By Jim McCarthy Jan 5, 2009 0 comments

David Bowie: Live 2.0 Prophet

In this amazing interview from 2002, David Bowie gets some direct hits in talking about the dynamics of Live 2.0:

”Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity,” he added. ”So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.”

Well, the “last few years” as Bowie described them have passed, and he’s right.  Touring is where the value is for rock stars.  And he’s also right that it doesn’t matter how you feel about it because the forces making it happen are too big to stop.

To review the fundamentals, the two mega-trends driving up the value of live entertainment and making it the most important part of the entertainment business are:

1.  Technology has made electronic entertainment cheap and easy to get. Bowie describes it as “running water or electricity,” and he’s exactly right.  When was the last time you couldn’t wait to get home and use your electricity?

2.  Society continues to push people apart, but the human need for togetherness is eternal. Ok, maybe over millenia, evolution could take care of that pesky need to be around other people, but until then we’re stuck with the social instinct.  You can cocoon yourself in your house and you can work as a consultant to an organization 1000 miles away and you can wear an ipod all day long to drown out the rest of the world, but for most people, it doesn’t change evolutionary biology.

So what does that mean?  Ultimately, it means that the live experience is unique and valuable and people will naturally be seeking it out.  The result of that is demand, rising prices, and profits.

But it’s masked a bit because something else has happened:  an explosion of niche content.  The technological revolution has also made it easy to create all kinds of shows that simply didn’t happen before, and so there is more competition for demand.

Live 2.0 is all about making the product good enough to fully capture all that demand.  The business isn’t there yet, but we can get there.

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