I saw this recently on a greeting card, and it struck me. It is true that the older I get, the more I’ve experienced unexpected life events, health issues, or friends passing away. Those things have given me some “grateful I’m not dead” appreciation.
But the funny part behind this saying is that lots of seniors really were front and center at many a Grateful Dead concert. And even today, those older adults aren’t just sitting around at home watching TV every night. Boomers (those 55 and up) have music in their soul. Their musical lives are likely to have been influenced by the watershed Woodstock Festival of 1969. Music and concert attendance remain staples of their lives, senior or not. Entertainment and music businesses are starting to take notice too. The 50+ market accounts for almost half of US consumer spending. That’s an annual $3.2 trillion that businesses want to get their hands on.
They know, for instance, that adults over 45 buy the most music-related goods. And adults over 65 are huge supporters of both rock and country music (the older teens and young adults are the primary fans of hiphop and rap). Older boomers go to more concerts than the younger 23-38 aged millennials (you’d expect them to be the majority rocking out at concerts!) Businesses want to get all that potential senior spending. Seniors have to learn to leverage their spending power and make concert-going more accessible in various ways for them.
“Just because you’re reaching your elder years doesn’t mean the effect of hearing live metal music has lessened its impact.” (From “The Inconveniences of Going to Concerts in Your 60s”)
I just read this very insightful account about an older heavy metal music lover (https://www.metalsucks.net/2022/06/01/the-inconveniences-of-going-to-concerts-in-your-60s/). She addresses some issues she must deal with now at concerts. As a younger person, she never considered such things as bathroom access, avoiding the standing room only seating, getting to the venue, finding someone to attend with her, or astronomical ticket prices. But as a senior concert-attendee, she does. Those issues that affect seniors have not stopped her from still going to her beloved heavy metal concerts though.
Such issues have not affected my attendance at concerts either. I still see concerts of my favorite groups, whenever location and budget allow. Primarily I find the cost of tickets to be astoundingly prohibitive. For some of the ticket prices I’ve seen (resale tickets in the thousands!!!), I want my own private musical performance by Sir Elton or Bruce Springsteen, with a steak-and-lobster dinner thrown in for good measure.
Tech-challenged as I am, I’ve had to learn how to jump into the online ticket-purchasing fray in order to get the best deal (or any deal at all, since tickets sell out so fast). However I refuse to ever promise that I will refrain from punching out any corporate Ticketmaster employee that I may someday meet. Ticketmaster upper management, beware this irate senior.
So I’m actually really excited about attending an upcoming music concert at the soon-to-be-finished Sphere in Las Vegas. My favorite group U2 will be in “Achtung Baby” residency there this fall. They will play concerts at the Venetian’s other-worldly Sphere. It is billed as the world’s largest spherical structure, seating 17,600 people. The Sphere will have the largest and highest-resolution LED screen in the world. Even hard-of-hearing senior folk will have no audio problems- the Sphere will feature 164,000 speakers, with sound delivered through the floorboards! (Pass the ear plugs, please).
Immersive concert experiences on a grand scale seem to be the latest in entertainment now. Even The Edge, U2’s usually reserved guitarist, seems excited. “My hope is that this will be a kind of quantum leap forward in the sense of what a concert can be,” he said in the May 12 Rolling Stone magazine. This concert-going senior is totally happy to soon find out if The Edge is right. (https://www.traveloffpath.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Las-Vegas-Sphere-Construction.jpg).
