European Music Festivals Increasingly Banning Smartphones

Many who attended Amsterdam’s No Art festival this summer had the time of their lives—but you wouldn’t know it from their social media. At the entrance to the all-day dance event, held at the Dutch city’s Flevopark in July, attendees were asked to drop their smartphones into envelopes, with strict instructions not to retrieve them until the end of the night.

Organizers Bora Güney and Ruud Boymans introduced the no-phones policy in response to their frustration with guests recording or livestreaming shows on their mobile devices. Their events are marked by “art moments,” such as solo guitar or saxophone performances, during pauses in the music. “But there was a point a few years ago when everyone in the room was watching these special interludes through their smartphone screen,” Güney said. “They might as well have watched the show on a laptop in their bedroom.”

Boymans added, “Banning mobile phones from the dancefloor has made a tremendous difference. People are in the moment, they talk to each other, they make friends. The party is back.”

Next year, the organizers plan to ask attendees to lock their phones in specially designed wallets that can only be unsealed with a magnet at the exit or the bar.

Across Europe, other live music promoters are also adopting similar measures. At the Voodoo festival, a boutique electronic music event held near Humbeek Castle in Belgium’s Grimbergen municipality in September, visitors to the Oracle stage were required to put a sticker over their phone cameras before entering. This routine was pioneered by nightclubs such as Berlin’s Berghain.

Voodoo festival organizer Maxim Dekegel said, “Last year, some people were filming the whole evening. We want people to be in the moment again and to listen to the music.” The reaction to the partial no-phone policy has been surprisingly positive, with only a few complaints about not having footage to share. Dekegel assured attendees that professional photographers would be on the dancefloor to document the atmosphere.

“It’s a test of how far we can go back to a pre-digital era,” Dekegel added. “You have to do it step by step.”

Weaning off social media will be challenging for both event organizers and crowds, said Gunn Enli, an associate professor at Oslo University’s Department of Media and Communication, who has researched smartphone use at live events.

“There’s a lot of ambivalence here,” Enli said. “Promoters want the hashtags, the video clips, the social media buzz, but they also don’t want people to be on their phones the whole time.” Her research suggests that many fans would not require strict measures to limit mobile use, as they are already showing more restraint of their own accord.

“Over the last two years, we have seen a shift at the biggest festivals in Oslo,” Enli noted. “More people are putting their phones in their pockets when the music starts and leaving them there. There is now more social cache in not being seen as a slave to social media.”

At the Campus festival in Konstanz, Germany, in May, German indie-pop band Juli paused their performance to urge the crowd to stop filming. “Our fans always look forward to this song because it was our biggest hit,” said singer Eva Briegel. “But as soon as they hear the first chords, the hands with the phones go up, and all the energy that we as a band feed off is gone.”

Briegel reminded the crowd that their hit “Perfekte Welle” (Perfect Wave) is about living in the moment, noting that no smartphone video could ever match the live experience. Three months later, fans still write to her saying her plea was the highlight of the festival.

Briegel pointed out that older fans, those over 40, are the most in need of such educational measures. “The people I see at our gigs with a glass of beer in one hand and a mobile phone held aloft in the other are mostly older fans,” she said. Younger fans seem to have already developed their own digital etiquette. “The younger the people, the better their digital hygiene.”

Enli added, “By far the biggest driver behind declining phone use at concerts is seeing uncool people do it, who younger people don’t want to be associated with.”

Source: The Guardian