The Experience Renaissance?
It's the best of times, and the worst of times, for IRL experiences.
Not long ago, the future of entertainment was millions of teenagers at a Travis Scott show in Fortnite. Now, it’s drunk Brits in sequinned onesies singing along with a holographic ABBA.
Unless you live under a rock, you will also have seen U2’s “distortion pedal for the mind” show at The Sphere in Las Vegas, a live spectacle seemingly beamed in from some distant future.
And although live music is often the bleeding edge of rich-media experiences, it’s not the only place where this kind of thing is occurring: if you look around right now, culture is ablaze with interesting examples of a shift that seems to be occurring.
It’s there in the the 99 million views of the hashtag ‘immersive art’ on Tiktok, the dizzying social hyper-fame of artists like Yayoi Kusama, JR’s recent Chiroptera performance, mixed-media art from the likes of Meow Wolf and Refik Anadol, and in mind-bending work that opens the doors of perception like Dream Machine.
It’s visible in Coperni’s Robots spray-painting Bella Hadid, Balenciaga’s mud runways , Heliot Emil sending models down the runway on fire, and many other iconic examples of fashion’s mastery of the art of spectacle.
It’s happening in architecture as Thomas Heatherwick issues a broadside against the “blandemic’ of dull and uninspiring buildings and their effects on our civic life and wellbeing, and also in rockstar experience designer Es Devlin calling for the repurposing of abandoned commercial space in urban centres as showcases for immersive art.
It’s on show as Netflix look to drive viewers of their properties into physical interaction via Bridgerton Balls, Stranger Things Theatre and Money Heist Escape Rooms - tapping into a frontier of live performance that the likes of Punch Drunk, Swamp Motel and Secret Cinema have been exploring for some time. It’s also there in Drake’s unlikely resurrection of the Luna Luna Art Amusement Park.
And if you wanted final confirmation, look at the state of dating. Match and Bumble both suffered 80% declines in their stock prices1 towards the end of last year, and you now have counter-movements like The Pear Ring driving people back towards a model of romance with greater spontaneity, real-life flirting, and fewer unsolicited photos of strangers’ genitals.
In everything from the entertainment and art we enjoy, to how we see our built environment, to how we date, there appears to be a cultural shifting occurring: one that has us moving, en masse, towards things that occur in the flesh, in physical space, in crowds, at scale.
In-the-flesh is in.
After ten years of unadulterated digital encroachment into every corner of our lives, people seem to have looked up from their phones and found that there are things that the unpredictable, visceral and beautiful world around them can deliver that no digital version can replicate. We stand on the cusp of a highly interesting experiential boom - or, as I am going to call it from now on: The Experience Renaissance.
Welcome To The Experience Renaissance
You don’t need to be a visionary to understand why this is happening. With Covid, we’ve just been through the biggest experiential deprivation experiment in 100 years, and many people seem to have come away from this prolonged period of isolation with a deep hunger for rich, real and collective experiences. History suggests that during pandemics people search for the meaning of it all, and afterwards they swiftly forget and party. After glutting ourselves on streaming content during on-off lockdowns, the innate human hunger for the visceral, the real and pure spectacle has intensified.
Creators and artists now have a better grasp of the limitations of physical and digital, and their ability to blend them allows great experiences to scale far beyond the audiences that attend in person. With the internet fragmenting from Web 2.0 into a series of smaller communities held together by fandom, all roads lead back to live moments. And the desire for these kind of experiences seems likely to intensify in reaction to the future prevalence of AI in much of online life - what happens in the flesh is tangible, real, and much harder to deepfake without diluting its emotional impact. Even if this seems a uniquely modern development, as always with these things it’s just the latest chapter in a story of timeless human needs: for wonder, spectacle, and connection on an epic scale. In his book Wonderland, Steven Johnson paints the following picture of Victorian London:
‘Along with the Panorama and the Phantasmagoria, a visitor to London in the early 1800s could enjoy a “Novel Mechanical and Pictorial Exhibition” called the Akolouthorama; a predecessor to the Phantasmagoria called the Phantascopia; an exhibition called the Spectrographia, which promised “TRADITIONARY GHOST WORK!”; an influential mechanical exhibition dubbed the Eidophusikon; the Panstereomachia, “a picto-mechanical representation,” according to the Times. A virtual orchestra created by a painter and musician named J. J. Gurk entertained audiences with performances of “Rule, Britannia”.’
Over the New Year I was lucky enough to visit The Sistine Chapel for the first time: you don’t need a giant spherical screen to fry minds, nor do you need to be religious to feel the sense of sacred awe and wonder that truly special spaces can evoke.
