[Image via Flickr of a Beck fan]

When I subscribed to Portfolio magazine I never thought I would enjoy it as much as I am loving the current issue. Here are a couple of great quotes on the future of the music business:

“For-profit culture will move toward the nonreproducible, more thrilling aspects of music,” says economist Tyler Cowen, author of Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding. Since perfect copies of music can be made and distributed for almost nothing, he says, the value moves to one-of-a-kind experiences, like a Jimmy Buffett concert. As even Ashley Dupré, Eliot Spitzer’s favorite escort and would-be pop diva, can use pitch-correction software to record a perfect track, consumers increasingly will treasure the ephemeral, even flawed, live experience.

“Everybody has gotten accustomed to a kind of flawlessness that doesn’t exist in reality,” says Mary Davis, a music-history professor at Case Western. “Reality is sometimes awful, but it’s more human.” And, yeah, we’ll pay for that.

As media consumers it is easy to get jaded by polished perfection that rings fake.

The same way I prefer quaint shops to malls, spicy food over bland and backpacking vs. business travel, theater to the movies, I truly enjoy the magic of live music and the imperfect yet real experience of seeing it happen right there in front of you.

In the online world, the equivalent might be the value of the quick blog post and twitter vs. the lengthy article. Both have a reason of being but maybe that immediacy factor is what really engages you.

The other factor that to me makes live music or art unique is how it can be ephemeral.
In art, when Christo did The Gates project in NYC he was very clear about how this would be only available for a moment in time — this added to the uniqueness of the collective experience to make it even more memorable. In music, there is always a certain point in the life cycle of a band when you get that feeling that the band is at its peak and things might soon change (e.g., band about to break up like Smashing Pumpkins in 1998). When you combine that moment with the rawness of the live experience it becomes unforgettable… and priceless. When you listen to the studio CD, it’s ok but it is a different experience.