not have otherwise come across it. I shared snippets of my favorite songs on my Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook of videos I took while there. When looking on Youtube for videos of her set, there are some cities with the full set and others without. There was a value in replicating my attendance for the future. 

Lingel and Naaman mentioned they primarily looked smaller rock concerts. This reflected my personal experience, but it would be interesting to compare this on a larger scale in today's era of live streaming.

When do you decide what concerts to record and what others to be 'in the moment' forgoing media? 

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