[FanDeAliFee]

By the way, I have nothing against big, fancy concerts filled end-to-end with music.

If you can aggregate a big crowd at each concert, and give a series of concerts, a lot of production effort, staffing and rehearsing can be done, and Alizée can star in a dynamite show whose grandeur is recorded (with improvements) for those of us who missed seeing it, courtesy of something like the En Concert video.

But what if you can't get even 2,500 people together at the same time in the biggest, richest French city in the world, even once, at the Grand Rex, and even after trying twice? Should you just give up and retire? Should you just make recordings while that business evaporates as a money-maker because of unlimited illicit copying?

Maybe you can work other things, like personal appearances at fairs (e.g. St. Erasmus Day in Ajaccio in June), program music at an elite hotel (e.g. The Paris Ritz in July) and so on.

The British music industry study I cited says that even if the recording business is vanishing, SOME people can still make money with music. If you can license Cyndi Lauper's True Colors to Kodak for their ads, you can make money. Even live shows are a growing money maker - the problem is that not every artist can put one together that pays very much.

In principle, you could record a show and share out the production cost by also selling to people who watch the edited recording, rather than the live show. That is how En Concert worked. But today, you face Napsterism, which is starting to injure video the way it long ago started injuring audio. "Deja vu all over again" as Yogi Berra would say, LOL.

A sequestered theater showing, where patrons cannot make (esp. high quality) recordings they pass on for free scotches Napsterism. Sadly, it is not as convenient as a disk or transmitted video-on-demand from Hulu or YouTube sent to your home PC or TV, but it can still sure beat the stuffing out of having to travel to another continent! And unlike in days gone by, global telecom is now so dirt cheap that the transmission cost of a live video feed - even a two-way connection - is negligible, even for small audiences like 250 people sitting in a small movie theater. And yes, it now can even include doing binocular-disparity "3D" so everyone virtually enjoys a front-row center view. (Aside: One of course still lacks the focal-depth cue one gets via holograms and in-person images.)

The bottom line is that artists who cannot put 2,500 concert viewers together in one place are no longer screwed! They might be able to put that number together at one time, 250 folks per city, by aggregating theaters in ten cities.

And even if they cannot put together even two cities at once, they might still play to an audience of 250 in a very distant city, without the need to travel from their home city, which eliminates costs, discomfort and lost time. And since you can make things interactive, even between continents, you can fashion the show for 250 so intimate that you might clear three or more times as much money per viewer as in a traditional concert venue.

I've made the point before that celebrities who have retired - like sports stars - can still make a pretty penny by hitting the convention and lecture circuit and never doing a lick of sports. To take an example from film, when he retired, Gregory Peck would go from place to place, reminisce about his career, comment upon some film clips he'd show, and then answer audience questions. He did no acting along the way, but he still drew crowds.

I think it is not impossible such folks can now use 3D theater venues to tour electronically. And even with only a decade in showbiz, I think someone like Alizée can start to do stuff like that, for which her appearance at the Ajaccio fair is supporting evidence.

Accepting her word, Alizée takes great pride in her singing and would never put in a bad singing performance, even for a small group. It might take a lot of practice to feel ready for a full-hour concert, and non-trivial psychic and physical stress in executing it. That's why I posited as few as three songs for the hypothetical 90 minute show for a meager 250 viewers, and made darn clear they could all be lip-synced, just like on typical TV shows. It guarantees no audio flubs and also facilitates cool stuff like multi-track singing and full orchestras for free. In my mind, if you want Alizée to sing for an entire hour, you'll have to aggregate 2,500 folks in one place or ten theaters of 250 folks. And by the way, then goodbye to (nearly?) all the one-on-one time; you'll just have to settle for interaction with the group as a whole.

I do not know exactly what material Alizée might use to fill the time outside her three (or more?) songs. My suggestions were inspired by stuff she has already done on TV shows like Stars à Domicile, Star Academy, La Méthode Cauet, Une Heure Avec and things in publicity interviews, chat show appearances and autograph sessions. Chatting and clowning around is a lot less demanding than doing that by which you want to be judged in all earnest. And for at least some fans, that stuff can have special meaning if it is in response to their requests and other participation.

Video games are getting so smart, Alizée might play 30 seconds of video-mediated virtual ping-pong rather than checkers with an audience member. She could play Simon Says with a group that spoke French. She could aim and launch real Nerf balls from an air cannon present in the theater as people try to dodge her shots. How much of a party animal she wanted to be would be up to her! Some people do stuff other than discuss their investment portfolio and foreign policy at parties.

And besides better average viewing, a 3D video feed offers an additional potential technical improvement over in-person attendance. One can do Augmented Reality by using a virtual set, if only via traditional green-screening, whose edge artifacts are no more today. That was never possible before, even in the most intimate nightclub act.

I sure hope Alizée would do something more exciting with it than give the Ajaccio weather report. But why can't she sing MJ with the MJ video playing behind her? She could do a duo with herself. Perhaps at one point she could even hold up her hand and shout stop, with the video screeching to a halt on a frozen frame. Then she asks, pointing with her finger, how many of you noticed the Tinker Bell statue next to the cake the first time you saw the video, and then takes a vote by applause. Then she says, ok, I thought so; now I will finish the song - unless instead you want to hear about the time my little dog Topaz got lost. And again there is an audience vote. People who never heard MJ before would get annoyed, but an audience of people who have seen the video 100 times before would be charmed, because they got to be a part of the show.

I have no idea about Alizée's interest in doing intimate shows like this, but they could command a very high gate price, because only the most devoted fans might attend. Alizée now has the Gainsbourg tribute in Tel Aviv later this month and then a booking to the northeast of Paris. And we also know she will be at the fair in Shanghai. I hope her new album helps her do many shows and win many new fans around the world who also visit her recording backlist with purchases, rather than piracy. But I would not be surprised to learn about increasing numbers of artists who might take commercial advantage of the new type of remote nightclub-style intimacy I posit in this thread.