From Vasco Rossi with Vasco Live 2025 – The Essentials to Cesare Cremonini with CremoniniLIVE 2025. So Jovanotti, with JOVA! LIVE! LOVE!. And again Lucio Corsi (The guitar in the rock), Last (Ultimo Stadi 2025 – The fairy tale continues) or Alpha (At the same BPM). In short, all of Italian music suddenly remembered that live albums exist. Or rather, that they can exist again.

The large-scale diffusion of streaming platforms, in fact, has facilitated a more liquid consumption of the music itself, erasing from the radar what were once pillars of discography: the collection with the great classics (there are playlists, everything is available) and indeed the live records, which often served as a business card for a specific moment – or for a certain part of the repertoire – of the singer on duty and which, again, are now superfluous.

A strange return

At least until a few months ago, that is, until this large batch of recordings of more or less large shows, not by chance go out close to the holidays. If it is true that records (intended precisely as physical media) continue to represent a safe haven asset when it comes to Christmas gifts, second only to books, this recovery also supports an increasingly frequent trend in the whole market, namely that it is no longer worth investing in unreleased records, given how long they last (spoilers, very little, and therefore revivals and reunions are also better). Object physicist by object physicistit’s better to treat yourself to a concert album, which inevitably costs less to those who produce it. And even if this is little more than… a souvenir.

Let’s be clear, the ones just released are not albums ugly. If anything, they have little to tell us. Corsi’s has it, if only because it testifies to an ancient way of doing concerts, yet brought back to today. And Cremonini’s has it, marginally, for how he photographs his state of grace. The rest – including the live series of Ultimo and Vasco Rossi, they now publish one a year, excluding the beautiful Blasco setlist, although the performance is not up to the level of some great classics – is pure fan servicea product reserved for the most loyal, a banner of belonging, nothing more. It’s unfortunate, because up until twenty years ago the record of a tour or a concert was made, excluding the usual ones scratchwas a work still capable of photographing unrepeatable moments or even making known other sides of the protagonist in question. In the first case, it comes to mind BananaRepublican (all too brief) account of the epochal joint tour of Lucio Dalla and Francesco De Gregori (1979).

In the second case, Okay, that’s okay by Vasco himself (1984), released at the height of the “reckless life” and became the main viaticum of the myth of his concerts, at the time forbidden, due to their extreme tones, to hundreds of thousands of teenagers. They were two best sellers, yes, in which there was substance, something to imagine even just through the recording. And again, the one on the tour between De André and PFM (another epochal turning point), Venditti at the Circus Maximus, Pirate of Litfiba (capital springboard).

The only real exception of this 2025 is JOVA! LIVE! LOVE! by Jovanotti, who has also released several live albums. The secret? Tell a story. In fact, it documents last spring’s tour of the sports halls, the PalaJovahis return to the stage after the bicycle accident and the very long and tiring rehabilitation. Sure, there’s “the best band I’ve ever had”, a set list of hits, the rearrangements. But the highlight – and in this, not surprisingly, the beautiful themed documentary on Rai Play is also recommended – is obviously him, the way he moves, the changes in style that his body imposes on him. But it’s an exception.

A structural problem

The problem – new Vasco or not new Vasco, Ultimo or not Ultimo – is structural. And that is: the way concerts are made today, and the way they are experienced, it almost makes no sense to release live records anymore. Partly because, with social media, there is no longer any form of mystery and what happens on stage is often blurted out everywhere, even before the end of the concert itself, furthermore fueling the dynamic for which it matters be therebeyond everything. On the other hand, this new perspective, in which the public’s expectations are at the center and must not be disregarded, has contributed to creating shows that are increasingly karaoke-like, in which the songs are performed as if on record, the setlists are rigid, there is no improvisation.

Not to mention, of course, the reversal of paths: now we often arrive on stages after an almost online apprenticeship, live performances are no longer the final testing ground, there are artists who are disinterested in concerts (who only see them as promotional catwalks, that is), so it doesn’t even make sense to aim for them. Of the new ones, a white fly is Marco Castello, who in fact published one in June and, obviously, ringsnothing but catwalks.

But you don’t discover America: the bigger a show becomes – dancers, visuals and the rest – the more difficult it is to deviate from the script and the setlist. And the more each event is sold as special, unique, unmissable, the more the sacredness of a live event becomes inflated. If every concert is the concert of a lifetime, but the setlists are strictly the same every night and nothing unexpected ever happens, it becomes increasingly difficult to record live records. Because it’s useless.