There are some good reasons to be cheerful about a resurgence of creativity aiming for this kind of aesthetic impact, and to view it as a positive societal development. Artists and creators are pushing the boundaries with their work, and examples of what experiences can deliver for audiences and the bottom line are everywhere - but that’s only half the story. The numbers tell a different story.
A Party Not Everyone Can Get Into
The Experience Renaissance is the best of times for big-name creators and the worst of times for their audiences and grassroots artists, and nowhere is this tension more obvious than live music. As the demand grows for major concerts, tickets to live shows are more expensive than ever. In the US, concert revenue is up 15% since pre-pandemic, but the number of concerts is down 14%2
As people pivot their spend to live entertainment, the prices of tickets for big-name acts have become insanely expensive. A lot of live experiences are near price-inelastic3, especially at the top end of the market.
Whilst this might look just a case of too much demand chasing not enough tickets, it’s more complex than that. It appears that the total experiential economy has shrunk. Indexes comparing the collective share prices of companies that benefit when people stay in versus going out suggest that many more people are staying at home4, ordering in, and streaming. This is great news if you’re a streamer or a delivery app, and shit if you’re a restaurant, theatre company or live comedy venue.
The age of the “hermit consumer”is a $600 billion shift from outside to inside, and it’s partly a problem of supply and demand as much as changing habits. Many venues, artists and parts of the hospitality and entertainment industries went bust during the Pandemic, and we haven’t pumped enough funding into the system to resurrect them. In the UK, 125 venues abandoned live music in 2023 due to price pressures, many of them closing forever5. With the mid-list and grassroots shrinking, the superstars might be able to always fill the big stadiums, but the middle and rising entertainers have fewer venues to play and places to tour. We can’t build the infrastructure fast enough. As Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino recently6 stated:
“There’s a whole movement now, if you’re a major city, to figure out how to build venues so live performances can come there……..Typically they have soccer stadiums, they don’t have arenas, they don’t have a 5,000-seat [venue], [it’s] been underdeveloped and underserviced [in] most of the world… And every day there’s a new arena built in São Paulo or Milan.”
While the industry plays catch-up on building the infrastructure required to stage live experiences, mixed and digital experiences bridge the gap. Immersive and experiential art continues to grow7, and streams of live shows have accelerated and are projected to be worth about $4-5 billion a year by 2028 8. VR is likely to further blur the boundaries and expand access, and shouldn’t be dismissed. As Marc Andreessen has stated, a big selling point of VR is in reducing “reality privilege” - virtual and mixed reality might be an inferior version of the real experience, but they’re better than being shut out entirely due to money or geography. Now that Apple have entered the space with Vision Pro, the experiences on offer here will continue to get richer and more exciting.
So live streams, TikTok streams, VR and concert films all have a role to play in expanding access to The Experience Renaissance. But if you were given the choice of any of these options versus seeing your favourite act in the flesh, which would you choose?
We risk falling into a situation where live IRL experiences become expensive gated enclaves in meatspace for the 1%, and the rest of us get cheap digital dilutions - or, if we’re really unlucky, the Wonka Experience in Glasgow that went viral whilst reducing many children to tears.
I’m not sure anyone wants to live in a world where experiences are the preserve of those who can fork out for them, and the closest people to the stage are always there just because they have money. And if no-one fosters the creative incubators and live infrastructure needed to feed new talent up into the spotlights of the big arenas and enormodomes, we’re going to find those places empty and lifeless some time in the near future.
This isn’t just a problem at a commercial or an artistic level, it’s a societal one. Collective experiences — what Neuroscientist Anil Seth refers to as “moments of massed consciousness9” — are the fuel that helps humans feel alive. Shows, raves and live sports are some of the last spaces in society where people will mingle with those whom they wouldn’t be seen dead sharing an online filter bubble, and they are a vital societal bonding agent. The political centre ground might now be found most readily on a dancefloor or a terrace. If we don’t fix this issue, we’re likely to find an already balkanised civic life and polity get worse.
And so for artists, makers and fans, there are huge opportunities to be seized in this moment.
How to expand The Experience Renaissance
Creative entrepreneurs and artists who can help resolve this tension will win fans for life, and there are very real opportunities to expand the promise of this new era of creativity to as many people as possible. Let’s start with some of the most obvious ones:
Make fandom about love, not money: If you’re an artist with a big following, you likely have an extreme mismatch between the number of fans who want to see you live and those who can afford to. Be on the lookout for new forms of exclusivity applied to IRL access in the same way labels like Telfar, Vollebak and Corteiz have made getting hold of their products a game of love, ingenuity and effort, not just whether you can afford them.
