Concert sales

Just about every time I give a talk about the possibilities of virtual reality, somebody asks me whether I think there is a danger that VR will replace reality. And I always tell them that I don’t worry about that, because all historical precedent shows otherwise.

Each time a new medium comes out, people worry that it will “replace reality”. I suspect that this perception is really a consequence of the newness of the medium, which leads people to mischaracterize it.

In its time, each new medium for distributing content was worried over, as a potential “reality killer”. Books, photography, audio recording, cinema and television are just some examples.

More recently, the rise of the high speed internet has coincided with a dramatic increase in long distance air travel. When people know more about a place in the world, they are more likely to take the effort to visit it in person.

Referring to historical precedent isn’t always convincing. After all, a person who grew up in today’s world has no real connection with the advent of books or cinema, and today’s undergrads were born into a world where the Web already existed.

But today a student once again asked me the question about whether VR would replace reality, and this time I managed to phrase my answer in a more relevent way, by placing it in the context of popular music. “Album sales,” I said, “don’t kill concert sales.”