Before I turn to that, I really have to point out the wonderfully imagistic vigil that Nancy Sinatra provided to the public just before his death and the concrete testimony of Hazlewood's Myspace. Both in their own way pull you into the world of the artist as friend or public figure, avoiding the reality of more commonplace experiences of Hazlewood's music.

Watching the 45 go round and round is perhaps the most common shared experience of early listeners; but I never really listened to 45s much myself. In fact, I hadn’t even heard the original version of the song until around 2002. The version closest to my heart was from Thin White Rope. On a scale of “real” vs. surreal it falls a long way from the movie-style video. It’s a sweaty, grainy, imperfect record of a live concert from 1991— but it seems “real” to me.

Contrasting this with yet another, more recent, version of the song it amazes me just how much more “unreal” it seems to me—but that is just a personal prejudice. I have not grown up experiencing music primarily through games, or cgi animated videos. Of course it seems “unreal” and not particularly “surreal” compared to my own feelings of transport, half-remembered, of music in physical settings outside my own head.

The interesting thing, in retrospect, is that the only version that is not “dialogic” is my favorite of them all. I’m okay with having my own experiences, even in group settings. Perhaps videos get in the way of the imagination as often as they facilitate it.

But a deeper problem is that though the root of music is indeed communal, controlling experience is hardly possible. The quasi-optimism of an article in Prospect Magazine pretty much spells out the nature of that control. They can charge admission:

A rediscovery, or a renewed appreciation, of the communal source of music-making—and listening— must lie near the root of this upending of the music business. As personal stereos and MP3 players have grown in popularity, so has an appreciation that music isn't just something that goes on between your ears. The guitarist of the American hardcore band Anthrax expressed this rather neatly: "Our album is the menu," he explained. "The concert is the meal."

In his book e-Topia, William Mitchell relates the increasing value of shared experience to the isolating nature of electronic or online virtual worlds. "In conducting our daily transactions, we will find ourselves constantly considering the benefits of the different grades of presence that are now available to us, and weighing these against the costs," he writes. Being in the same place at the same time as a live performance, music fans appear to have decided, is the rarest and most precious presence of all.

This strikes me as just another Utopian myth, and hardly a new business model. The percentage of people viewing the video vs. attending the concert will always be skewed; I feel that they'll continue to try to charge us for both, although one of them most certainly isn’t real.