I’m making a public vow, which I fear I may abandon the moment Lana Del Rey comes on stage at Wembley in July: to stop recording concerts on my phone. Last Sunday, producer and DJ Kaytranadaresponded to a fan on Xwho was frustrated at motionless concertgoers with their phones in the air, writing: “I think we have come in this age where everybody’s trying to catch a moment for their own social media presence. It shows their appreciation instead of them dancing and enjoying shows like we used to.” Even though I wasn’t at Kaytranada’s show, he had me bang to rights.
I have in the past incessantly recorded gigs, insisting to myself that there is no impairment of my enjoyment, or that determinedly rejigging the camera for a panoramic shot of the entire stage was all part of the concert experience. Lost in the spirit of a moment, it can be nice to snap yourself and friends singing along to your favourite artist, and to create a personal archive of a concert’s best bits.
But what Kaytranada has really nailed is the fact that often recording concerts to upload footage to social media is meant to betray a kind of cool to your audience and reap the intangible social rewards of being a source of Fomo. Concert recording can be like letting everyone know you’ve been invited to the coolest party – the exclusivity factor baked into the ticket price. Personally, I’m moving on to more subtle and mysterious ways to signal status, like casually dropping the concerts I’m attending in a newspaper.
The whole record and upload process has almost been gamified by social media such as TikTok, where clips can go viral and even be picked up by the press. Particularly with large, anticipated tours, there’s almost a race to be the person who captures and releases the best footage of a certain moment, with all the accompanying hopes of fast numbers and engagement. Broke the news of Charli xcx’s fiance George Daniel doing the TikTok Apple dance at her O2 show long before anyone else? Here’syour post embedded in NMEand a thousand new followers; don’t spend it all at once.
I was among the first people in the world to see Beyoncé’s Renaissance world tour in Stockholm in 2023 – I uploaded a video of her opening with Dangerously in Love 2 to my former Twitter/X account while she was still mid-song. I got thousands of likes and retweets and people commenting, many pleasantly shocked that she had opened a tour connected to a dance album with an R&B ballad. But what was the point of doing that, really? While I still had fun, I was distracted by my phone during a concert by one of my favourite artists, all for the sake of some ephemeral internet buzz. I haven’t even looked at any of those clips again.
How much you get your phone out at a concert is not necessarily inversely correlated with fun, but it can just become a faff and a compulsion. At the end of the night you find yourself with a depleted battery, your camera cluttered with maybe a hundred clips, and a lot of time wasted swiping through each one figuring out which is the best to use to show off on social media. I also had a ticket to Beyoncé’s London show where I felt no need to record the same performance twice and had possibly the best concert experience of my life. But we can’t always attend every tour twice – with today’s prices, it’s a money pit just going once.
I suppose, though, that there are those who are performing a kind of public service. Beyoncé kicked off her Cowboy Carter tour in California this week, and,as with other major concerts, there were several livestreams across Instagram and TikTok from people who have committed to capturing the show from open to close for those fans who can’t attend due to location or expense. There are problems with this; some people complain of “concert spoilers” filling their timelines (though I personally don’t think aconcert can be“spoiled”), and I’m not especially clear at what point it becomes piracy. But with the decline of tour DVDs and uncertainty over whether you’ll ever set your eyes on an iconic stage design beyond press stills again, I can see why recording still feels necessary for posterity.
But it doesn’t have to be you. Rest safe in the knowledge that the most dedicated fans, probably with tickets for multiple nights, will shoot and upload the best angles and most surprising moments for you to scroll past later. Maybe limit yourself to one or two clips for theInstagramstory, then lock your phone away, wave your hands in the air and “move them hips”, as Kaytranada says.
Jason Okundaye is an assistant newsletter editor and writer at the Guardian