If you went to a LIVE concert and found out they mimed , How would you feel?

its no secret they mime in pop music. what else could the audience have expected.

if they sound just like they do on the album, then they are miming. nearly all pop sounds the same live as it does on the CD, they all mime.

however, if i found out one of the bands i listen to had been doing this, depending on what one, i would never buy another album off them again. having said that, we are talking hard rock, not many rock bands would mime.

It actually depends on the concert, if it a great concert and I had a good time then I wouldn’t really mind, but id probably wont go to a concert of their’s again, otherwise id be really disappointed as I have paid for a real concert, not a CD playing and people miming!!

@poisonedantidote Lots of Rockbands mime also its not just limited to pop music , hell even Iron Maiden mimed on Top of The Pops once .

@sandystrachan aye, i said “not many” though, im aware that some do. but yea, in her defense its hard to expect people to sing for real if they are being made to dance about. there is not really much choice, otherwise they would just sound out of breath. but really, if its pop, i think its to be expected.

Depends who I came to see. If it’s a band that I listen to for their lyrical talent, Dog Fashion Disco for me, then I would be outraged. If I liked them for their beat, The Prodigy maybe, or their on-stage performance, Rammstein for sure, I think I could let it slide.

None of the bands I would see live would ever dream of miming. So if they did I would probably be very pissed off. It is also impossible to pull off a mime to the sort of music I listen to without being caught within minutes so I’m guessing everyone else would notice as well :p.

I don’t see any point going to a concert/gig where the singer mimes. Might as well just not have them on the stage. Especially so if the whole band is miming. I might as well just listen to a CD.

Completely cheated. I remember going to see Queen years ago, and there was a part in the show where, while performing Bohemian Rhapsody, they used prerecorded vocals. During this part, Mercury and the band all left the stage, being upfront that this was not them performing at that moment. That is integrity.

I’d be disappointed… Why go to a concert if you’re going to hear what you already have (assuming you have the CD)? In fact, whether or not it was a recording, I would be disappointed if I saw a musician/band who didn’t sound a different than that in concert – be it because they don’t have all the instruments they had on the recording, or because they intentionally change the rhythm or tune a little bit to mix it up. Most of the concerts I have been to, they mix things up enough so that you really know it’s not prerecorded. I’ve heard Rufus Wainwright start songs over again because he didn’t like the way it started. Ben Folds improvs entire songs (granted, short silly ones) in his concerts. Brandi Carlile is famous for recording her CDs in a way that sounds just like her concerts, but she changes up the rhythm and sometimes the melody of her songs so it’s not the same as the CD. I suppose maybe if a musician has really awesome stage presence it would be worth it… but I’d still feel a little cheated.

some dance routines combined with certain upbeat songs I imagine are impossible to perform live (and that coupled with the set list as a whole – has to be taken into consideration) concerts can be just as much about the performance – spectacle as about the music these days…but apart from those then yes I would expect them to sing live

love Brandi Carlile!!

I’d be disappointed if one of my indie rock faves were lipsynching, because that would be unnecessary for their style of performance. If it were, say, Kylie, well, I’d expect that. No one can dance the way she would in a show and sing with full voice at the same time.

I wouldn’t go as far as to complain and ask for my money back, but they’d lose a lot of my respect in my book.
Also, I’ve never been to a non live concert before. ;)

I would want my money back. People are paying for line performanes.

It would be a quiet concert.

Can we all collectively stop confusing mime with lip syncing? Please? You’re hurting me.

Sometimes it would be a good thing. I had to sit through Fall Out Boy to see Blink 182… they didn’t even try to sound good. It just sounded like total garbage. At least if they’d lip synced they would have been consistent.

Ooh but when I saw Neko Case this spring the vocals were amazing. The woman hit every single note exactly how she had on her album, and I suspected cheating – but I was in the first row and could tell that it was 100% live. Blew me away.

Mime? You mean lip-sync right?

