The Live Music Industry is on a Downward Spiral

Concerts have long been a reigning form of entertainment. The concert experience, in theory, feels too good to be true; you buy tickets, anticipate the event for months in advance, and then the night finally comes. You get ready, by yourself or with your friends, and you go to line up at the venue. After a small while of waiting, your favourite artist finally appears on stage, and for a few hours, you get to enjoy live music in the company of other fans.

The first step in attending a concert is, of course, buying the tickets. In previous decades, you would buy concert tickets by getting them at major record stores or box offices. Despite the obvious barriers to equity (such as people needing help to get themselves to a box office/record store, and needing more money to afford a concert), the process was significantly easier. Today, getting concert tickets is not only incredibly difficult and expensive but also incredibly exploitative.

Most artists sell their tickets through Ticketmaster, a company that is a complete monopoly in the concert business, meaning that they have no real competitors and thus no reason to give customers a respectable experience. If you are lucky and manage to get a presale code, you’ll join a virtual queue to get tickets, usually with thousands of people in front of you. Once it gets to your turn, you’ll have a few short minutes to select tickets. If you manage to get tickets, you’ll drown in a sea of Ticketmaster’s made-up fees. After paying a facility charge, order processing fee, service fee, taxes, and many more random fees, you’ll end up paying almost double for a ticket. This is only the tip of the Ticketmaster iceberg, but you get the idea.

Finally, you arrive at the concert. Concert etiquette is the next thing you have to worry about. Fan behaviour at live shows is becoming increasingly appalling, to the point where some shows aren’t even pleasant anymore. I saw Cigarettes After Sex live in September. It’s a band that I had listened to for years, and I was so excited to finally see them live. Anyone who listens to them would know that their songs are dreamy and quiet–so probably not concert music–but I was determined to go regardless. People screamed before each song began, when each song began, when the bass dropped, when the singing began…you get the point. There is nothing wrong with singing along at a concert, but when it comes to the point that not a single person can hear the artist singing, it becomes problematic. People also talked loudly during songs that they didn’t know, distracting everybody else who was just trying to enjoy the music. Though these are just first-hand experiences, they point to a greater issue in the concert industry: audiences have become increasingly disrespectful to the musicians and fellow concert-goers.

At this exact show, around five people fainted. This is because it was 30+ degrees and the venue had sold more tickets than their maximum capacity. When security tried to find those who had fainted, people in the crowd tried to get the band’s attention–this is possibly the most repulsive behaviour I’ve witnessed at a concert. All of this goes to say that the true purpose of concerts is slowly being forgotten. Concerts are meant to be a sacred couple of hours in which fans of the same artist can come and connect with one another, regardless of their differences.

It would be naive of me to say that they were ever community experiences to begin with – concerts have long been unsafe for women, especially with regard to harder music genres (punk, grunge, rock…etc). But as an avid concert-goer, I don’t think any real steps are being taken in the right direction. Tickets for concerts are inaccessible to the vast majority of people, and people in the audience don’t consider how they might be inconveniencing others. In short, the concert experience has become individualistic. The community aspect of live music has been forgotten, all the while monopolies like Ticketmaster continue to abuse their power and make disproportionate profits. It’s a disorganised mess, and it’s creating the downward spiral of the industry.