PopHeads

From nightmare ticketing to online abuse, being a pop fan is becoming miserable

Kate Solomon

The stress of trying to get Taylor Swift tickets this week led to feelings of anger and loathing. It’s all part of a music culture that feels increasingly greedy and combative

Wed 12 Jul 2023 10.29 BST

This week, hundreds of thousands of Taylor Swift fans around the UK, Ireland and Europe have been desperately trying to get tickets to the Eras tour, which kicks off in Paris in May 2024. When tickets for North America dates went on sale last year, it was a disaster: demand was so high that systems crashed, the sale had to be stopped and ticket prices spiralled out of control due to Ticketmaster’s “dynamic pricing” whereby costs increase with demand. Clearly Swift’s team and Ticketmaster have worked hard to try to prevent the same thing happening here but it has involved dizzying bureaucracy: presale codes, waitlists and special ballots for general sale.

In our dedicated Swiftageddon group chat, we had been discussing strategy and making spreadsheets for weeks, ensuring we had credit cards and log-ins for every possible date we could make, though there was no indication in advance of how much tickets would be. Presale opened, and we dutifully took our places in the lobby, the waiting room and then the hundred-thousand-deep queue in which places were randomly assigned (military-grade planning only gets you so far).

The panic spiked when VIP packages started appearing: you could pay £350 for an OK-ish seat and get the added benefit of some absolute tat, including a souvenir concert ticket and a lanyard. “Should we just get the VIP tickets?” we asked in our frantic chat (we resisted). Breathless articles and Twitter threads about how to maximise your chances of getting tickets added to the hysteria, as did the screenshots of excited fans who had managed to secure the tickets they wanted as the day wore on. “What’s an extra £100?” I asked myself, thinking of my pathetic savings account and that a VIP ticket equalled half my monthly rent.

“This is making me hate her” has been said on more than one occasion – of the woman we are so desperate to see because we love her music so much.

Stage shows are intricate and logistically challenging, requiring the work of hundreds of people, all of whom need to be paid. A fair price should be paid for live music, but the current ticket setup for the biggest live shows is far from fair. Charging more for tickets with exclusive vantage points – whether Swift’s Ready for It package or the Diamond VIP experience at the recent British Summer Time shows in Hyde Park – isn’t just elitist, it plays into the idea that if you’re a real fan, you’ll pay more. It doesn’t have to be this way – some artists, including Tom Grennan, Ed Sheeran and the Cure have responded to the cost of living crisis by insisting on a cap for ticket prices – but for young people, many gigs are surely out of comfortable reach (particularly for those from low income backgrounds) and require being able to sit at a computer throughout the day during a potentially fruitless two weeks of trying to buy them in the staggered, complicated sales opportunities.

As Joel Golby recently suggested in these pages, maybe the reason we’re seeing fans hurl things at their faves on stage – be it cheese or the cremated remains of their parents – is to crowbar themselves into fan lore, because when you’ve paid the money, you have to make it mean something. The heightened demand and sense of panic around the Eras tour has made a status symbol of the tickets alone.

This exhausting slog feels like just one part of what is often a wretched experience for today’s pop fan. Obsessive fandom has been integral to pop since it began, but the network effects of online culture have intensified it. Now, fandom for individual artists has replaced the old tribalism around genre, and although there are tentatively supportive communities out there, fans often compete with each other to prove themselves the most worthy of their idol’s love. There is online warring and – as in the case of a recent debate about who got to stand front row at a Boygenius gig in the US – indignation about what kind of fan deserves the best access.

Musicians then capitalise on this devotion with merch drops, in-gig accessories such as the light-up wands beloved of K-pop acts, and repackaged albums – whether to celebrate spurious anniversaries or, in Swift’s case, reclaim ownership over old work. Fans endlessly share and meme their heroes, keeping them in cultural consciousness and recruiting new fans to the cause as well as spending what are sometimes vast amounts of money on them. A mock slide-show posted on Twitter in June claiming that Swifties were unionising seemed almost fair enough. Its introductory line was, “Fans do the vast majority of promotion and marketing for Taylor Swift without being compensated.” In fact, we pay to do it.

Some fans emotionally thrive off this melee, just as they do the hounding of journalists who criticise stars’ music, and the harassment of the stars themselves for not performing certain songs or playing certain cities. But I suspect most of us just feel overwhelmed and manipulated – not just by the exhausting hoop-jumping for tickets, but also by the internecine squabbles inside and between fan groups and the sense that the music comes second to fandom itself. There are of course much worse things than having to queue online for Taylor Swift tickets; the demand is inevitable for a star of her calibre and the payoff of actually seeing her will certainly be heightened by getting through this rigmarole. But pop music should be the fun bit of life, the bit that eases the daily grind of work, the general horror of the news cycle or the combat of social media comments.

In our dedicated Taylor Swift fan group chat, we have all expressed the following emotions over the past two weeks: fear, anxiety, anger, stress-induced nausea, malaise, despair and loathing. As we noticed more and more of the increasingly expensive but apparently valueless options appearing, these feelings became more pronounced. Everything from fuel to sequins is more expensive now, but fans seem to be bearing the full cost. At what point does it become too much? The American Swift fans taking Ticketmaster to court may have the right idea: burn the ticketing industry down and start again.