Concerts through the lens of social media
Photo courtesy of Luis Quintero/Pexels
Concerts go hand in hand with pulling out your phone to record nowadays, probably to capture something that will go staright to your social media. Is that really the experience we want?
Recently it feels like every pop star’s tour is receiving insane amounts of news and social media coverage, whether it be for surprise celebrity guest appearances or any kind of deviation that the singer makes from the normal run of their show. They have to do something to make the audience of that night feel special.
This wide-spread media coverage of pop concerts first began with Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, which had a massive influence on the culture of attending a pop concert— a fun event made even more exciting by the fact we had all been locked in our homes for the past two and a half years in the pandemic.
Swift’s tour has influenced many aspects of going to a concert, such as wearing a themed outfit and predicting what “surprise songs” you were going to get that night. Staging some kind of moment to include the audience for a viral clip of concerts has been another really common tactic used by different artists’ teams to create more buzz around a tour. This trend was also influenced by an element of Swift’s tour: hand-selecting a fan from the crowd to be given Taylor’s hat during her song “22.”
More examples of this include doing the “apple dance” on the big screen at Charli xcx’s show, dancing around the stage with ROLE MODEL as his “Sally,” and being arrested by Sabrina Carpenter for being too hot. Normally, the tour begins with fans being featured as these “special guests”; but as the tour continues, different celebrities will make appearances in these roles, sending both the actual crowd and the internet beyond into an uproar. Although a surprise celebrity guest appearance makes a concert more exciting, they are taking away an opportunity from a fan to have a moment with a singer that they spent lots of money on their concert ticket to get the chance for.
While it is really cool whenever an artist does something unique for the city they are touring in, having the entire audience recording it on their phones also takes away from that feeling of specialness—what is supposed to be an intimate moment between a singer and their audience is made crowded by another looming presence.
I remember opening TikTok the morning after the first night of Lorde’s Ultrasound Tour and being flooded with videos of Lorde walking through the pit, wearing a large jacket covered with panels of light as she sang “David,” one of her final songs of the show. She was surrounded by a few security guards who were able to keep her safe and moving smoothly through the crowd, but the fans around her were still able to clearly make eye contact with her and even touch or hold her hand. All of these videos appear kind of dystopian to me, as every single person in the pit was holding their phones up in Lorde’s face as she was singing to them. I cannot help but wonder what she was thinking as she sang this emotional, melancholic song, trying to look into everyone’s eyes and connect with her fans, instead looking into the little rectangular boxes being propped up next to their heads.
No matter what, if you are attending an event as big as a pop concert, there will always be annoying and disrespectful people in the audience, but there will probably be even more people attending the concert that are not even fans of the artist. Many are attending simply because they have seen the viral moments on TikTok, so they want to be a part of it. On one of the nights of Charli xcx and Troye Sivan’s Sweat Tour, the influencer Brittany Broski and a few other people were featured on the big screen to do the “apple dance.” Videos from this moment of the concert went viral because as the group was dancing, a man pushed through the crowd of people to push Brittany over so that he was able to get into frame. It makes me wonder how many people are attending concerts just because they want an opportunity to be noticed by the artist or simply just get attention.
The culture surrounding concerts has shifted from being about the shared experience of music, to chasing viral moments. Although social media is a good outlet to help fans feel more connected to their favorite artists, it also makes concerts feel less personal and more performative. This raises the question: is the excitement of being seen online worth losing the magic of simply being present?