Money back please. Unless of course I expect it.

The concerts I go to no one mimes or lip-syncs anything. If someone were to do that I would be greatly disappointed and demand my money back.

But then, I don’t go to pop concerts.

I can’t imagine that they sound you hear when you attend a concert is actually coming only from the stage, and not augmented in some way. How could it matter, if they are there in person, they really don’t even need to sing, do they?

Of course it’s live and it is coming from the stage via speakers.

I’d know it was fake in the middle of the show because no lip synched show can be all that great. It’s just fake mass hype that makes the people there enjoy it, not the music. There is no magical connection between audience and band, when there is lip synching.

No band I see would ever lip-synch, but if they did, the audience would probably boo them off stage. And these are audiences that never usually boo.

I don’t think that The Beatles lip-synced so I don’t need to worry about it. I have, however, been forced to a pop concert and you could really tell that they were not actually singing. It was a christian concert and there were 3 kids jumping around and doing flips while singing. Then they would talk and were breathing hard. It was honestly a terrible concert and a waste of my time and money.

Miming the “whole” show is a phenomenon only really associated with pop music, and I don’t go to pop music concerts. Now, even your greatest rock bands will use a little pre-recorded music to augment the sound, and hey, even on the CD you’ll often hear a singer singing two parts at the same time, as you know it’s physically impossible, you figure that some songs just can’t be done completely live AND preserve the full sound. Now some musicians choose to do stripped down versions of those songs and some choose to augment with pre-recorded vocals. I can usually tell when that’s happening and I don’t care. Case in point, went to see Kiss on Saturday night, they did the show live for the most part, but there was a part where Gene did his whole Demon thing with the blood spitting, etc….some shows the stage act is really a part of what you go to see…I’m under no illusions that Kiss is anything other than a musical circus act and not exactly high art, you go for the spectacle and the catchy music that lets you forget about everything else for a while, mindless entertainment, kind of like watching a sitcom instead of a Felini movie, or reading the latest Evanovich book instead of Dostoyevski, escapism in its purist form. You know that when the spectacle is what you’re there for, some things are going to be illusory. So when Gene starts to fly and lands on a platform above the lighting rigging, all the while spitting fake blood and playing his axe shaped bass, you could tell that some of the background vocals he did on whatever song it was they did next were pre-recorded…dude is in thick grease makeup, a full leather, studded bat costume under stage lights, standing next to pyros that you could feel at the back of the stadium, sweat is literally pouring off his neck and chin and then he’s flying and chomping fake blood capsules while while whirling 6 inches of tongue out of his mouth and slamming away at the bass, and the dude’s in his 60s…yeah, I expected a “little” lip syncing during the parts where he was not on lead vocal duties (there’s a reason they played a Paul Stanley number after Gene got on top of the lights).

With many pop artists, it’s about the show, the spectacle…the trend that really started with Michael Jackson was that the big pop stars put on huge choreographed dance numbers. Indeed, I don’t even consider pop to be music in the same vein as rock, because most of pop is really paint by numbers, it requires little talent or vision to write, and often the “artists” don’t even write their own material. The difference between a pop star and a talented pop star often has little to do with the music itself and a lot to do with their talent as a performer. In fact, many pop stars don’t sound much like they do on the records at all, their flat notes are fixed by a producer to create a polished pop record, but the real show is the live performance. They often can’t replicate the sound, nor can they exactly be expected to perform acrobatics and sing without sounding both off and winded. For shows like this, it would actually be a detriment to the performance and it would seem like far more of a ripoff if these people came out and actually just performed the music live. And basically, unless you confuse art with commerce, you really should never be surprised or disappointed, if you go to see Britney, expect to see a live choreographed performance with a lot of pre-recorded sound, if you go to see the Foo Fighters, expect to see a live musical performance with minimal stage theatrics.

I laughed my head off when the Monkey’s lip synced at Soldier Field after Hendrix Played.