No one, anywhere in the world, has posted a photo on Instagram of the outfit they’ll be wearing to see Insidious at the theater this weekend. Zara didn’t put out any special collection of clothing inspired by Indiana Jones and the Dial of Fate, even though they were both highly anticipated summer movies. But they are not events, like Barbenheimer, the global phenomenon that has managed to sell out Oppenheimer, and especially Barbie, this weekend. The two films will continue on the billboard, if all goes well, for several weeks, but that doesn’t count. The important thing is to see them now, if possible on Friday, and be one of the first to tell it on networks.
Although it is now an event that everyone is going to try to get a piece of, from movie theaters that organize double sessions to the dozens of brands that have collaborated for Barbie’s marketing, at the beginning of it all, Barbenheimer, the curious coincidence of a dark film, like all Christopher Nolan’s, and Greta Gerwig’s pink fable on the same day it was released, was an unplanned phenomenon, fueled by fans who began to make memes and YouTube montages with the two trailers. “Without a doubt, Warner and Universal saw a clear opportunity to benefit from a situation in social networks that was growing organically and that offered them to reach young audience sectors that are very difficult to conquer but key to success,” believes Pau Brunet, analyst at Box Office Spain and based in Los Angeles.
What has happened with these two films is an exaggerated, but not isolated, case of what could be called the culture of the event: when something that was considered ordinary – going to the movies, sitting in a park, going out to dinner, attending a concert – becomes something extraordinary, an event worth telling and for which more money is paid. Because on the journey that goes from everyday fact to canonical event, what almost always increases is the price.
One only has to see, for example, the tendency to order organized picnics in the park, which Analía Plaza recounted this week in this article in El Periódico de España: in Madrid there are companies that charge up to 190 euros for a romantic-country meal in the Retiro. The option also exists in Barcelona, ??with options of all prices: from the simple basket of six euros to the luxurious one, of 75. Probably, the industry that has been most impacted by the event is live music, along with restaurants. Concert attendance has risen 24% compared to the last pre-pandemic year, 2019, according to LiveNation, in an unexpected return to live music that has surprised the sector itself. The Wall Street Journal has dubbed the summer of 2023—the one that America is spending engaged in Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and Europe watching Beyoncé disrupt a country’s inflation and scrambling to get Taylor Swift tickets in 2024—as “the summer of the thousand-dollar concert ticket.”
Undoubtedly, the factors that explain why this situation has come to be, the dramatic rise in concert prices, is largely due to Ticketmaster’s monopolistic situation and decisions by the industry itself, such as using “dynamic pricing” (the algorithm that guesses how much someone is willing to pay for something they really want) and overloading extras, in addition to designing luxury packs for superfans, but also the fact that there are many people willing to pay those prices.
The article in The Wall Street Journal interviews people who have added second and third jobs to their workload to be able to pay for concert tickets, and they attribute this type of decision to the so-called split brain. When someone is so tired of economizing in every area of ??their life, marked by wild inflation, that they decide to throw the house out the window with one-off spending. The swifties who participated in the Hunger Games on the Eras Tour last week and the week before can testify that, after registering in 15 European cities, receiving codes from seven of them, staring at websites that don’t load for hours, and losing tickets at the last minute, if the opportunity arises to buy a ticket three or four times more than what you had planned to spend, your brain cracked, or simply exhausted, you can say: come on, okay.
Jason Mercer, an analyst at Moody’s consulting firm specializing in live music, confirms that “the demand has taken the industry by surprise. We hoped to return to pre-pandemic levels, but not exceed them.” And he adds: “surviving a global pandemic has made many people want to spend on experiences, rather than on material goods.” This is the most common explanation for understanding the psychology behind this rise in the culture of the event: a progressive sociological trend, and with a large generational component, to value what has been lived above what has been bought would have been imposed after a global trauma such as the pandemic, which made the world aware of its own fragility. Statistics like this one from Eventbrite are often cited, which says that 78% of millennials, counted as those born between 1980 and 1996, declare that they prefer to spend their money on experiences than on things.
