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The aromatic future of concerts

The iconic days of boy band tours are something I will never forget. Frankly, when you are an angsty pre-teen bottled up with hormones, seeing someone with their shirt off was worth the price of admission. Nowadays, tour directors can’t get away with simply playing the music and showing some skin (although many have certainly tried).

Fans buying tickets to worldwide headline tours expect to be amazed with all the bells and whistles. A tour is no longer a glorified concert – it’s an experience. And the musicians who realize this will be at the top of the pile.

Katy Perry is one such artist. Ever since “I Kissed a Girl” came out in 2008, she has been portrayed as an artist who pushes the envelope and inspires curious girls everywhere to “like it.”

With Lady Gaga and Pink to direct her creative senses, Perry has ideas for a tour that will be entirely unique. The California Dreams tour will include 95 stops and have more of a Broadway feel.

Rather than just playing the music, the tour will have a storyline loosely based on her life in cartoon form. It will also incorporate candy and cupcakes in Perry’s traditional too sweet for words style which we saw in her “California Gurls” video. She also plans for the show to smell good, like a “cotton candy heaven.”

The tour, which runs from Portugal to Dublin, will also feature 15 outfit changes from Perry and built-in downtime to enjoy the places she will be visiting.

While it sounds like this tour will be pretty unique, there is only so far the envelope can be pushed. If we have smell-o-vision in concerts and scenes resembling an all-out Broadway play, where do we go from there?

I guess maybe we regress to the days when taking your shirt off was all it took. And if you take Lady Gaga’s wardrobe as a cue, this might just work. Maybe the future of headline tours is some hybrid of sex and drama, where the concert tees have the nipples cut out and the posters actually sing “Will you marry me?” at the artists.

Whatever the future holds, I will be turning to my faded Justin Timberlake shirt and Madison Square Garden’s VHS tape for comfort while the rest of the world gets high on cotton candy fumes.

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