I was listening to the radio yesterday and a group named Owl City came on the radio. The song on the radio was “fireflies.” The genre of the band is “Electronic.” But, it’s not exactly the typical sound of club music. It’s actually very cool sounding stuff-definitely aimed at a younger crowd.
I hopped on youtube and watched a video of the band-which seems to be two guys, two apple computers, some keyboards and a whole lot of digitized music.Their concerts are sold out all over the world, by the way.
The interesting thing about this group is the simple nature of their presentation. The two guys barely look up at the crowd, are focused on mixing their grooves, playing a bit of melody and singing.
This is another indicator to me that the more we move to an experience based socieity (and economy) that people are looking less and less for the “slick” and more and more for the “authentic.” Oh sure, there’s probably still room, lots of it, for the big production with the focus on the “presentation.” But, there is a growing part of the population that is looking to be IN the presentation, not WATCHING it.
When the boundaries blur between presenter and participants, the expeirence becomes the center.
This means the presenter and the participants lose the sense of their primary roles and become more engrossed in what, together, they are creating–rather than on the roles they are playing in the moment.
Owl city makes the concert goer feel like everyone’s just sitting together in the living room listening to music, watching some cool images, and hanging out with friends. In some ways, they are not the focus of moment, the experience is.
Hmmmmm….what could this mean for you?