L
ast week, I held my breath in anticipation as I joined the waiting room for the Lorde concert presale. As the seconds ticked down, my heart rate accelerated. I had done everything right: signed up for a presale code, joined early and had my credit card information at the ready. Finally, the Ticketmaster screen changed as I entered the queue. But my excitement soon vanished when I found myself behind 60,000 other people. Although I had streamed Lorde’s music for 7,000 minutes last year, I left the Ticketmaster website, dejected and ticketless. This scenario is all too common within the modern concert scene, but it could be avoided with stricter purchasing restrictions that limit the majority of ticket sales to actual fans.
One problem with the concert ticket market are ticket resellers, who take tickets in bulk away from an artist’s real supporters. Ticket scalping is the act of purchasing tickets to an event solely to resell them for a profit instead of actually attending. In 2023, the ticket resale market was valued at $2.85 billion, and it is projected to reach $6.56 billion, according to Straits Research. When real fans have to compete with ticket scalpers who often operate bots to quickly swipe tickets, it becomes much harder to purchase tickets at market value. In turn, sky-high resale prices make concert attendance financially impossible for many. By making it difficult to buy concert tickets at their original price, the current system puts tickets in the hands of the wealthy over diehard fans of the artist.
The other issue with modern concert culture is casual listeners over-attending concerts. Especially in the social media oriented digital age, concert attendance has become performative. Attendees seem to focus more on over-the-top concert outfits than song lyrics as they hold their phones up through the entire performance to get the perfect clip for their Instagram story. When people unfamiliar with an artist’s discography attend concerts with severely limited capacity, they are harming the artist’s most devoted supporters who would naturally enjoy the concert more. Although casual listeners may become more interested in an artist after seeing them live, their enjoyment of the concert experience would be mostly retrospective. Meanwhile, people who have listened extensively to the artist before attending will find much more excitement and joy during the concert.
A possible solution to the concert problem is instituting strict fan verifications. Although systems like the Spotify Fans First presales, which give presale codes to an artist’s top listeners and followers on the music streaming platform, are a good start, the system currently only accounts for a small portion of overall ticket sales. The fan verification system must be expanded to other music streaming platforms and should become the sale system for the majority of tickets to an event. That way, the people who care most about the artist — not scalpers or non-fans — are the ones filling the seats.
To make these fan-first systems truly effective, artists and ticketing platforms must work together to increase transparency and accountability. Platforms like Ticketmaster should be required to disclose exactly how many tickets are reserved for fan presales, sponsors and general public sales. Additionally, implementing multi-step verification — such as linking ticket access to streaming accounts or fan club memberships — could better ensure that real fans are prioritized. Dynamic pricing models, often used to inflate prices based on demand, should be limited or banned entirely for fan-verified sales. If fans are the foundation of an artist’s success, they should be treated like a priority, not an afterthought. Such a system would make concert attendance more accessible to devoted fans, preserving the authenticity and energy of the concert experience.
