Should Mobile Phones Be Banned At Concerts?

You might say, "What about the doctor that is waiting on a call to do a heart transplant on a child?".  I'm not talking about that, and I'm also not talking about not being able to bring them into the venues as nowadays that's generally where your tickets are.

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I'm talking about the banning of having them out during the performances.  I bring this up because in the past week I went to two shows.  One was Shinedown and Seether at the Target Center, the other was Guns N' Roses with Mammoth, just last night at Xcel Energy Center.  For Shinedown we had floor tickets and while you could move around, there always seemed to be someone filming the show or taking way too many pictures right in front of us.  That means we got to see the band and also see the band though phones being held in the air.

To me, it's pointless, but in defense of everyone that does it, I was bad about it many years ago.  Phones take better pictures with every new model release but it's still not professional photographer quality.  In reality too, are you going to go back to your phone and re-watch everything you took video of and enjoy it?  Probably not as the video and the sound, or both, generally suck.  At GNR, we had seats, so it wasn't as annoying but it still is hard to avoid all of the screens hanging out and lit up.

So what's a good solution?  It would be near impossible to police with that many people, though I have heard some bands from the stage say to put them away.  If you're one of the people who has theirs out for most of the show, for just one concert, keep it in your pants and I promise you, it will be a much better concert experience.  That's what you go for, not to re-watch it later, otherwise stay home and catch the crappy video of it on YouTube.  Do you think phones, at least to some degree, should be banned from concerts?