BottleRock Shows the Value of Music Festivals and IRL Experiences

The BottleRock music festival in Napa, Calif., just wrapped up, kicking off the summer festival season with headliners Lizzo, Post Malone and the return of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. This high-end, three-day music event, now a decade old, featured the products of the finest wineries from the region alongside gonzo gourmet food. You’re never going to get that in virtual reality. As if to punctuate that point, Keanu Reeves also shared the stage with his band Dogstar.

BottleRock is a gem among festivals, offering a unique, vineyard-spirited experience that’s always a standout. More importantly, it underscores the lasting power of live music and shared experiences in an increasingly ephemeral, heads-down, mobile-obsessed digital world. That’s the increasingly isolating environment in which AI thrives, presenting the latest major tech threat to musicians, artists and the entire entertainment community. 

Live music and festivals, along with the fandom they nurture, are secret weapons in our tech-accelerated times. We spend more and more of our time with our heads in the clouds, or just the cloud. That goes against the urge in human nature to seek physical interaction. Live experiences reinforce the value of looking up and away from our phones. Magical moments and serendipitous relationships simply happen once we allow them in. 

That’s why the live music and festival world continues its rapid growth across the planet. Goldman Sachs expected the global live music market to gross $26.5 billion in 2022, and forecasts that market to grow 7% a year from 2023 to 2030 to reach $38.3 billion, with music festivals the increasingly “dominant segment,” according to analyst firm Allied Market Rearch. There is no sign this trend is abating, precisely because live music and other IRL experiences offer counter-programming to tech-induced isolation and cannot be replicated by AI, no matter how hard it tries. 

To be clear, it’s not an either-or proposition: generative AI already infiltrates some aspects of live music. Grimes is one artist who now charts an AI-forward path. She has made her voice and music available for fans to use generative AI to create “new” songs, so long as she shares in their profits. Peter Gabriel also welcomes the advent of AI. He recently wrote in a broadside on his website that AI is not to be feared, and musicians and the entire creative community must adapt to the new AI reality and learn to leverage it. (Isn’t it interesting that he co-wrote a song about AI with One Republic in 2016?)

Seven-time Grammy winner Stewart Copeland, drummer of famed band The Police, agrees. AI “is a tool,” he recently told me. “Artists can use it. An analogy would be the drum box. It was considered to be a great threat to drummers… but [it] became another tool used by drummers.” 

But others disagree. Grammy-winning artist and composer Alex Ebert of Edward Sharpe recently bemoaned that AI’s “democratization leads to homogenization” of music. “Where’s the art in that?”, he asked me.

AI certainly can’t compete with human artists and the fervor they create for their fandoms when playing live. Yes, we can stream entire clips of live concerts of our favorite artists on YouTube — and generative AI might study these videos and create synthetic replicas. But there is something uniquely powerful about the real thing, about IRL, that can’t be replicated. Just as it is much more fun, lasting and scary to experience a horror movie in theaters with others who provoke our own screams, live events with others heighten the impact of the music, the tastes, the smells — the overall multisensory experience. If there was any doubt about that, it was dispelled by Reeves and BottleRock. 

Virtual digital relationships certainly offer many people a sense of connection, understanding and comfort that may be otherwise unavailable to them at that moment. But ultimately digital relationships, including a new breed of AI companions offered by the likes of Replika, only further separate us from each other.

Interestingly, even Gabriel notoriously noted that point. “My hope and my fear / is human interaction,” he and One Republic sang in “A.I.”

We live in a time of increasing teen depression, a phenomenon which has dramatically increased during the rise of algorithmically toxic social media. Live music events and festivals like BottleRock offer physical escape, pause and refuge from those forces that bombard us. Yes, those escapes can be expensive and they take effort and resources. (We drove over 1,000 miles round-trip.) But critically, they get us looking up and out at the world around us, waking us to the beauty of IRL nature and human interaction. 

They also compensate IRL artists, allowing them to continue to create the art that feeds our souls and inspires us to move forward with humanity.

As my wife and I drove home from Napa to San Diego, we reflected on our weekend’s BottleRock escape. The laughter and late-night shenanigans with our classic new friends — not to mention that great mélange of music, spirits and food — are now locked in our memories. Not the GPS map that got us there. 

For those of you interested in learning more, visit Peter’s firm Creative Media at creativemedia.biz and follow him on Twitter @pcsathy.