Have audiences gotten rude?

[eeldip]

to answer the OP's question. audiences are not getting louder, you are getting older.

[Snarl 12/8]

Now I was also at Amanda Palmer and Jason Webly's 'Evelyn Evelyn' concert last year. At the end of their concert, she asked everyone to hold up their phones. And send her a text to the number Jason was holding on a cardboard sign. He then flipped over the board and Amanda said "Now everyone send me and e-mail."

Awesome and direct way to build their mailing list, too.

[JGriffin]

I find this need for silence pretentious. It would be nice to find some sort of balance though, perhaps.

I agree with this--I've played on the bill with artists who insist that everyone sit quietly and listen to their art...and within the rock world that's ridiculous as well. But balance, yeah. Be there to be part of the event, don't yammer away on your phone or have a conversation you could just as easily have at Starbucks.

[eeldip]

people should be free to chat up the nearest attractive person at a rock show for example.

[hogfish]

If you are playing your music well,you are moving your audience emotionally.This will cause people to want to react to it. Add alcohol and pharmocological agents and it gets even more intense. Add the hot girl in the third row shaking her ass and that adds a whole nother layer. Shit, Im just glad there are people there to hear what Im playing.Audience etiquette? In a bar? With alcohol? And hot chicks? If your so precious about every note you play, you should play in a highly controlled environment, and pass out instructions to the audience to please be quiet and respectful of the musicians every note and not to make noise during the quiet bits, and not to get up and shake your ass during the bits that groove. Im sure it will make your performance more emotionally involving for the people that attend. Just like Bob Weir says "its one in ten thousand that come for the show"..........

[T-rex]

Well its music reliant of course. Being in a garagey rock kind of band we encourage hoops, hollars and all types of drunken revelry. But when I go see a band and I literally can't hear the band for the people talking, thats a little much.

[alex matson]

Exactly. In the case I was writing about, this was the one relatively quiet moment of the set. Scream your head off if you want to when the energy's high.
I remember a Low concert being all but ruined by a group of Dirty Three fans sitting behind me. Of course they were completely silent for their band.

[agauchede]

I'm glad this discussion took off. It's helpful for me as an artist, performer, and music fan to know how other people feel about this kind of situation. Jeff Tweedy asked what he could do to be more entertaining, and this is a valid question. It's too much to assume that everyone in the audience is a) drunk or b) doesn't care. So, it must be that for whatever reason the performance is not holding their attention. Maybe it's the sound, maybe the band isn't giving it their all.

Nevertheless, I fail to understand why anybody would spend any amount of money and not take advantage of what they've paid for. If you buy a ticket to a terrible movie, do you sit there and talk through the whole thing, undoubtedly annoying the people around you? No, you leave, or sit there quietly and complain about it afterward.

Perhaps we have always been rude, but I'm inclined to think that something has changed in our collective (sub)conscience which makes us less capable of embracing a situation and paying attention to what is happening around us.

[JGriffin]

I'm inclined to think that something has changed in our collective (sub)conscience which makes us less capable of embracing a situation and paying attention to what is happening around us.

At the risk of sounding like an old fart, I think it's got something to do with how we consume art these days. Scarcity is key here. For instance: the town I grew up in had one movie theater. It played one film, one showing a night, and when that movie was out of that theater you weren't going to see it again until years later when WGN chopped out all the cussing and boobs and showed it once at 11 pm on a Wednesday. So,you went to the theater and you paid attention to the movie. Now,we not only have megaplexes where you can see the same film on 5 different screens, we know the DVD's gonna be out at Christmas --or we'll torrent the file to our PC-- and we can look at it all we want and not worry about missing something because we were texting. Live music's very similar--live recordings used to be somewhat rare (The Dead nonwithstanding), but now you can get a USB wristband with mp3s of the show you just talked through on your way to the parking lot. Why bother paying attention?

[T-rex]

People would pay more attention if you had a Waves L2 on the PA set to stun!

[agauchede]

People would pay more attention if you had a Waves L2 on the PA set to stun!

Funny you should mention it . . . I spent a good part of the show behind the mixing board. The engineer was using Venue, and it was fun to watch him use the same various plugs I use while mixing recorded music, i.e., BF76, Smack, etc. It was the first time I'd seen a live gig mixed "in the box!"

[lapsteel]

Audiences more rude? No. Bob Dylan was booed for going electric all through that tour. You couldn't hear Elvis or the Beatles with the screaming girls. I have the Beatles live at the Hollywood Bowl LP and it is just hard to listen to because it is just screaming.

What's always interesting to me is I'll have ear plugs in and be hearing people's conversations since the white noise gets cut.

I don't really care if I'm playing a show as long as they paid. I hate singers talking down to people at the show like Jeff Tweedy was doing. The audience will take care of them. A concert is still a social event. When have they ever been about sitting quietly?

Phone obsession is more annoying to me. People always waiting for their next text or looking at email.

[@?,*???&?]

You should just silence the crowd:

www.stageit.com

[Bro Shark]

You should just silence the crowd:

www.stageit.com

Good lord.

[@?,*???&?]

You should just silence the crowd:

www.stageit.com

Good lord.

And this is where we are headed. I just had an artist say to me, "Yeah, but I like reacting to crowd reaction when we play and seeing people's faces." I re-assured him and said, "Well, likely there will be some Skype-like program or application that will allow you to view 100 little faces on your laptop as you play for them...