'Ladies and Gentleman, start your browsers as we welcome Columbia Recording Artist, Bob Dylan.' Dylan shuffles out onto the stage. You click your applause emoticon. You enter a request for Lay Lady Lay. Dylan looks up from his piano at the screens around him, a little confused perhaps, a little dazzled. He sees your virtual applause and scowls. He sees your request and begins the opening chords as the band joins in behind him. A long way from the Greenwich Village coffee houses where he started, that's for sure.
If this scenario sounds a bit far-fetched to you, it shouldn't. Wired reports in this story, Online Music Festival Takes Interactive Leap, that a company called Deep Rock Live is putting together a concert series that will be completely online. And they even got Pepsi to sponsor it, so all the "seats" are free.
My first reaction is that this company is missing the point of a concert. The beauty of live music is to be there, to feel it, to commune with like-minded fans. You can't capture that feeling in front of a computer screen, but let's suppose you can get past that idea and look at it strictly from a geeky point of view, maybe it's worth checking out. It gives you a chance to interact directly (sort of) with the musician, something you can't do at the live show beyond clapping and screaming a request (which always seems to annoy the artist).
If we look at this as a technological exercise, it could be pretty interesting. If we look at it as a sociological exercise, it could be pretty scary, giving credence to the idea that the internet is isolating us into a society of people sitting in front of individual computer screens, rather than interacting in the world at large, but I'm a technology guy, so I'm inclined to give it a shot and see what it's about. It doesn't have to be one or the other and could be pretty darn interesting.
Comments