The venerable band KISS have made the news for selling their music catalog, brand name and IP (intellectual property) to Pophouse Entertainment Group. Apparently, KISS and Pophouse have already been collaborating. The company is responsible for the digital avatars that ABBA used during their recent(ish) concerts, and now it sounds like that may be where we're headed with KISS. The band already debuted digitized avatars of themselves back in December 2023, and that may be a sign of things to come.
From the article:
The ways in which Kiss' avatars will be utilized has yet to be announced, but Pophouse CEO Per Sundin says fans can expect a biopic, a documentary and a Kiss experience on the horizon.
That bolding was from me. I'm not sure what a "KISS experience" refers to, but out of what was mentioned, it sounds the closes to something akin to a music concert. And this gives me the springboard to talk about a topic I've been thinking over for awhile -- namely, what constitutes a live experience?
Cards on the table: I'm not a KISS fan. For those who enjoy them, that's great! But the point here is, I won't be going to any kind of KISS concert experience, whether it be the live performers, or digital versions of themselves. I like some ABBA songs, but don't have much an interest in going to a concert that's just digitized recreations of them. The late, great Roy Orbison is my favorite singer of all-time, and a few years ago they had (or were at least floating the idea of) an Orbison Hologram Tour. Las Vegas apparently has its own Whitney Houston hologram concert.
I feel like we're through a certain looking glass here. All of this begs the question (at least for me) of what constitutes a music concert. Notice that I left out the word "live," because if we're all gathered 'round to watch a bunch of holograms, then that hardly constitutes a live experience. Your mileage may vary, and that's what I'm curious about.
For a long time -- well, since the advent of recorded music that we can play back on demand -- there've been two marked experiences. The first is listening to music somewhere, often at our home or in the car. The format has changed over the years -- 8 Track, vinyl, cassette, CD, MP3, streaming -- but the exposure has been the same. We would have the ability to play some of our favorite songs, classical works, etc., and it could be done alone, or with friends and family, or out in public at a grocery store or in an elevator.
The second version would be the live and in-person occasion. We would purchase tickets (unless it was a free show), and physically travel to a building somewhere, and join hundreds or perhaps thousands of other people as we listened to the music and watched the artists perform it on stage in front of us. They could be singing it in the moment, or it could be pre-recorded, and they would lip-sync. Regardless, it was something that felt important to us. It was an event.
With the second experience, I would argue that (at least for me) the key component of what went on was that the artist -- the person, or people, whose music had meant something to us -- was actually there. For a couple of hours, we would share the same general space with our favorite performers as they put on a show. That was -- or I thought it was -- the draw.
What this new age of digital/holographic avatars has done is made us re-think why we go to a concert. Or at least it should. If the performers aren't there, then what it would seem like we're experiencing is going to a building with other people, and listening to the pre-recorded music of an artist that we like as it's played over the sound system. That's... not a music concert. That's more akin to a concert video, like the kind we've seen from Talking Heads, Michael Jackson, Beyonce and, of course, Taylor Swift. But those are shown at movie theaters, and have been around for decades. We've always known what we're getting with them.
But what we are dealing with now is a paradigm shift in the definition of a music concert, and I'm not sure I like where it's headed. It also encompasses the greater issue of letting go. Someday, the members of KISS, or whichever band happens to be your favorite, will be gone. It is the way of things. Life is finite. Roy Orbison and Whitney Houston are gone. As far as I'm concerned, the opportunity to see them perform live died with them. What we have with those artists now, and with ABBA and, perhaps in the future with KISS, is a glorified 3-D concert video.
No thanks.
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