The Last Thing We Still Do Together

On community, loneliness, and the one thing the algorithm can’t replicate.

Last summer I was standing at the side of a stage in a London park, doing the thing I always do at that particular moment of an event: quietly watching the crowd instead of the artist.

It was about forty minutes into the headline set. The sun had just dropped below the treeline, the lights were doing their thing, and somewhere in the region of 25,000 people were all doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. Not intentionally. Nobody told them to. But the whole crowd was moving in the same direction, on the same beat, and when the drop hit, 25,000 people made the same involuntary noise.

I’ve been doing this job for fifteen years. I’ve watched that happen hundreds of times. And I still find it quietly astonishing.

Not because it’s spectacular, although it is. But because outside of that moment, in the rest of our daily lives, genuine collective experience is becoming almost impossibly rare.

Part One: The Bit Where We Acknowledge That Everything Has Splintered

Here’s a number that stopped me cold when I first read it.

500 million tracks are now available on Spotify. In 1990, the UK’s entire recorded music market offered consumers roughly 150,000 albums. (Spotify Loud & Clear Report, 2024 / BPI UK Market Data)

That’s not a music industry statistic. That’s a statement about how completely individual the act of listening has become.

In 1985, when Band Aid released Do They Know It’s Christmas, it sold 3.5 million copies in the UK in its first week. One in five British households bought it. Everyone heard it. Everyone had an opinion on it. It was, for better or worse, a shared cultural moment in the most literal sense.

The last song to sell a million copies in a single week in the UK was Bohemian Rhapsody, following the release of the Queen biopic in 2018. It took a major Hollywood film and the death of a cultural icon to briefly recreate the conditions under which the whole country listened to the same thing.

It isn’t just music. The same fragmentation has happened everywhere.

Netflix has over 15,000 titles available globally. In 2004, there were four terrestrial television channels in the UK. Office kitchen conversations about last night’s telly required no qualification because last night’s telly was the same for everyone. Now when someone says ‘are you watching anything good?’ they mean: are you watching anything that I might also, by some coincidence, be watching?

Social media promised connection and delivered personalisation. Your feed is not the same as my feed. We are not looking at the same things, reading the same things, or being influenced by the same things. The algorithm’s job is to show each of us more of what we already like, which means it’s specifically designed to make sure we never have to encounter anything we didn’t already agree with.

Eli Pariser put it plainly in his 2011 book The Filter Bubble: when the internet shows us what we like, it hides from us what we don’t. And in doing so, it slowly erodes the shared spaces where disagreement used to happen.

He had no idea how much worse it was going to get.

Part Two: The Bit Where We Establish That This Is Making Us Quite Lonely

The UK Government appointed a Minister for Loneliness in 2018. That fact alone should tell you something about where we are.

3.83 million adults in England reported feeling lonely ‘often’ or ‘always’ in 2023/24. That’s up from 2.6 million in 2016/17. (Community Life Survey, DCMS, 2024)

These aren’t just sad statistics. They’re expensive ones. The NHS estimates that loneliness costs the UK economy approximately £2.5 billion per year in increased healthcare use, reduced productivity, and lost working days. A review commissioned by the government found that GPs spend between 15% and 20% of their time with patients whose primary issue is loneliness, not illness.

There’s also a growing body of research suggesting that loneliness is, physiologically, genuinely dangerous. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a psychologist at Brigham Young University, found in a 2015 meta-analysis of 148 studies that social isolation increases the risk of premature death by 26%. Loneliness is, by her estimate, roughly as harmful to your long-term health as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

My take: I find that statistic extraordinary and slightly terrifying every time I read it. We have entire government departments dedicated to reducing smoking. We put graphic images on cigarette packets. We banned it from every pub in the country. And yet we’ve built an entire digital economy specifically designed to make people spend more time alone, staring at a screen, and we treat that as progress. Make it make sense.

