In a year that has already seen records for live music events smashed by Taylor Swift (a bar set high by Beyonce last year), Oasis announced their own slew of dates for 2025 and outstripped the Swifties in the UK with 1.4 million tickets sold across the UK and Ireland (and 14 million fans having tried to buy tickets).
Festivals of all kinds continue to increase in number and scale and podcasts like The Rest is Politics and Off Menu leverage their huge audiences by booking arena venues for live specials. Even the cast of People Just Do Nothing - a relatively modest sitcom – have a fully booked stadium tour underway. Travis Scott, one of the first artists to embrace the idea of the Metaverse with his ‘in-game’ event in Fortnite in 2021 has this year broken his own record for a ticketed event by playing to 48,000 fans in Tottenham’s Stadium, netting over 5 million on a wet Wednesday night in north London. Even the virtual simulated Abba have passed up on being virtual and gone live.
Events of all kinds have never been more popular or more prolific in the UK. A combination of a continued improvement and investment in venues plus a bit of post-lockdown liberation means that now more than ever, bands, brands and fans can get together IRL.
‘In Real Life’ has become a scenario for which we already have an abbreviation. Reality is noteworthy and precious, with good reason. In a post-truth world, with fake news, paid influencers, generative AI and openly biased media platforms, people simply don’t know what’s true and what they shouldn’t trust when it’s on a screen, which covers practically everything.
Conversely, if we see something with our own eyes or hear it or feel it live, it happened. Whether it’s Burning Man, or the Olympic Games, being there matters because our brains inscribe visceral experiences much more deeply than simulated ones. Our lived memories will always override ‘reported’ memories.
It’s no coincidence that as live experiences burgeon, mass uptake of AR/VR headsets has underwhelmed its bullish investors. Decentraland, one of the most well-funded Metaverse products, had only around 38 active daily users in its $1.3 billion ecosystem.
Zuckerberg’s ‘Reality Labs’ has lost at least $46.5 billion since 2019.
Harvard Business Review recently reported that AI’s emerging trust problem compounds the challenge facing a business sector built on hype. As impressive and useful as all these things are, they’re not going to shrink Glastonbury’s gate sales.
Clients and agencies would do well to balance their understanding of what’s new, exciting and technically possible with what people are demonstrably doing more of, which is living in the moment or, as Oasis will put it to over a million of us shortly, ‘Be Here Now’.
