Today's Modern Fan Increasingly Dependent and At Risk with Mobile Devices

It’s been a few years since I attended a destination music festival, but going to the second US festival in 1983 was one of the highlights of my college years. I remember it was very hot, we saw an incredible array of stellar performances, toured some exhibits with cutting edge personal computers and other technology and had a simply wonderful time. Hard to believe, but back then, we bought our tickets at a ticket broker’s office, we carried wallets and cameras and it was only days later we could show people our photos once we’d had the film developed.

Now, of course, the Modern Fan enjoys (if they want to) a connected experience they can share with their friends in their social networks. You can purchase your tickets online. (Take care, lots of people get scammed in dodgy online ticket schemes. Stick to trusted ticket vendors and online shops).  You can download apps created just for the event to help you schedule what acts you’ll see, where you’ll buy food, even to arrange meet-ups with friends or fellow fans. I tried out a specialty app like that at the most recent Presidential Inauguration. It was a great way to find good routes for taking the Washington DC Metro, planning our viewing spot for the Inauguration itself and later, making our way to our viewing spot for the parade. Apps can be tricky though; the one for the Inauguration kept texting alerts about closed streets and missing children, running my phone’s battery down until I reconfigured the settings. Make sure you configure the alert and update settings to avoid that problem.