Madonna, Alicia Keys, and now Bob Dylan. The trend of “phone-free” concerts is booming. Smartphones, omnipresent when fans want to film their favorite artist on stage, are regularly accused of spoiling the concert experience. For a while now, the world of entertainment has been mobilizing to facilitate their slightest presence, by using start-ups to finally calm the frenzy of video recordings, as will be the case of the American singer who has just announced, among others, two dates at La Seine Musicale, in Paris next October.
The name “Yondr” is still unknown to the general public, but has nevertheless become a staple of concert halls that host artists from the anti-smartphone movement. “There are times and places where phones simply do not belong,” exhorts the start-up founded in 2014 by Graham Dugoni, in the midst of the technological explosion in Silicon Valley, on its website. To compensate for the massive arrival of smart devices in our daily lives, the Californian company is responding to what it calls “technology overload” … with technology.