The former head of Creativity and Innovation at Disney, Duncan Wardle, explained in an article that it was Walt himself who invented, like so many other things, monetizing sensations. Instead of implanting Smell-o-vision (smells in time with the film) in theaters, in 1955 he decided to set up Disneyland and build a whole world in 3D tailored to his fantasy. “When I was commissioned to grow the audience of Disneyland Paris for its 25th anniversary, the statistics data said that people go to the parks for the attractions. But when we sat down with the actual customers and asked why they came, they told us the real reason was to create family memories,” Wardle says in the article.
Anyone raising children these days knows that that phrase, “making memories,” is used to sell families everything from the annual zoo pass to kayaking excursions. The children’s activity industry has made sure to generate in mothers and fathers an extra anxiety to those they already have: the fear of giving their children too dull a childhood.
It was two economists, B.Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, who codified the idea of ??the “experience economy” in an influential paper in 1998. Gilmore and Pine claimed that after the service economy, which had replaced the industrial economy in the 20th century, a system based on sensations would reign. “Since services, like goods before, have become widespread, companies that want to lead, whether they target consumers or businesses, will find that the next workhorse is staging experiences,” they said in that text. Since then the concept has been applied to marketing in all sectors and in all possible ways. As prescient as the two economists were, there was something they didn’t see coming: social media, which has added an extra dimension to the experience economy. What is better than living something special? Live something special and tell it.
Without this magical combination, it is not understandable that the great museums of the world have been designing their exhibitions for more than a decade thinking, among other things, of putting up a wall so that visitors can become instagrammable. It is also not understood that there are pop-up experiences (fashion reached its peak before the pandemic) called the Ice Cream Museum or Rosado Experience, which consist of a series of montages to take colorful photos, or immersive exhibitions, such as those of the Ideal museum in Barcelona, ??which usually sell tickets three or four times more expensive than those of a normal museum, with its art collections, its temporary exhibitions and others.
“The eventization of shows, turning leisure appointments into events that mark your biography, happens in music in the same way that it has happened in restaurants and in football”, Nando Cruz, author of the book Macrofestivales (Península), explains, in which he defends a very critical position with the macro drift of live music. “Before, your leisure time was based on eating, going to concerts, going to football… pleasant events, but they weren’t crucially important in your life either and now they have become distinctive elements. The stadiums are full of people who are relatively interested in football, but who have decided to allocate money to live a one-off experience”.
Although it seems obvious, the people who packed Coldplay’s five concerts in Barcelona at the beginning of the summer were not there to hear the chords of Yellow. They were there to cry with Yellow and to try to capture some of the studied moments with which Chris Martin tries to signify each date of his very long tour, whether it is singing with an autistic child, stopping a song to admire a pillar, as he did in Barcelona, ????or taking Roger Federer on stage. In other words, to live experiences and feel things.
As Cruz also points out, going from selling music (or food, or soccer, or whatever) to selling souvenirs, Walt Disney-style, allows something fundamental, broadening the base. The potential audience becomes infinite. “From my perspective as a music consumer – says the journalist – I have seen this evolution. When the first festivals appeared in Spain, the audiences were niche. The FIB was for indies and there were 8,000 indies in Spain, there were no more. The moment you make that click and make the whole of society aware that at some point in their life they have to go to a festival, then you broaden the target and people with a lot of purchasing power also enter”. That is why, says Cruz, we saw Íñigo Onieva, Tamara Falcó’s already husband, broadening his target, at a festival, the Burning Man in Nevada.
The causes and consequences of event culture are everywhere. In the recent trend, also very active in Spain, to convert successful podcasts into live shows, which makes them much more profitable than leaving them only as audios that are consumed in streaming, and allows fans to see and listen closely to the podcasters with whom they have parasocial relationships. There are also traces of the culture of the event in the success of the curious gastronomic experiences (eating hamburgers in a bathtub, as in the Machaca chain, or designing brunches that are like mini art installations, as in the Eat My Trip venue in Barcelona, ??which always has a queue at the door), and which feed off perfectly with the successful Instagram and Tik Tok accounts with names like Madrid Secreto or Secret London.
The company behind these pages, Secret Media Network, part of Fever, was founded by a Catalan, Pep Gómez, is present in more than one hundred cities and is considered a unicorn, that is, a company valued at more than one hundred million dollars. If one spends a while watching his hypnotic videos, in which there is no distinction between what is editorial content and what is branded, that is, paid for by a brand, one has the feeling that the city itself is a gigantic field of potential experiences, of unprecedented sensations. Of events that have not yet been lived.