Owning the Experience

What do we like about music and movies?  Different things, perhaps.  But also some of the same.  Music is now very easy to listen to wherever you are, including the bathroom.  Audio quality (unless you are a hopeless audiophile) is actually pretty good for a minimal investment.  Recordings are cheap and easy to get–free even, if you don’t mind looking.  But concerts still sell out.  More musicians practice and perform than ever before.  Why?

It is because the experience of going to a concert can’t be replicated – not on DVD, not on CD, not on an iPod.  The act of going with a friend and being in a room with 100, 500, 10,000 other strangers who come together in a social experience to enjoy a commonly loved band is special, worth paying money for, worth making an evening or even a road trip out of it.

Some of the reasons movies aren’t pirated as much as music are because the files are protected by more filters, it’s not as commonly known how to rip them from DVD, and they are huge (in terms of storage space).  Good quality files require many gigabytes of storage, and while storage costs are low and continue to get lower, it’s still too much for the average person to keep investing in.  Songs are about one hundred times easier to download, and that might show in the statistics, but I’m not really interested in looking that up, and that isn’t what this argument is about.

Movies share something with concerts.  It is an exhibition of something that strangers come together to experience as a common interest and fantasy.  People experience something that cannot be copied or owned or held.  Like a rollercoaster:  you can own the physical apparatus, but you can’t own the rush, the feeling, the sensations of riding it.  A couple on a first date wouldn’t pop a romantic comedy into a computer, not even a giant 24″ iMac in all its glory.  (It might lead more quickly to makeouts, but people, this is an old-fashioned couple.)

I’m pretty biased, because I love seeing movies in theaters more than most people.  BUT, I do think that is why people still go see movies and concerts: for the experience.  That is where artists will continue to be relevant and make money.  Their art can be contained in many ways, but the ways in which the experience cannot be copied or owned is where they have their true power.

Tags: concerts movies music