Stop Buying Albums, Save Rock'n'Roll (R.I.P. Langerado)

For the past few years, concerts have remained the bastion of hope for those music fans praying that the entire music industry wouldn’t go down as flaming wreckage. Total album sales from 2008 decreased a staggering 45% since 2000 while illegal downloading has skyrocketed, but touring has kept a steady pace even in the face of an economy that’s about as bleak as seeing MC Hammer’s career dump him in a Cash4Gold commercial.

Bon Jovi’s tour last year alone made over 210 million dollars. Further, last year saw the most successful year ever for rock tours, up 13% from 2007.

But if the Bush economy has taught me anything, it’s that things can always get worse. And yesterday, they did.

Langerado, an annual Florida music festival, announced its cancellation due to slow ticket sales. Co-Promoter Ethan Schwarts wrote, “During these difficult economic times… it’s become apparent that we cannot execute a production that lives up to the high standards of our past events. Putting Langerado on hold was the toughest decision we have ever had to make.”

The popular three-day festival has landed some of the industry’s top not-awful bands in its six year run including the Beastie Boys and R.E.M. with last year’s fest drawing almost 30,000 people.

This year’s cancellation can be attributed to a few factors. The first is that the genius folks planning the fest decided to move it from the rural Big Cypress Indian Reservation to the Bicentennial Park in the decidedly non-rural Miami, thereby alienating the many fans who are drawn to music festivals for their free-flowing environments where camping and, ahem, mind-expansion are welcomed.

Sure, it was a bad idea, but the lack of Langerado this year points at a much grimmer conclusion — the fortress of live music has begun to crumble in the face of the economy.

Now a logical, albeit foolish, thought here would be “Maybe Langerado just sucked this year and no one wanted to go. I’m going to Wal Mart to buy the new AC/DC.”

But it’s hard to make that argument when the proposed lineup included heavyweights like Death Cab for Cutie, Modest Mouse, Broken Social Scene, Against Me!, Parliament/Funkadelic and a reunited Public Enemy. In other words, it’s the economy, stupid.
And the only solution I can foresee is this: Stop buying CD’s. Seriously, if you haven’t already (though most of you have), just stop buying CD’s.

Here’s why — we’re all on a budget nowadays, and tight budgets call for hard decisions. If you’ve got, say, $50 that you’re willing to part with for five new albums on iTunes, why not save that money for a concert that you’ll remember forever instead of 11 tracks that’ll likely get lost in the annals of your surely gigantic and unnecessary iTunes library.

I’m willing to say that in the face of this possible impending doom there is no shame in downloading or (much better yet) simply streaming music on your computer through sites like Skreemr.com or the ubiquitous MySpace if it’ll free up your cash to help keep live music, well, alive.

The world of rock’n’roll would be better off with an even steeper decline in record sales if it’d keep concerts halls from having empty seats. Because at the heart of the music world is the live show. You can get the recorded music anywhere, from your friend’s iPod to bit torrent sites to MTV (during the 6 minutes a day when dating shows aren’t broadcast) to the 12 billion music blogs out there. But you can’t get the experience of a live show anywhere but a live show.

So for the sake of the summer tours and festivals that are still in tact in this black hole where the economy used to be, save your money to see that band you love in concert, because a world without great rock concerts and festivals would kill off what’s left of the independent spirit of rock’n’roll that Nickelback hasn’t already killed.