Culture: The Spice Girls are back. But who knew they'd been away?

Ten years ago, 'Vanity Fair' devoted an issue to the phenomenon known as "Cool Britannia" and I was the man behind it. After coming up with the idea, I was entrusted by the editor with the task of putting together a series of photo shoots to reflect London's new-found vitality. My greatest coup was persuading the Spice Girls to pose together in a nightclub on Regent's Street.

At least, I thought I'd persuaded them. On the day in question, I waited outside the club for what seemed like an eternity. The only evidence that they hadn't forgotten was the presence of a burly ex-policeman who claimed to be a member of the Spice Girls' security detail. After several hours had elapsed, I tentatively asked him when he thought they might turn up. "Your guess is as a good as mine," he said. "There's time, and then there's Spice time."

Judging by how quickly the band has reformed to mount a reunion tour, they are no longer operating on Spice time. Admirers of Led Zeppelin have had to wait more than 20 years to see the original line-up again, whereas the Spice Girls last toured eight years ago. The series of concerts is called The Return of the Spice Girls, but fans could be forgiven for not noticing they'd been away.

The reason for this unseemly haste is that embarking on a world tour is one of the few ways a pop group can still make money. Thanks to the internet, albums simply don't sell in the same volume they used to. In 1997, the Spice Girls set a record that is unlikely to be broken when seven million copies of their new album shipped in two weeks. Compare this with sales of the greatest hits album they've released to tie in with the world tour: since its debut at the beginning of last month it has struggled to sell a million copies worldwide.

No such sluggishness has been apparent in sales of concert tickets. Their management company was forced to add another 16 dates to the UK tour after all the tickets to their first London concert sold out within 37 seconds. Similarly, more than a million people have attempted to get tickets for Led Zeppelin's concert at the O2, with demand exceeding supply by a ratio of 50:1.

It is one of the ironies of the digital age that popular music acts have been forced to return to a more primitive form of entertainment in order to cash in on their fame. At a time when a song or an image can be reproduced at the touch of a button, there's something appealingly exotic about a live performance.