The causes are complicated and well-documented. People are getting married later, having children later, moving more frequently, working remotely more often. The traditional structures that used to create incidental community — the pub, the church, the social club, the regular workplace — have all declined significantly. And the digital replacements, while genuinely useful for maintaining existing relationships, appear to be fairly poor at creating new ones.

A 2023 study by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that high social media use was associated with significantly increased feelings of social isolation, not decreased ones. The platforms we use to feel more connected are, in aggregate, making us feel more alone.

Part Three: The Bit Where I Make The Argument I’ve Actually Been Building To

Right. So we live in algorithmically siloed bubbles where we consume personalised content in isolation, and it’s making us lonelier and shortening our lives. Great. Lovely stuff. Thanks for coming to my TED talk, everyone.

Here’s what I actually want to say.

Live events — concerts, festivals, gatherings of people around shared experience — are one of the last genuinely non-algorithmic spaces that exist at scale. And I think that matters in ways we haven’t fully articulated yet.

37 million people attended a live music event in the UK in 2023. That’s more than attended any other entertainment category, including cinema, theatre, and sport. (UK Music: Wish You Were Here, 2024)

Think about what actually happens when you go to a concert.

You leave the house. You travel somewhere. You stand or sit in a physical space with other human beings. You cannot curate who is next to you. You cannot skip the support act. You cannot pause it when you need a wee (well, technically you can, but then you miss the bit where everyone goes mad and you spend the rest of the night feeling bitter about it, so you don’t). You are, for two to three hours, in a genuinely uncontrolled environment with a group of people you did not choose.

And the thing they all have in common is that they chose to be there. Not because an algorithm suggested it. Not because a recommendation engine pushed it to them. Because they actively decided, in advance, with money, that this thing mattered enough to show up for.

Robin Dunbar, best known for Dunbar’s Number — the theory that humans can maintain stable social relationships with roughly 150 people — has spent significant time studying what actually creates social bonds between people. His conclusion is that music, specifically communal music, is one of the most powerful bonding mechanisms human beings have.

“Music is the social glue that holds human communities together. It has been doing so for at least 40,000 years.” — Dunbar, Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships, 2021

The mechanism is neurochemical. When people move together in synchrony, sing together, or experience music together in a group, there’s a measurable release of endorphins. Not metaphorical connection. Actual neurochemical bonding. The same stuff that happens when you laugh with friends or are touched by someone you trust.

A 2016 study published in Royal Society Open Science, led by Dunbar himself, found that group singing raised pain thresholds — a reliable proxy for endorphin release — significantly more than singing alone or listening without participating. Communal music-making, in other words, literally makes you more resilient.

Part Four: The Bit Where The Neuroscience Gets Interesting

Daniel Levitin is a neuroscientist and former music producer who has spent most of his career studying what music does to the brain. His book This Is Your Brain on Music is one of the tattiest things I own, which says something about my reading habits and probably something about my social life.

One of his central arguments is that music evolved, at least in part, as a coordination mechanism. Before language was sophisticated enough to communicate complex social information, music allowed groups of humans to synchronise their behaviour, establish group identity, and signal trustworthiness to each other.

In other words: we didn’t develop music as entertainment. We developed it as infrastructure.

The entire architecture of modern music consumption is built around the individual. Your listening history. Your taste profile. Your Discover Weekly. It’s brilliant technology. I use it myself constantly. But it is, by design, completely indifferent to community.

A concert, by contrast, is the opposite of personalisation. It is the same thing, at the same time, for everyone in the room. The setlist is not tailored to you specifically. The lighting rig doesn’t respond to your individual emotional state. The crowd around you did not pass a vibe check before they were allowed in.

And somehow, despite all of that lack of personalisation — or perhaps because of it — it’s the experience that people most want to spend their money on.

