Just to give you a different perspective: in Japan, and before COVID hit of course, I've attended quite a few concerts, and none of them had any person holding up their phones or iPads to record anything, ever. It's completely banned in all the concerts I went to and is illegal: you'll have your phone confiscated and the recorded material deleted by the event staff. Not that I've seen anyone trying to break it. Maybe the ones done by amateurs at small stages don't have that rule, but even then, I've never seen any.

But what we did carry were penlights/cyalium lights. And each song has a set of calls people do at specific parts of the song. And for the rest of it? We set our penlights to the color matching the artist on stage, and we wave them, and sing along and make the screaming calls when it's appropriate. I would feel this crazy emptiness in my hands with one penlight so I'd bring two for both hands. The making of magic moment happens when few thousand fans scream "Encore" at the end, and when we do this penlight waving and all the stuff together. Phones don't even come to the picture. They are in vibrate mode. Can't have it ringing when the MC is speaking and everyone else is quiet, that'd be rude as hell.

I guess it's totally different elsewhere, but I'd be in for a culture shock if I saw that many people trying to "capture the moment" on a device screen, instead of in their hearts and minds. For me, those are memories I treasure.

I do understand that I cannot share the experience with my family/friends, but I get to share the experience with the guy sitting/standing next to me, and maybe the guy I exchanged Twitter details with so we could talk about it afterwards. Met quite a few great people during those concerts, and some I talk with time to time on Twitter even now. :)