I don’t think I like live music

I don’t think I like live music. This is a realization I came to a few months ago, and now I’m making it official by posting about it here.

I came across something in Derek Sivers’ bio that stopped me in my tracks – the idea that he does not like live music, and instead much prefers “great recordings.”

This is exactly how I am. It’s probably exacerbated by the fact that I have not seen much live music in the last few years.

I’m just going to quote Derek directly, because I identify so closely with this:

Like my preference for one-on-one conversations, my relationship to a piece of music is personal — it’s between me and the music. I don’t want to have a bunch of other people around, and don’t want to be distracted with other things when listening. Ideally, instead of a one-to-one relationship between listener and musician, it would be one-to-zero, where I can’t even know who the musician is. Then I could focus just on the music itself, and not be distracted by any personal information about the musician.

Most of my interest in music has been as a music-maker. I’m fluent in that language. I graduated from Berklee College of Music. I know almost too much music theory. I ran a recording studio for 12 years, and produced and engineered hundreds of recordings, often playing all the instruments myself. When listening to a piece of music, I’m usually too analytical. If you play something for me and ask, “What do you think?”, I’m almost always thinking about what I would have done differently if I had written it.

I’m not bragging about this. It kinda sucks. It makes me incompatible with most music situations.

So what do I like?
Innovative arrangements. I love a unique combination and intersection of instruments. New sounds I’ve never heard before. It’s hard to listen to yet another guitar-bass-drums rock band. I need more creativity than that.
Song craft. I admire it like a carpenter admires a well-made table. I worked hard for 15 years to write the best songs I could, trying to learn everything about that craft, and so appreciate a good one.
Great recordings, for the same reason. After years recording music, I so appreciate something well-produced and well-engineered.
New ideas. I’m unimpressed by emoting, because emotions are not impressive. I’ve heard all the regular wailing with the same-old palette of sounds and words. I have to be hit with a new idea, a new angle, to be interested.

I’m not completely averse to it – I’m even starting to (finally) explore playing live again myself, and I do still enjoy watching my friends play music – but the joy of a live show doesn’t get me excited anymore.

I think this is partly influenced by the shitty reality of the live music industry in 2025, in which there are so many middlemen looking to extract wealth from said industry that an average show is economically inaccessible to most people and financially worthless to the artist. That said, I do realize the power of live music both as promotion and as an enabler of community & belonging. So I can’t rule it out entirely.