Quality vs. Convenience: Online Concerts

Daily, I am bombarded with advertisements for products and services promoting new and exciting ways to work and play from home. With online banking, food delivery, on-demand entertainment, internet courses, instant messaging, telecommuting, and digital media downloads, I see a glamorous future in which no one will ever need to leave her home. If the future goes according to plan, we can all become obese, stagnate slobs with social skills equivalent to those of spotted garden slugs and no one will have to know.

For now, I can still skip to the bank and talk to a teller about my finances, yet I worry what tomorrow will bring when the convenience of digital solutions doesn’t always match the quality of the physical interpersonal interactions it replaces. An example of a lost societal gem is the pay-phone; when the cell phone first came along, people who found being within range of a call at anytime unappealing could continue using pay-phones. Today pay-phones have gone the way of the Po'o-uli and our only option is to carry phones and pay for their service plans.

At the last Iggli blogger meeting, we discussed possible evolutionary paths of online concert experiences. Today, watching a concert online means either picking through a limited selection of prerecorded shows on services such as Fabchannel.com, watching uninspired live performances of major label bands on websites like MySpace, or sifting through millions of low quality camera-phone videos on YouTube. Tomorrow’s experience will likely hold many of the advantages associated with watching any televised event, yet with the potential for much added interactivity. An unlimited amount of people could digitally attend the event and they would not be limited by the burdens of room capacity or geographic location. Everything could easily be stored so people could make the concert fit into their schedule instead of planning their life around the event. The potential for additional bonus features to watching a concert online are limitless.

In the fury of this exciting prospect, I can’t help but wonder if online concerts will serve to excite the masses about live music and, in turn, boost concert attendance or if they will have the opposite effect. I would like to think that people will be able to make decisions factoring in the indispensable human quality of live musical performances. Yet things do not look good for quality in the quality vs. convenience battle when 54 million people are choosing to save a few minutes by eating at McDonalds each day. Continuing in my negativity, receiving postal mail from a friend is still much more satisfying and exciting than receiving an email. Yet, it seems people almost unwaveringly opt for the convenience of email. Sometimes I wonder if Netflix is solely responsible for keeping the US Postal Service afloat.

My predictions is this: dedicated music fans will always support live music and will take advantage of online concerts to find out about new bands and to see shows they would otherwise be unable to attend. However, most people will fall into the arms of convenience and large major label concert attendance will decline. It is doubtful we will hear any complaints from major labels because the majority of the concerts they arrange are built from the ground up to be promotional loss-leaders to boost sales and artist recognition. If record labels have heads on their shoulders and any brains in their heads, they will quickly get on-top of licensing high quality online concert experiences before the the ever-growing, pent-up consumer demand explodes into the establishment of reputable concert sharing networks beyond their control.