Perennial copyright curmudgeon Don Henley recently told the Daily Telegraph that “videoing a concert with a phone is a violation (of The Eagles’ rights).”
“It spoils it for people who are going to come to a show in the future,” he said. “We’d like for them to experience it for the first time in the audience rather than experience it on a crappy video that sounds horrible.”
As far as I’m concerned, if you have to sell a kidney in order to afford a ticket to an Eagles concert, you deserve to be able to shoot a little video to prove that you were there. Furthermore, I’m not sure that a crappy YouTube video qualifies as an “experience” for the diehard Eagles fan. They’re still going to want to go to the show.
But matters of copyright aside, what’s happening at concerts today when so many attendees are holding up their smartphones to snap pictures, shoot videos, or tweet about the show?
Are mobile phones a distraction for concertgoers, or do they help turn the audience into a social marketing machine?
If at least some of the concert experience is now mediated through this new technology, do artists lose audience engagement, or is the smartphone a powerful extension OF audience engagement?
What do you think? Let us know in the comments below.
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Chris Robley is an acclaimed singer-songwriter and award-winning poet from Maine.
His Beatlesque indie-pop and milltown Americana songs have been praised by The Associated Press, No Depression, KCRW, The LA Times, Boston Globe, NPR, American Songwriter, and others.
His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Poetry Review, and more.
Robley has received a Maine Literary Award in Poetry, Boulevard’s Emerging Writers Prize for Poetry, and in 2016 was selected by former US-poet laureate Robert Pinsky as a finalist for the Dorset Prize.