Last week hundreds of young people queued overnight to watch Andrew Murray play a game of tennis. Tickets were reportedly changing hands for £2,000. Yet the game could be watched on any television or computer screen, in the comfort of home, pub or work-place. Last year the market clearing price for a ticket to December’s Led Zeppelin reunion was £7,425. Yet every note was available for free on download. What is happening?

Futurology seminars have long been obsessed with one question: what next after the internet? The answer is always the same, a new electronic gizmo. There will be a novel way of downloading into the ear or eye, a new web phenomenon or interactive device. Since the invention of the telegraph and gramophone, innovation is interested only in kit that yields profit. What is becoming plain, even under the strains of recession, is that the futurologist’s answer should lie in the realm not of electronics but of reality. It is in reality television, reality politics, reality entertainment and sport, the immediate, the active, the present, the live.

The phenomenon is near-universal. People do not want to spend their spare time in front of the same screens at which they increasingly work. They want to “go out”. They will use the internet and iPod, MySpace and YouTube, but as a proxy for the real. The popularity of “reality” television lies in being brought closer to truth to life than drama can ever be.

Last year sales of CDs fell by more than 10% and prices plummeted, while attendance at live concerts rose by 13% and prices soared. A million people reportedly tried to get tickets for Led Zeppelin. The Rolling Stones 2005-6 world tour grossed £280m, with single tickets costing more than the price of their entire album output.

At the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss concert in the grim Wembley arena in May, enthusiasts were hanging from the rafters. Tickets for Anna Netrebko at Covent Garden changed hands for four times their face value.

A year ago Prince declared that his CDs would be given away free, in effect as flyers to publicise his 21 concerts at the O2arena, which swiftly sold out. Recorded music became overnight what it had not been since the invention of recording: publicity for live rather than live being publicity for recording. With more than half of internet provider traffic estimated to be illegal downloads, David Bowie’s prediction is true, that “music will soon be like running water”, available at the cost only of transmitting it. A shrewd promoter signs a “360degree” contract with a singer, ensuring revenue from live as well as recorded output.

What is happening is a reversal of history. Artists can no longer sell the products of their genius because the internet supplies it virtually for free. What can be sold is that genius in the flesh. The miserable output of modern abstract art is gradually being supplanted by what amount to live freak shows, such as Tate Britain’s performers running up and down the gallery in trainers.

The boom in recorded music probably peaked in the mid1990s, when album sales hit a record of 3.4 billion worldwide. Last year the comparable figure was 1.9 billion and falling more than 10% a year, with revenue down 8%.

Nor is the “rise of live” confined to high-profile music, art and sport. The fastest growing cultural activity in Britain is literary and music festivals. The number of the latter has risen tenfold over the past two decades to about 450. Festivals such as Edinburgh, Oxford and Hay have become near-industrial in scale and others have spread out to embrace market towns and villages. My favourite festival of the year is at Charleston in East Sussex.

These are not financial extravaganzas and pay their performers little or nothing, but they draw big crowds to socialise and meet, or at least hear, celebrity performers. They generate turnover and employ people. The musicians and writers who are their staple input will soon earn more from live activity than from mass-produced versions of their work.

Wendy Cope, the poet, recently championed her profession by demanding that poetry readings acknowledge copyright. But when a poet’s work can be instantly disseminated on the web, the only real income will in future come from the gift book market and public recitals. The festival and lecture circuit, well exploited by retired politicians, may yet be many a writer’s chief source of income.

Lectures – surely the most archaic form of public entertainment – now cram the London what’s-on schedules. Popular debating series such as IQ2 regularly sell out at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington.

Even the steady decline in church attendance is not matched by a decline in well promoted religious events. The Dalai Lama packed the Albert Hall in May. The Pope is guaranteed to draw crowds wherever he goes.

Cathedrals are booming thanks to the fame of their architecture and choirs. Half a million people attended concerts last year in Exeter Cathedral. So many people went to Wells over Christmas that an official worried that it “could lose its prayerful atmosphere”. It is not a risk run by many parish churches.

One demonstration of this phenomenon lies in the oldest form of human communication, politics. In the early days of the internet in 1992, Ross Perot, the Texan tycoon, claimed that he would transform democracy by campaigning for the presidency on the web. Bill Clinton responded by campaigning old style, from the back of a train.

Sixteen years later, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were still barnstorming around every key state in their primary election battle. They knew that people would not believe in them unless they were physically and visibly present on their territory.

The difference of the internet to the campaign lay in sending messages and raising money. If it supplanted anything it was other media such as the letter post, radio and television. Obama’s online securing of $270m combined the e-mail with computer banking to sensational effect. As with show business, the internet supports live but is in no way a substitute for it. Clicking a mouse can never beat pumping flesh. The recent London mayoral election saw a dramatic return to the popularity of the old hustings with packed meetings.

The reason why public figures such as Clinton and Tony Blair can command huge sums for “personal appearances” is not that people are eager to hear their wisdom. That is available on the web for free. The reason is that people pay to be in the presence. JPMorgan, the bank, has blown £1m on a Blair “consul-tancy” that appears to involve no more than having him to lunch. That is the price of live.

Futurology has a built-in distortion towards technological novelty, while ignoring the continued appeal of what has gone before. It cannot recognise what the historian David Edgerton of Imperial College has dubbed “the shock of the old”. Our demands rarely change over time, only the way in which the market supplies them.

I find this form of conservatism vastly encouraging. People like people. They crave the immediacy of human contact and congregation. They want to see those who inspire or excite them live, not digitised. And what they want, they will pay for.

Ellis Rich, chairman of the Performing Rights Society, remarked recently that the battered music business, traditionally at the cutting edge of entertainment, “must constantly ask itself, where is the money being made? For that’s where we should be”.

The money is now being made in supplying a public craving not for technology but for human experience. It lies in flesh and blood. Live is live.

simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk

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