Is this something you actually do? Watch a crummy video of a song you know, with the sound distorted to cracks and pops? I never understood the appeal, knowing I was there is, and should be, enough. Also, someone remembers your phone in front of their view.

I think you're begging the question by describing it up front as 'crummy'.

A band I like play very differently when live to when recording, almost like a different vibe. It's great that some people have recorded it as otherwise there wouldn't be any way to remember it.

My main gripe is with disturbing the attendees who paid for a ticket and went to the live show. You getting to see the show through other peoples phones is not something the paying guests care about, but have to suffer for anyway.

I find the phone screens distracting my view with their light to be pretty annoying at a live show. I try not to be too judgemental as I typically will record about 15 seconds of a band that I'm seeing to send to my son and someone else in the crowd could be doing the same thing. People have become content creators for better or worse.

Maybe there could be a "concert" mode on your phone that turns down brightness to a low percentage and cuts the view down to a quarter of your screen.

> I never understood the appeal, knowing I was there is, and should be, enough.

The video captured that couple in front of you who were ridiculous, and that nudged you to remember talking about them afterwards with your friends. You wouldn't have remembered it otherwise because memory is not very durable or accurate at the best of times.

This is why everyone should follow the lead of Dead & Company and offer places to patch in to the sound system so people can record high-quality bootlegs

Not the OP but as someone who has attended many concerts and music festivals I can say I have no desire to watch any of them again. I have my memories of them and would rather spend my time making new ones.

In my experience, photos taken with the intent to remember an event later are more interesting when they have people in them.

I don’t feel like I need to “prove” I attended an event but years later it makes the recollection more visceral — at least for me.

I call this FOFI - Fear of Forgetting It Like its relative, FOMO, a perfectly irrational feeling.

Yeah, I think it's impossible to encapsulate feelings anyway. I think we think we remember how something feels, but we just simulate it on demand, and there's no way to tell the difference.