32% of UK consumers named experiences as the first thing they’d spend money on if they had extra budget. The highest of any category, above holidays abroad, clothing, or dining out. (KPMG Consumer Pulse Survey, Q4 2025)

That data, which I wrote about in my first article in February, has stayed with me. In the middle of a consumer spending crisis, with confidence at multi-year lows, people are protecting their experience budget above almost everything else.

I don’t think that’s irrational. I think people know, at some level, that the thing they get from a live event is something they genuinely cannot get anywhere else. They just don’t necessarily have the language to explain why.

My take: I’ve had this conversation with people who work outside the industry. ‘Why do you spend so much on gigs?’ ‘Why travel two hours to stand in a field?’ ‘You could just listen at home.’ And they’re right, you could. But ‘listening at home’ is not the same activity with better acoustics. It’s a completely different thing. The presence of other people who care about the same thing you care about is not a side effect of a concert. It is the concert.

Part Five: The Bit Where I Try Not To Sound Like A Motivational Speaker

There’s a version of this article that ends with me saying something like: ‘In a disconnected world, live events bring us together. See you in the field.’

I’m not going to do that, partly because it’s insufferably wanky and partly because it’s not quite honest.

The truth is messier. Not everyone can afford to go to concerts. Ticket prices have increased significantly faster than inflation over the past decade, and the collapse of meaningful mid-size venues in the UK means the gap between a £15 local gig and an £85 arena show has become enormous, with very little in between.

A 2023 report by the Trades Union Congress found that real wages in the UK had fallen by 3% over the previous year, while average festival ticket prices had risen by 25% since 2019. The shared cultural experience I’m describing is increasingly available only to people with disposable income. That is a genuine problem, not a footnote.

My take: This is the thing that keeps me up at night about our industry more than anything else. We talk a lot about the democratising power of live music. And there’s truth in that. But we’re also pricing out the people who arguably need communal experience the most. I don’t have a clean answer to this. I work in the industry. I’ve set ticket prices. It’s complicated. But I think we should at least be honest about the tension, rather than pretending it doesn’t exist.

And yet. Despite all of that.

The numbers keep going up. 37 million people attended live music in the UK in 2023, a post-pandemic record. The economic contribution of live music to the UK economy reached £6.6 billion in the same year, another record. The festivals that have survived the post-COVID market consolidation are, for the most part, thriving.

People are not choosing live events because there’s nothing else to do. They’re choosing them specifically because there is an enormous amount else to do, and they still want this.

Part Six: The Bit Where I Get To The Point I’ve Been Circling For Five Hundred Words

In 2020, during the first lockdown, a survey by Live Nation asked people what they missed most about live events. They gave people a list of options: the music, the artists, the social experience, the atmosphere, the sense of occasion.

The most common answer, by a significant margin, was not the music.

It was the feeling of being in a crowd.

When I’m at the side of that stage watching the crowd rather than the artist, this is what I’m watching. The spontaneous coordination of people who have never met. The way a section of audience starts a movement that ripples outward without anyone directing it. The moment when 25,000 people who came from different postcodes, hold different opinions, and live entirely separate lives, all feel exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.

We have built, in the span of about twenty years, a digital world that is extraordinarily good at helping us find people who think like us, look like us, and consume like us. What it has not figured out how to replicate is the experience of standing next to someone you’ve never met, who you will never meet again, and sharing a moment that belongs to neither of you and both of you simultaneously.

That is not a small thing.

That might, actually, be one of the most important things.

Sources

Spotify Loud & Clear Report (2024) / BPI UK Music Market Report (2024)
DCMS Community Life Survey (2024)
Holt-Lunstad et al., PLOS Medicine (2015)
Primack et al., American Journal of Preventive Medicine (2023)
UK Music: Wish You Were Here (2024)
Dunbar et al., Royal Society Open Science (2016)
Dunbar, Friends (2021)
Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Pariser, The Filter Bubble (2011)
KPMG Consumer Pulse Survey Q4 2025
TUC Real Wages Analysis (2023)
Live Nation Consumer Sentiment Survey (2020)