Concerts 2025

In the liquid mutability of our times, it is good to note the absolute steadfastness with which certain fundamental values remain intact and unchanged. In the end, music in its essence is, and has always been, first and foremost the act of the concert, that is, someone singing and playing for someone else. And it is for this primary reason that, long before there were tapes and records to carry music around the world, songs were imagined, melodies written and words invented.

Today, more than ever, concerts are the bulwark of authenticity; they represent truth at a delicate moment in which music is exposed to the risk of doubt, of uncertainty about what we are actually listening to, in which the integrity of authors' work is endangered by the unchecked practices of Artificial Intelligence. Live, you cannot lie, it is impossible to lie, and as if to underline the trust the public places in live music, the figures are encouraging: this year too all the indicators show growth, as if, starting from the restart that followed the dramatic months of the Covid lockdown, the desire to share live music had never stopped again.

And that is a good thing, good for singers and for authors, compensating for what no longer comes in from records and for the enormous damage that the disappearance of the physical format has caused above all to the lower-middle tier of authors, which is in fact the one that represents the main fabric, the essential weave of most of the music consumed in Italy.

Concerts are growing, and with them grows the perception of our country as a particularly welcoming place, with a strong appeal for tourism and the related economic activity that this phenomenon brings. In plain terms, this simply means that, as far as foreign artists are concerned too, it is certainly nicer to come and see a concert in Verona, in Rome, or in the Dolomites than elsewhere.

That said, we should not hide the fact that the world of concerts has inevitably absorbed some of the ills of the contemporary communication system. We see too many phones constantly switched on during the event, as if we were incapable of experiencing live the emotional impact that music has, and must have, on us. The artists themselves follow a trend that has been underway for many years now, one that favours the desire to please the audience rather than to challenge it. On the one hand, this is an entirely natural mechanism. The public goes to concerts knowing and demanding that their idols perform exactly the songs they love, and the artists respond; yet we must not forget that concerts have also been, for centuries, the occasion to offer something new, and perhaps a better balance between these two needs should be sought.

Then there is the sore point of prices: they are high, and they are even higher when you consider the growing practice of differentiating ticket prices for access to reserved areas, pits, meet-and-greets with the artist and so on.

Finally, dazzled by the bright mass concerts, we too often forget the shortcomings at the grassroots level, the level of beginnings, the one that should allow young people to perform and test themselves before an audience. The places where they can play are too few and too little supported by the institutions.

Concerts, all concerts, from the smallest to the largest, must be preserved and cared for as what they are: an ideal territory of sharing, where people are together, where no one is against anyone else, a place you enter to overcome conflicts, to be moved, where there is no partisanship but only passions.