Almost a million and a half tickets sold in a few hours for their 2023 European tour, representing a milestone in the history of popular music. Are Coldplay the best band ever or are there extra-musical reasons for their success?
The following experience is related by a person linked to the music business. It happened more or less like this. A few weeks ago, during a meal with friends, a teenager asked if someone could get her tickets for the Coldplay concerts in Barcelona in May next year. She had run out. Among those present, one was interested in her musical hobbies. "Do you like Coldplay a lot?" "Well, yes," came the girl's reply. "But do you know their songs?" "Well, yes, some." After receiving these rather evasive answers, the adult was more direct: "But what is the real reason you want to see Coldplay so much?" "Well, I have to be."
The syndrome was baptized about a decade ago with the acronym FOMO, from English fear of missing out (fear of missing out). It is not something new, of course, but the emergence of social networks has amplified its effects, as the sociologist Liliana Arroyo points out in the book Welcome Metaverso? Presence, body and vicissitudes in the digital age (NED), co-written with the social psychologist and psychoanalyst José Ramón Ubieto: “Now we have many more opportunities to see what we are missing”.
In this essay, Arroyo recounts the case of a boy who tells him the following: “Look, FOMO is that you are having a coffee on a terrace with some friends, you open your mobile and you see that someone is traveling and you think: what do I do? drinking a coffee? I would have to be traveling. FOMO is also that you are traveling in a paradisiacal place, you open your mobile and see on the networks that someone is partying. And you think: I should be partying. But the thing is that FOMO is also partying and seeing that someone…”
To which Ubieto adds that FOMO is also a way to combat the horror of the void: "Being able to account for our presence in these events gives us a consistency –illusory– as I's that are alive and present in the world."
It cannot be ruled out that because of this need to be present, this urgency to belong to the community that does what must be done at all times, many adolescents without a ticket go to the surroundings of the Olympic Stadium to be able to post images that suggest that They are going to attend the concert that everyone you know, or should know, is going to be at.
Coldplay, an excellent pop band with numerous hits, is also a studied commitment to marketing based on the viralization of the experiences generated by the group. It is not just about his original way of interacting on the networks. It is that everything in his shows is designed so that it circulates on Instagram or TikTok, thus configuring an environment from which you do not want to leave. Apparently, it is very difficult to escape the effect of its lavish staging. Even Mick Jagger posted a video of himself on Instagram waving the smart and sustainable bracelet at a Coldplay concert that is used to chorally illuminate the stadiums where the group plays!
Of course, in the middle of a concert, Chris Martin's band, in an exercise that borders on cynicism, usually asks the public to stop filming them during a song, so that they can enjoy together a more genuine musical experience...
Ubieto maintains that crowds have a future, even in a pandemic: "They maintain the illusion of enjoying together as if they were a single body, with nothing that could limit them."
Too bad it's impossible to be at the same time having a coffee on a terrace with friends, traveling in a paradisiacal place and at a Coldplay concert. And – most worryingly – that this lack of the gift of ubiquity can generate anxiety or loss of self-esteem among young people, to the point of considering it a matter of life or death to attend a concert by a group they hardly like.
(This article is written while Coldplay's Music Of the Spheres album was playing, fitting, but not overly so, as a Saturday morning soundtrack.)
