No photos or video were allowed at the concert I went to last night -- and I’m okay with it

I thought, In this day and age?

I thought, Didn't y'all just put out a new album? What about the inevitable marketing boost from hundreds of hashtags and user-generated content? 

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Usually, I see musicians of all stripes leverage all the social media juice they can get from their fans. They tap into user-generated content, and they create specific social media marketing campaigns to drum up chatter about their new albums or their touring shows. It’s been the standard for several years now.

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To be fair, I work in media and my job often sits square with marketing, especially when I'm considering audience growth or engagement. The idea of hundreds of people using a #dayton hashtag or tagging @daytondotcom on Instagram is, if I can be completely honest about my digital geekiness, pretty thrilling for me. It's one of the reasons I've continued in this industry.

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But there's that little word: engagement. Which now -- at least in many data-driven industries -- is something we talk about in terms like reach, comments, shares. It's how we measure response on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter.

But what about engagement in real life?

It sounds simple and corny, and I’m not the first by far to bring it up, but it’s true. Watching a show without fiddling with my pocket-computer-data-gizmo was refreshing.

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I don’t purport to know the real reason Isbell didn’t allow it, but I can take a few guesses: 1.) control over the way your art is presented (I mean honestly, I kind of get why people wouldn’t want shaky, low-quality clips flooding the Internet en masse), 2.) he wanted people to enjoy the experience unfettered by technology, or 3.) all of the above.

It took the pressure off of finding “that perfect moment” to capture, and instead allowed me to focus on the experience. Which I must say was absolutely lovely, given that there weren’t a sea of glowing screens floating between me and the stage.

It was just me, my honey, and the music. Which is just how I like it.

What do you think? Have you been to a concert where you weren’t allowed to take photos and video? What was the experience like?