Queue All the Time, Tickets Occasionally: Are Concerts Still Worth the Hype?

Alisha Reeve

Harry Styles. CREDIT: Johnny Dufort.

If you’re friends with a Harry Styles fan, chances are you’ve already heard about the disastrous ticket fiasco that has occurred over the past week. During the artists’ presale for his ‘Together, Together’ tour, fans were left disappointed, upset, and furious over the crippling prices they were expected to pay. For the UK leg of his so-called world tour, tickets had cost between £44.10 and £466.25 (at least, before the good old dynamic pricing kicked in). In America, it was worse, with prices coming up to over $1000.

Alas, it doesn’t stop there. What is even more unreasonable are the logistical issues that many fans will face. Many will have to travel hundreds of miles in order to attend his shows. I thought the point of a tour was that an artist came to you, not the other way around? Though with that being said, as someone who was born and raised in Aberdeenshire, journeys of this particular variety are not a foreign concept to me, having had to traipse all the way down to either Glasgow or Edinburgh to see my favourite artists.

But putting that aside, since when was going to a gig supposed to cost the same amount as a month’s rent? And since when was the process of purchasing tickets meant to resemble that of The Hunger Games? For most fans, getting their hands on any tickets has become stressful and time consuming, and the usual result is either an empty basket or an empty wallet. This isn’t the first occurrence where fans have been left outraged over this increasingly unjust system (I try not to weep as I recall the disaster that was trying to buy Oasis tickets). In general, concerts used to feel like it’s all about the music: now it’s feels more like an exploitative cash grab.

Which raises the question: are concerts still worth the hype? The answer will depend on who you ask. Ask your friends who are always listening to some artist you’ve never heard of (guilty), chances are they’ll say yes, because they paid under £50 for their ticket. Ask fans of Coldplay, Oasis, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Ariana Grande, Sabrina Carpenter, or, as of late, Harry Styles, perhaps not. The answer will depend on whether or not they got tickets.

So why have concerts suddenly become so unreasonably expensive? Is it greed? Or is it because times have simply changed? The music industry is no longer what it used to be. Gone are the days when most artists could earn a living through record sales. Although, that could all be changing, given the internet’s current fascination with collecting physical media (that is an entirely different story in itself). On what is perhaps the most popular music streaming service, Spotify, to monetise their music, artists must first pass a threshold of one-thousand streams. On top of this, each stream must exceed 30 seconds in order to be eligible. To make matters worse, once an artist has passed this threshold, the rewards are dismal, with each stream earning between $0.003 and $0.005. And so, the most straightforward solution to this unethical, unsustainable practice is to increase the price of concert tickets to compensate for the losses.

Moreover, there is also the costs of touring to consider. Venue hire, staff hire, power, catering, scaffolding, barriers, medical staff, security, and stagehands are just the beginning. As well as this, artists must also be able to cover their own crew: tour management, roadies, musicians, light and sound engineers, backing dancers, transport, and the costs for rehearsals.

Ergo, the blame for unaffordable ticket prices cannot be shifted entirely onto the artists. However, that does not mean going to a concert should cost an individual’s entire paycheck. Yes, artists need to earn a living like everybody else and need to pay their employees like any other employer, but in recent years the concert experience seems to have gotten out of hand, and out of touch with reality. Fans are the reason artists get to tour in the first place, so to expect them to spend this kind of money in return seems like a tone-deaf, unappreciative act of gratitude. Considering Harry Styles has named this his ‘Together, Together’ tour, there appears to be nothing remotely ‘together,’ about it, unless it’s an opportunity for the Harries to come together and wallow in their shared bankruptcy.