Raymond J. de Souza: Memories of Live Aid and a different era

National Post

18 hours ago

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Yet it was as a cultural phenomenon that Live Aid seems from an entirely different era. Would it be possible today to assemble a cast of musicians sufficiently well known across the generations to attract the viewers that Live Aid did in 1985? The stadium show itself no longer has the cultural power it did in the 1980s, when it was a staple of summertime.
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Taylor Swift's recent tour, concluded in Canada, attracted such attention partly because it was so unusual — a pop star selling out massive stadium after massive stadium. It happens, but not like the 1980s, when Springsteen and Jackson and others packed football stadiums night after night, summer after summer — and it didn't require debt financing for the fans to attend.
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Perhaps Swift marks a return to popular live music. A new outdoor concert facility — capacity 50,000 — opened on the old Toronto Downsview airport site last month. Coldplay did four shows there, part of their multi-year Music of the Spheres tour that has now sold more tickets than any other tour in history.
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But Swift and Coldplay are more likely exceptional. Which is a shame, because the joyous exuberance of the stadium tour is not replicable in the privatized music listening environment of the digital world.
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In 1985 the Sony Walkman was still relatively new, launched only in 1979, and had not yet reached its peak. Still running on audio cassettes, the Walkman was a cultural earthquake, converting music from an ambient communal experience to a singular, even private, one.
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It was still possible in the early 1990s to walk around a university campus and to hear the current anthems wafting out of open windows; now everyone is wearing earbuds and no one hears each other's music. Something was lost when parents and children — and brothers and sisters — fought over what was on the radio or the home stereo. The first act to play the new Downsview site was Stray Kids. It's a K-pop group I have never heard of. To be fair, I don't know any K-pop groups. To be honest, I had to look up what K-pop is.
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The stadium and arena tour is not entirely dead. Springsteen is still performing and Elton John's farewell tour went on so long he may still revive it.
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In 2019, Princeton economist Alan Krueger, chairman of the council of economic advisers under Barack Obama, wrote a fun book called Rockonomics on the music industry. Pre-digital, artists could earn well from sales of recorded music. Streaming killed that off, similar to declining sales in printed media. The big money now is in live concerts. According to Krueger's research, even McCartney, who dominated the world of records with his long list of No. 1 songs, now earns 80 per cent of his income from live concerts.
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