the experience renaissance

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Hey! I keep getting asked about J. Cole and his apology to Kendrick Lamar over his diss track, “7 Minute Drill.”

I’m not surprised Cole deleted the song. He has contemplated retirement at several points, and recently made an attempt at professional basketball. I still believe he loves hip-hop, but he doesn’t have that competitive piece in him like other rappers do.

Also, let’s be real. The Big 3 grouping has always been debatable, even before this past week. Drake and Kendrick are on that top tier, but why not Future in that third spot? Or Nicki Minaj? They both have a strong case.

This week’s essay is about The Experience Renaissance. The term was coined by this week’s guest writer, Michael Hines. This is the last of our guest essays. Thanks again to the writers who contributed during my pat leave.

You can read his full essay here or read part of it below.

The Experience Renaissance

For IRL experiences, it’s the best of times and it’s the worst of times

The future of entertainment used to look like millions of teenagers at a Travis Scott show in Fortnite. Now, it’s drunk Brits in sequined onesies singing Dancing Queen in time with a holographic ABBA.

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve also seen U2’s “distortion pedal for the mind” show at The Sphere in Las Vegas. Live music is the bleeding frontier of rich media experiences. Our culture is littered with examples of great experiential creativity designed to blow your mind.

Think about Heliot Emil sending models down the runway on fire and Coperni spraying Bella Hadid’s dress on using robots; sensory experiences that open the doors of perception like Dream Machine; or artistic spectacles like Kusama’s Infinity Rooms and JR’s Chiroptera.

We have found ourselves in The Experience Renaissance.

What’s fuelling The Experience Renaissance?

The increasing importance of live moments can be traced back to the early Noughties when the accelerating penetration of mobile internet and social media created a parallel cultural response. People were able to film and stream live moments, but they also gained a new appreciation for what live experiences could bring that you couldn’t find online or in a social network.

Then came The Pandemic. Covid-19 was the biggest natural experiment in experiential deprivation in 100 years. History suggests that humans search for meaning during pandemics, and afterward we forget and party. After glutting ourselves on streaming content during on-off lockdowns, the innate human hunger for the visceral, the real, and pure spectacle has only intensified.

This mixture of creativity, opportunity, and technology allows great experiences to scale far beyond the audiences that attend in person. Creators and artists now have a better grasp of the limitations of physical and digital, and their ability to blend the two has accelerated as mixed-reality tech scales up.

Even so, as the author William Gibson said, when it comes to experiences, “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” The big digital players are still very West-centric (North America, the UK, and Western Europe). Still, the value of live moments relative to digital services is much stronger in Asia-Pacific and Latin America. And there’s likely still a massive amount of demand for live experiences still to be met.

​Live Nation​

With the internet fragmenting from Web 2.0 into a series of smaller communities held together by fandom, all roads lead back to live moments and the human hunger for real experiences will probably intensify in reaction to the future prevalence of AI in much of online life. What happens in the flesh is human, real, and will always be more valuable.

Artists and creators are pushing the boundaries with their work, and examples of what experiences can deliver for artists, fans and the bottom line are everywhere - but that’s just half the story.

Not everyone is invited to this party

The Experience Renaissance is the best of times for big-name creators and the worst of times for their audiences and grassroots artists. As demand grows for major concerts, tickets to live music are more expensive than ever. In the US, concert revenue is up 15% since pre-pandemic, but the number of concerts is down 14%[1].

It’s not just live music: index trackers built out of companies’ share prices that benefit when people stay in versus going out suggest that many more people are staying at home[2], ordering in, and streaming. The age of the “hermit consumer” is a $600 billion shift from outside to inside. It’s partly a problem of supply and demand as much as changing habits. Many venues, artists, and parts of the hospitality and entertainment industries went bust during the Pandemic, and we haven’t pumped enough funding into the system to resurrect them. The superstars can participate in the Experience Renaissance and fill the big stadiums, but the middle and rising artists have fewer venues to play and places to tour. We can’t build the venues fast enough. As Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino said at the 2023 Liberty Media investor conference:

“There’s a whole movement now, if you’re a major city, to figure out how to build venues so live performances can come there……..Typically they have soccer stadiums, they don’t have arenas, they don’t have a 5,000-seat [venue], [it’s] been underdeveloped and underserviced [in] most of the world… And every day there’s a new arena built in Sao Paulo or Milan.”

While the industry plays catch-up on building the infrastructure required to stage live experiences, digital can help audiences who can’t make it in person. Streams of live shows have accelerated and are estimated by 2028 to be worth about $4-5 billion a year [3].

VR is likely to further blur the boundaries and expand access, and shouldn’t be overlooked or dismissed. As Marc Andreessen of VC Andreessen Horowitz has pointed out, a big selling point of VR is in reducing “reality privilege.” Virtual reality might be an inferior version of the real experience, but it’s better than being shut out entirely due to money or geography. So live streams, TikTok streams, VR, and concert films all have a role to play. But if you were given the choice of any of these options versus seeing your favorite act in the flesh, which would you choose?

If you enjoyed this preview, you can read the full essay on The Experience Renaissance here.

Michael Hines is a writer & strategist working at Wieden + Kennedy London. He can be found at Fiction + Persuasion.

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