Digital photography

You're conflating so much here. First and foremost. Deal with it! It's the reality of technological advancement.
This is in the same line as all Photographers whining that stock Photography "took away" from their work.
BULLSHIT. Photographers became the lowest common denominators themselves. They created that market and made it borderline useless, live with it. To claim that something as innocuous as hundreds of people at a gig taking pics (I fucking despise it, that's why I barge to the front) has somehow forced Promoters/musicians to stop hiring Photographers is a false premise to detract from the fact that Photographers embraced technology like a teat and sucked it dry before they even knew what lay further down the line.

Don't dump "hard working guys" into it. Those hard working guys are the same guys that were outselling each other when the stock Photo market bloomed and then all of a sudden, each pic was worth 5p. I WAS one of those guys, and now I'm living with the shitty consequences. The Professional Photo world made its bed, and now it doesn't want to sleep in it.

As for copyright, a gig you pay to go see live. One filmed and dumped on youtube doesn't compare. A movie filmed and dumped online, you can watch on your fuck off massive TV at home. The comparison of the two with a baseline argument that it's "experience" you're sharing is plain ass bollocks. It's not. If you want to share the experience of going to a movie, why don't you film a dark room with people crunching around you. You're sharing content from a movie, not experience.

Actually, and I mean this in the nicest of ways, your whole argument is a personal rather then objective attack on people taking pics with phones at a gig. What the fuck did you expect? Seriously, if people take pics at a gruesome traffic accident and have no moral problem posting that online, you really think they'll give a shit doing the same during a gig. Cameras have been around for yonks, and so have the people that used them during gigs, they were just expensive. Now it's cheap and some musicians are suddenly angry that people aren't "listening" to them at gigs. You can't expect stage music to stay the same forever, move along with it or you'l be left behind. Once people experience a convenience, there is NO way they will go back to life without it.

Nah. I'm lucky enough to work with people who really want to change live music, and keep it changing. So I don't know where you got that from.

The situation with stock photography isn't really comparable. Can't see how you think it is.

And my point was: if you want to take a proper camera into a venue, and they won't let you, "deal with it!". As is so popular.