This past summer, it seemed like every artist was going on tour. From Drake’s It’s All a Blur Tour to Morgan Wallen’s One Night At A Time Tour, and a myriad of genres in between, every teenager’s Instagram feed was filled with concert post after concert post: a bonafide, concert apocalypse.
Many teenagers found themselves swept up in the phenomenon as this was the first big boom of touring since covid. Before this summer, junior Jasmine Park had never been to a concert, but now, she has attended both the K-indie band, Wave to Earth and the Alternative/Indie, Cigarettes after Sex productions, and has three more lined up for this fall. She never had much interest in attending concerts, thinking it was pointless to pay for music you can get for free on Spotify; however, her perspective quickly shifted after seeing Wave to Earth at the Howard Theatre. “It’s so much different when you are with other people seeing the artist… you can connect with the music more,” Park shared. “I got chills after every single song.”
Like Park, junior Allison Loiselle attended many different concerts throughout the summer: Cigarettes after Sex, alternative rock band Arctic Monkeys, and pop artist Taylor Swift, concurring that seeing artists live brings a whole new level of energy to the music. “When I’m listening to [music] at school or something, I can’t fully get into it, but at a concert I can just like, be myself and enjoy it.” Seeing music live is distinct for every different genre. At the Cigarettes after Sex concert, Loiselle enjoyed the “chill” and intimate vibe, but preferred the liveliness of the Taylor Swift concert.
The venue an artist is performing at is another crucial piece of the concert experience. Junior Aditi Kashyap attended concerts similar to Loiselle: Taylor Swift and the rock band Weezer. Both her and Loiselle compare their other smaller-scale concert experiences with the grandiose venues of Taylor Swift’s tour. Kashyap claims that the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, where she saw the rock band Weezer, allowed for a little more personal space compared to the hectic and packed Taylor Swift concert. While Park didn’t go to a concert at quite the scale of Taylor Swift, she generally prefers less-populated concerts. To her, smaller venues offer a more comfortable experience, considering there are far fewer people, and attendees have a better chance at getting a close view of the artist. Additionally, she points out that concerts feel much more intimate in smaller venues. Although they might not have the same lively component that big artists such as Swift brings to the stage, these smaller venues allow artists more opportunities to interact with the crowd.
Loiselle sees the pros in both big and small venues, agreeing that smaller places like Merriweather and the Anthem gave a more “intimate vibe” to the experience. On the other hand, the larger venue for the Taylor Swift concert still “felt more like a family in the crowd,” despite there being over 50,000 people. Because the fanbase is so connected, the concert was still able to feel very intimate, just in a different type of way.
Regardless of the size of the concert, many are just happy to once again be able to attend them. “I’ve seen so many people [going to concerts],” Park recalls. While she wonders if the rise in concert popularity could just be a result of getting older and being more interested in music, she also questions what the pandemic had to do with it. Once Covid started to settle down and life got back to normal, many artists started releasing new music and going back on tour, ending the years-long dry spell of live music. Similar to Park, Loiselle suggests that the popularity of concerts rocketed because “people think of concerts as a way of the world getting back to normal after covid.”
Kashyap also recognizes the change in the concert environment post-pandemic. “A lot more people are going to concerts even if they’re not huge fans, which I think can definitely change the environment of it because they can not understand concert etiquette,” she says. Luckily, this wasn’t the case for Kashyap at Weezer. Kashyap recalls, “It was a very chill concert, so everyone’s just kind of doing their own thing: having fun.”
While the Covid pandemic might have made things like big crowds, and live music a thing of the past, the huge uptick of concerts this summer seems to have disproved that. Between trading friendship bracelets at Taylor Swift, doing the “on mute” challenge at Beyonce, or singing your heart out at Drake, it is clear that the live music industry is back and better than ever.
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