Long live live music!

You'd be hard-pressed to get me to admit that my musical love affair began with Dave Matthews Band. But to a 13-year-old with bubblegum pop obsessions like Savage Garden, Dream Street, and Backstreet Boys, DMB was as different as any music I'd ever heard in my tiny life. Dave was my stepping out, my realization that good music existed, despite the current culture of manufactured pop hits. And although DMB is polarizing in college circles, there will always be a fondness in my heart for Under The Table And Dreaming. From there I became a music fiend- I have devoured any and all music I've come into contact with for the last 8 years, and the ways in which I've done so are continually changing.

Perhaps the roots of my musical interest are genetic- both my parents are gargantuan music fans. Dad likes jazz, blues, and alt-rock; Mom listens to classic rock and pop from the 60's and 70's. When I was 8, we moved to the house where my parents still live, and Dad installed an intercom system, upon which he would blast NPR's Blue Collar Sunday, the weekend blues-dedicated public radio show. These were summer days; all the windows in the house open, my sister and I lounging around the pool (or terrorizing the cat), Mom and Dad preparing to grill out. This radio ritual is perhaps more suited for a time before television, but was my first foray into the communal experience that is music.

After I discovered DMB, I tried to get my hands on music any way I could. I raided my parents music collection, I checked out albums (on CD) from the library. I learned how to burn CDs, and would carry around bags full of music-laden plastic discs to use on my Discman, which I used until my senior year of high school. When I was at home, I blasted music from my portable stereo, or from my parents' system while they were gone.

Of course, in the last decade the methods in which music is delivered have changed almost completely. We are now in a world of iPods, satellite radio and internet streaming, digital downloads and pirating. I can load my 4gb iPod with various mp3s from different artists- I no longer have to carry around my entire music collection with me. I still listen to local radio while in the car, but my boyfriend has used satellite radio in the past, and currently listens to Pandora through his cell phone. And many websites allow music fans to buy singles, not necessarily the whole album; there are many debates on the impact this has has on the art of the album format. Of course, pirating will always exist and evolve right along with the music industry.

However, my most life-affirming music experience, in which I saw my life flash before my eyes, was my first real concert at age 15- of course, none other than the Dave Matthews Band. In June of 2004 my friend and I drove sans-parents across Columbus to Polaris Ampitheater, to sit on the dewy grass and absorb the sound of DMB and their opener O.A.R., to smell the illicit substances wafting around us for the first time, to watch the drunken college students and a few Dead-heads dance with each other in the spirit of happiness and love, and to really and truly experience music, free from the constraints of studio processors and compressors and auto-tuning. I laid back on the grass and stared at the sky, reveling in the fact that I'd never been happier in my 15 years. It was out-of-body, an experience akin to watching a film in theater, but so much bigger.

I feel, in the same way as AO Scott, that there are some aspects of media consumption that will never die out. Indeed, like the cinema experience is to the evolving film industry, the live performance is the music industry's counterpart. Fans will always pay for those few hours where they can escape their reality, where they will leave their homes to be enveloped in a world of sound, where the artist will reach out and touch them (literally and figuratively), and where they can be whomever they want to be.

Personal delivery methods may change, but the live experience is one that will never be replaced. Even DMB says, "You pay for what you get".