The Record Crate

Here’s my Lady Cleo moment for the century: the traditional concert is a dying breed. In only a few years, I believe that they way people enjoy concerts will be changed from its current model. More and more festivals are being planned and executed every summer. Summer isn’t exactly a new season for concerts-this is when most of the country’s open-air venues, like Massachusett’s Comcast Center, open their doors and lawn seating for business. However, where music magazines like Rolling Stone used to spend entire issues detailing the summer’s hottest tours, these features have been reduced to mere pages, while issues are now being devoted to the festival circuit.

Having not been to festivals like Bonnaroo and Coachella, I can only base my festival experience on the Vans Warped Tour, as most of my generation can. There’s something about these festivals that just get people stoked on the music they’re hearing. Where at a traditional concert, a feeling of sadness comes over concertgoers when the band plays their last song, this is not so at festivals. Atendees know that there will be another band playing within minutes, if they aren’t already starting their set on another stage on the other side of the festival grounds. It’s like that old surf movie “The Endless Summer.” Two guys run around the globe in search of the perfect wave until they get to J-Bay in South Africa. I feel like that in terms of concerts these days. We run around looking for the perfect concerts, then we finally find one. “The Endless Summer 2” comes out dozens of years later and this duo of new surfers go to the same spot and find that the everpresent urban sprawl has capitalized on a spot that was once the epitome of a surfer’s paradise.

The current concert scene, to me, is that surf spot capitalized on my urban developers. The concert scene isn’t really surviving anywhere. These days, it seems like the ideal concert-the perfect wave of the music industry-can only be found wherever the Warped Tour parks its trucks, Chicago, Tennessee or Indo, California. How will we reach these kids?