Two concert-goers compare Tame Impala and Rosalía shows, debating setlists, phone culture, and what kills the vibe.
The crowd tells you everything. At the Tame Impala show, nobody was filming. People were dancing, jumping, humming through the instrumental breaks. Full-on, no-phones, eyes-forward dancing. And when you look around a venue and barely see a single screen glowing back at you, you realize how rare that is now.
Tame Impala pulled that off for a specific reason: Kevin Parker doesn't really have a fandom in the traditional sense. Nobody is elbowing to the front to get a close-up for their Instagram. Nobody cares if he walks past them on the street. Everyone is just there for the music. That absence of celebrity worship is exactly what makes the vibe so good.
The whole concert feels like one long song.
The production backs that feeling up. Everything is planned, from the lights to the camera work. There's a guy following the band the whole time, and his footage plays live on the screens. When Kevin needed a bathroom break, the camera followed him to the door. No dead air, no awkward pause, someone on stage was always playing something. The show never stopped being a show.
Tickets were cheap. Merch was 45 euros for a shirt, which, compared to Billie Eilish at 100 or Beyoncé's whole operation, is basically nothing. The strategy makes sense when you think about it: Beyoncé can lower per-item prices because she has 100,000 people in a stadium who will each buy five things. Parker just charges a fair price and lets the music do the work.
The Rosalía show was a different story. Not a bad concert, but it didn't crack the top five. The album is incredible, genuinely insane, but the tracklist structure worked against the live experience. She'd go full techno, boom boom boom, and then drop into a piano ballad five seconds later. Then back up. Then calm again. Vibe, calm, vibe, calm, over and over, until the whole thing became exhausting.
"She would be like, techno boom boom boom boom, and then literally be at a piano in the next five seconds."
A good setlist builds. Easy songs at the start, energy rising through the middle, then go completely crazy near the end and leave everyone wanting 15 more hours. Instead, the Rosalía show peaked two songs before it finished, then closed on the slowest ballad imaginable. The second-to-last song was crazy. The last song was not. You could have left early and felt like it ended perfectly.
The set design compounded the problem. There was a full live orchestra in the center of the venue, which should have been a jaw-dropping moment. Most people in the crowd never noticed it was there, because the orchestra was positioned low with nothing elevated to draw attention to them. No screens showing close-up camera feeds either, so anyone more than a few rows back couldn't see Rosalía at all. The production felt designed to make cute content clips rather than to serve 10,000 people in a room.
The bigger issue at the Rosalía show was the crowd itself. She's the artist of the moment, which means a lot of people show up who don't actually know her music. They know she's big. They don't know the songs. And when that happens, you get a sea of phones instead of a sea of people dancing.
If you're going to a show, do the work first. At least know a couple of songs.
This is a rule worth taking seriously. If you're going to see someone you don't know well, spend the week before listening to their most popular tracks. Give yourself 10 songs you recognize. You don't have to sing along to everything. You don't have to know every word. But just standing there looking blank while everyone else is losing their minds is its own kind of energy drain on the people around you.
The worst version of this is when someone breaks your friend circle mid-concert. Standing in a tight group with people you came with is one of the unwritten rules of the experience. Three strangers wedging in and splitting the group in half, in the middle of the show, not even at the start, is a legitimate concert crime.
I fucking hated that.
Going to the same concert twice and recording one while fully living the other is the real solution. One night for content, one night for the experience. Pick your mode before you walk in. Trying to do both usually means doing neither well.
The next one on the calendar is Harry Styles, and the concern is already real: the fandom. The Rosalía crowd had phones everywhere; the Harry Styles crowd is going to be a full-scale event in itself. General admission tickets are still available, which is unusual and slightly alarming, and the temptation to switch from seated to the floor is real, but the risk of getting your friend circle broken up again is just as real.
The last album is genuinely great, which creates its own problem: there's a real desire to hear the whole thing front to back, and instead you're going to get Watermelon Sugar and the deep cuts from three albums ago. That's the trade-off with established artists. You buy the ticket for the new music and you get the full career.
The opening act is Robin, who is worth knowing about before you go. At the Tame Impala show, the opener was skipped entirely, arriving 15 minutes before headliner time with merch already in hand. Sometimes that's the right call. Other times, the opener is the one thing people remember.
The formula for a great show turns out to be simpler than any production budget can guarantee: a crowd that came to listen, a setlist that builds toward something, and a stage setup that makes every person in the room feel included. Everything else is details.
