In the beginning, everything was live. We sat around the fire, banged bits of bone together and howled tunefully at the unforgiving moon. Then some bright spark picked up a charred stick and used it to draw the first rudimentary picture on a cave wall. Fast forward 40 millennia, 2001: a Space Odyssey-style, and we continue to make a distinction between the thrilling evanescence of live performance and the profoundly different experience of recorded art, whether that record has been made in burnt wood or on 4K video.
Covid has caused us to think again about the differing values we apply to the live experience and the recorded one. Much of the focus during the pandemic has been on how we miss being in crowds at live events, but thereâs also the emotional charge of watching or hearing something in the actual moment, even if youâre not physically present. Call it immediacy or authenticity, unpredictability or uniqueness, but itâs part of the reason people pay more to attend a single concert than they will to purchase the entire recorded works of the same musician. And itâs why online audiences still get far more excited about live events than about recorded ones.