Informal, Illegal and Unmissable: Expect a resurgence of illegal and informal events that don’t need costly infrastructure to happen, particularly for grassroots artists. Queens of the Stone Age first made their name as Kyuss playing generator parties in The Mojave Desert, and Homebass have reignited UK rave culture with their guerrilla live shows. When ticketed experiences become unaffordable and mainstream events in a gilded cage, DIY events on the margins are where the action is. Transgression is part of the appeal.
Space is there to be hijacked - The first and most obvious artistic directive might be to prioritise feeling and spatial interaction over narrative, but there’s more to it than that. Be alive to the possibilities of space, especially in repurposing under-utilised commercial space. Our cities are full of commercial property standing empty waiting for good use, and it feels that we’re overdue a realignment of the social contract when it comes to what highly valuable space in city centres could be used for.
Marketers as Medicis: Marketers will be welcomed anywhere where they can expand access to great experiences without ruining them, and this offers scope to build relationships with new audiences that they might never have otherwise interacted with. Mobile network O2 has built out a long-running loyalty program in the UK on the basis of their venue sponsorship and offering priority tickets to the big names of their customers. Converse Rubber Tracks built the brand’s credibility amongst musicians by offering grassroots acts valuable studio space to record. It’s easy for marketers to throw big money at massive names for a guaranteed audience - but those who help create space and platforms for rising stars to grow are likely to reap a bigger payoff in loyalty and credibility.
Join the experiential arms race: Big-name players commanding big-ticket prices are now in an experiential arms race to justify those premiums. The level of sensory overload on offer at shows is going to accelerate, as fans will expect live experiences that border on religious ceremony to justify the insane prices. Expect to see a growing focus on rockstar experience designers like Es Devlin, whose work with Kanye West and U2 shows how creative craft and vision can elevate a live experience into something spectacular.
Treat experience as rocket fuel for launch moments: Every album launch from a superstar seems to rewrite the model of how to go to market. There’s now the scope, and the tools, for more and more artists to push this by using experiences as a vital tool to deepen engagement and feeling.
Aim for spectacle over illusion; Finally, pay close and careful attention to the line between spectacle and illusion. AI and the collapsing boundaries between digital and physical mean that it’s never been easier to fake big live spectacles, in the manner of Jacquemus’ Giant Bags or North Face’s puffer jacket on Big Ben. (I will be exploring this issue at length in a future post). Entertainers might be tempted to cut corners by trimming away the most costly bits of great experiences - but whilst this lets more people see what you do, the power of it will be diminished. Don’t compromise feeling for reach.
As a final thought: it’s a cliché that shows up in almost every single trend or audience report that Millennials/Boomers/Gen Z prefer experiences to things, but lurking beneath this unkillable banality is a near-universal truth. No-one lies on their death bed and thinks about the things that they have owned, bought and sold: they reflect on the roar of the crowd in extra time, the falling hush in the stalls as the footlights dim and the actors take the stage, or the sight of Bono’s gravity-defying buttocks squeezed into leather trousers before a vertiginous curved screen in Las Vegas. Experiences are the fuel of memory, and what most of us will have to muster in our final hours as the proof that we’ve been alive. If you are an artist, entrepreneur or creative person, there has never been a better time or tools to create some truly spectacular ones.
At the heart of it all, The Experience Renaissance offers many more occasions where we might find ourselves lost in the crowd, our arms aloft, and our eyes turned upwards away from our phones - communing with the artists, with the gods, or just, for a few brief and precious moments, with one another.
“I go, for the millionth time, to encounter the reality of experience” - James Joyce
Thank you for reading.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-16/match-and-bumble-s-80-stock-plunges-test-analyst-commitment?leadSource=uverify%20wall
Trapital Report 2023, drawn from Pollstar Data until June 2023
https://pitchfork.com/features/article/the-price-of-pop-fandom/
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/10/22/welcome-to-the-age-of-the-hermit-consumer
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/mar/01/the-whole-ecosystem-is-collapsing-inside-the-crisis-in-britains-live-music-scene
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/live-nations-michael-rapino-lays-out-the-argument-for-why-concerts-not-streaming-are-the-future-of-the-music-biz/
https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/immersive-art-thematic-071223
https://www.economist.com/culture/2022/05/27/abba-and-the-rise-of-the-work-from-home-rock-star
Anil Seth - Being You
Bono’s leathered buns. No escaping that experience! And now memory implant.
If you haven't read about the Story Of Jack Conte yet, I'd highly recommend it, it's fantastic and relates to a lot of what you've discussed.