Concert Etiquette

[Crimson]

For the past few years after every Coachella festival, there are complaints about the audience being dead-eyed and staring at the concert through their phones; no dancing, no clapping, no singing.

Every concert I have been to post-Covid has been a horrible experience. Peoples' behavior at public events seems to have gone noticeably downhill. A pop/rock concert isn't a ballet recital, I don't expect people to sit quietly with their hands in the laps (although the fogey in me might like that). Yet I find it odd that people pay hundreds of dollars to go to a concert for the sole purpose of screaming at the top of their lungs for 90 minutes. Every recent concert I've been to made me feel like I paid to listen to 1000s of people do bad karaoke rather than hear the actual artist.

I think I'd prefer the glassy-eyed Gen Z audience because then I could at least enjoy the music.

For those who still go to concerts, what have your recent experiences been like? What is your expectation of audience behavior?

 

[Whovian]

Fans singing along to the songs is part of what makes concerts great, and good artists genuinely appreciate hearing their songs sung back to them by adoring fans and enjoy doing the crowd work - at least here in the UK the artist would probably be very unnerved if absolutely no-one was singing along at a pop/rock concert - except maybe if they are doing a very slow song or an acoustic song where the sole attention should be on them. You aren't there to hear the songs as they were sung on the record, a good gig is a collective almost outer body experience centred round a shared love of the artist's music. Obviously genre dependent here to an extent but referring to pop/rock concerts here (if someone was doing it at the opera or a classical recital you might have a case to be upset). Many artists say hearing crowds sing their songs back to them is the best part of performing and at most gigs will deliberately build in crowd work in the appropriate (most popular) songs. I'd much rather watch a performer who can work a crowd do just that than watch a room full of people sitting in stupefied silence "admiring" a performer.

 

[Barbara Fan]

I find it strange that people who now go to concerts dont actually watch it, they are too busy watching it through their phone or taking a million selfies of themself.

The older i get the more i long for the small venues ie 2- 3000 that used to be in our city, now huge arenas where they are a speck in the distance and over inflated ticket prices

I do agree with you @Crimson that peoples behaviour at events have dumbed down and its maybe one of the reasons i go far less to concerts and gigs than i did in the 80/90s