Let them buy concert tickets!

As someone who’s been going to concerts since before the pandemic, I am deeply disheartened (but not surprised) by what the ticket-buying and concert-going process has turned into. What once was a joyful and fairly priced experience is now a stressful game of fate and yet another chance to exploit the working class.

For starters, Ticketmaster’s verified fan presale and its unavoidability is largely the root of the problem. While Ticketmaster says that the verified fan presale is to ensure that musician-devotees have a chance to buy tickets before the bots and scalpers, in reality, Ticketmaster and the artist end up making a large profit at the expense of the biggest fans. A lot of the time, dynamic pricing is turned on for most large artists’ presales, which defeats the whole purpose of wanting to make sure fans, not scalpers and bots, have a chance to buy tickets first. What does getting in during presale do for me if the prices for tickets have already skyrocketed by the time I get into my respective virtual venue? Often, fans will end up feeling pressured to spend more than they initially planned to because they waited in the queue for so long and are worried that if they don’t buy a ticket at that moment, they won’t get another chance to — and the thing is, they’re probably right. It’s gotten to a point where if you are not able to buy tickets during the presale period for a popular artist, you can be fairly certain that you won’t be able to get tickets during general sale, unless you’re prepared to spend an exorbitant amount. This is often not just the fault of dynamic pricing, though, as some people will go in to buy tickets just to resell them at unreasonably-high prices, but Ticketmaster and artists rarely do anything to prevent this from happening. 

Additionally, many fans who get into verified fan presales but aren’t able to buy tickets often say they’ve been a fan of [insert artist] since the beginning, in order to justify why they were more deserving of tickets. I find this so ridiculously sad. First of all, being a fan of an artist for a long time does not make you more deserving of tickets, and people holding this belief only further support the greedy capitalist corporations who benefit from exploiting us. This is because making such a statement implies that those fans are largely upset by presales going sour because it impacted them, failing to realise that this should not be happening to anyone, long-time fan or not. It also implies that had all those long-term fans managed to buy tickets during presale, they likely would not have been as upset by the price-gouging and nearly-sold-out venues, because it hadn’t happened to them. Instead, they would have likely rejoiced, and claimed that the presale system works, if you work hard enough to prove you’re a loyal fan. Remind you of anything?  

It’s always ‘eat the rich’ this, ‘eat the rich’ that, but when it truly comes down to it, we end up feeding on each other. Fans need to realise that we can’t have our cake and eat it, too, when we don’t have a cake to begin with.

What also leaves me feeling very confused, is that as much as people love to complain about the absurdly high prices that resellers ask for, they still end up paying them. People acknowledge that these prices are too high, they’re being exploited, and the only way resellers and Ticketmaster will stop doing this is if people stop buying those tickets; and yet they still buy these tickets. How are they able to maintain this cognitive dissonance? It’s like those people who say, “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” and then go spend $500 on Shein. They try and justify this by saying, “well it’s my favourite artist,” but what I don’t understand is, why would you want to pay $1000+ to see an artist who was fine with letting you pay $1000+ to see them? You might say, “well it’s not the artist’s fault if resellers hike up the prices,” but to that I say, if they’re not actively trying to prevent this from happening, then they’re at least partially to blame. As much as it’s hard to admit, we need to come to the realisation that a lot of big artists do not actually care about us as people. All they care about is how much money they can squeeze out of us. The question is, what do we plan to do about it?

While I don’t have all the answers, I do know that, on the current track, things will only keep getting worse; concerts will gradually become a distant memory for many because they have become a luxury they can no longer afford, unless we, as the working class, band together and do something about it. The reality is, artists and corporations likely aren’t going to make a change to the way tickets are being sold right now because it benefits them, so let’s make it not benefit them. 

Stop buying overpriced tickets. Stop buying tickets that are being resold at ridiculous fees. Stop giving these corporations incentive to keep exploiting us. If not, then I hope you’re prepared for when you’re no longer able to keep up with the skyrocketing prices, when you have to turn to your favourite artist in a desperate attempt to get them to act, and I hope you can recover when they look down on you from their pile of gold, laugh in your face, and say: “Let them buy concert tickets!”