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What constitutes a musical performance? The minister for Fair Trading in New South Wales, Australia, Virginia Judge, has a very strict idea. Before Britney Spears arrived last Friday for a series of concerts in Australia, the minister warned that the government was considering impelling performers who use prerecorded music in their concerts to put a disclaimer on their tickets. The disclaimer would inform ticket buyers that the singer would be lip-synching, or miming over recorded music – as Britney Spears makes no secret of doing in her megastage extravaganzas.

This strange idea has the support of the Consumer Affairs minister for the state of Victoria. He told a Melbourne tabloid, “We believe it is good business practice for concert promoters to make it clear to consumers before they buy tickets whether the performer will be miming.” The Fair Trading minister said in other interviews, “Let's be clear – live means live.”

Well, now, does it? And what exactly does live mean? The composer Edgar Varèse first used electronic tape in live symphonic performances in the early 1950s. The sound he introduced into the live sound was recordings of industrial noise taken from sawmills. People may have accused him of being impenetrable, but not of cheating.

I wonder what the Australian categorizers would have made of the enormous band that made up the funk group Parliament-Funkadelic? When they played in the 1970s, there were so many people on stage – some playing, some singing, some merely dancing and looking fantastic – that it would have been difficult to ascertain that they were all making a purely musical contribution to the concert.

I would hate to have to tell the Australian politicians about even more confusing developments in popular music that have happened in the last 30 years: There are electronic keyboards and drum machines that play preprogrammed drum patterns, and many of them are used in live performances to replace drummers. And then there is this whole DJ thing: People pay huge amounts of money – for some star DJs, up to $100 – to see someone play nothing but recorded music all night long. All the singing is prerecorded! And, of course, the world of avant-gardist classical music would right now have to issue rather lengthy disclaimers: may use recorded sound, may use programmed sound, may use loops, may use music made by waves or squirrels or hamburgers, may repeat non-musical sounds to the point of annoyance, may contain no sound at all. Caveat emptor !

But I suspect the Australian politicians are not as irritated with classical music. Britney Spears just bugs them. She's American, she's annoying, and people still really love her and want to pay $200 just to see her dance. Are they stupid?

The concert promoters responded calmly and rightly that people are paying to see a spectacle. It doesn't matter if she's singing or not.

Britney Spears is an experience, like going to the circus – in fact, the theme of the new show is the circus. It's a team product, a giant machine that one wants to be enmeshed in. One wants, for example, to see the star's face in the concert hall, close-up, on giant TV screens. The screens are crucial. If those screens were not present, if there were merely a small figure dancing on the stage – 100 metres from some seats – there would be no point in paying $200. Folk singers can be seen at your local bar for free.

Now that machine is represented, outside the concerts, by a sort of spokesperson, an actual person called Britney Spears, but that real personality is not supposed to be present when she is performing. That would throw a dent in the whole thing. Can you imagine? This particular performer is so personally volatile that to give her free rein for improvisation would be nerve-racking for the producer of this team of dancers and engineers.

Imagine him, sitting there at the bridge, at his console of screens and computers with his legion of head-setted co-ordinators waiting for his commands – you think he wants spontaneity from Britney Spears?

After Spears's first performance in Perth last Friday, some Australian media claimed that fans had been disappointed by the concert.

Spears's management denies this. Interestingly, the major issue apparently was not about Spears's singing, but that the machine was not functioning smoothly. Some fans complained that she too often had her back turned to the stage cameras and so was not visible on the giant screens. If that's true, then that's a much more serious failure. The art here is the machine – just as it is in installation art and so many other highbrow artistic experiments. A great deal of high art avoids personal expression for immersive technological experiences (indeed, the more highbrow the art, the less expressive it tends to be these days).

In Spears's case, the virtual being on stage – the avatar for the production team – must be, in fact, as inhuman as possible for the machine to function as smoothly and amazingly as it usually does.