The American:
“Aging acts account for most of the music industry’s live performance revenue. What happens when these acts are gone?” Ah, they’ll wheel out Depeche Mode in their wheelchairs to lip-synch “Personal Jesus.”
Comments:
What happens when these acts are gone?
They roll out the Troupe of Amazing Fakes. aka, “American Idol”.
Anecdotal evidence: One of my closest friend’s daughter and her friends listen to a LOT of music past their generation mark, and lately, they’ve been listening to the Crooners: Sinatra, Cole, Bennett, just to name a few.
Additionally, a couple of months ago, an unknown cell-phone salesman became a YouTube fixture with his semi-coherent rendition of The Only Opera Piece Ever Written, Nessun Dorna.
They’ll never get to see Pavarotti perform live, much less Sinatra, Cole, or even Tony Bennett.
But they *will* see some amazing karaoke on tv, and being the best *live* performance they’ve seen, they’ll be completely absorbed.
Maybe the Japanese saw this future LONG ago.
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.
i was mesmerized in a bangkok art gallery the other night by act after act of twenty year olds with laptops doing mindblowing sets of sound, noise, beats, textures, music, with all the edge and emotion that one could desire… the industry cannot own this so easily, but performance will not be disappearing any time soon