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May 20 2008 12:07AM EDT

Why We Go to Concerts but Don't Buy CDs

While researching this month's essay on the music industry for Portfolio magazine, I had a fascinating conversation about broad music business trends with Mary Davis, professor of music history at Case Western University in Cleveland. The city is the home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Davis consults there.

So basically, I approached Davis with the fact that while CD sales are falling, concert sales keep rising. And I asked why that's happening, and also -- why do people really go to rock concerts?

"People come for the communal experience," she said. "They know the music, they're in the milieu of others who know it well. Jimmy Buffet concerts are a good example. Everyone is participating with the singer and band. It's part of the experience. It's not like like an orchestra concert where you sit and listen and absorb the music. You're singing along and dancing."

Then Davis added this intriguing thought: "In an age of highly perfected recordings, everybody becomes accustomed to a kind of flawlessness that doesn't exist in reality." We go to concerts, she posits, to get away from the artifice and see what a performer can really do. "To see the reality can sometimes be awful, but it's human."

I found myself agreeing when Davis said she's particularly disappointed when she goes to see a band that plays everything exactly as it sounds on the recorded album. "I find I'm going, why am I here?" she says.

Davis, by the way, says she does "an odd mix of things." Her specialty is actually twentieth-century French music, and she's just published a book on music and fashion in France in the the early 1920s, titled Classic Chic.

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