an 18-year-old's inner thoughts

I’d like to preface this with the wise words of a dear friend, “Let’s face it, this is a long article about a somewhat shallow topic.” This is, in fact, true, so please bear with me because although shallow, I do have a point. Also I feel like these days, with everything going on in the world, we need some shallow journalism on occasion. Anyways…

In the past few years, I think we can all agree that the spike in ticket prices for concerts has been unprecedented. We saw it most severely during the Eras Tour: Tickets were upwards of $500k for a seat at Taylor Swift’s recent stadium tour. Even smaller artists are selling out Radio City Music Hall in a matter of minutes. Music festivals like Coachella and All Things Go are becoming strangely exclusive and scarily expensive.

Although there could be many reasons, I find a sound argument in the idea that the quest for tickets comes from Gen Z’s growing desire for experiences, and is a product of, for lack of better words, FOMO.

Allow me to enlighten those not familiar with the term FOMO. FOMO stands for Fear of Missing Out and is a disease that all of Gen Z faces to a certain degree. This fear, whether we like to admit it or not, comes from a place of jealousy, and not wanting to hear your friends brag about their wild night, or hear the blood-boiling phrase, “you just HAD to be there.”

I think FOMO really became amplified during Covid-19, and even transformed from a fear to a frightening reality. Being in quarantine for the better part of two years, Gen Z teens missed out on a lot of experiences.

As much as I’d like to believe that Covid is the only factor, it’s unreasonable to just blame the pandemic. The true culprit is both our biggest enemy, and closest friend: social media.

Teens are one of the largest groups that comprise the hungry consumers and investors of social media. We all are well aware of the doomscroll epidemic and well versed in influencer culture. Since we consume so much media at such an intense rate, it’s easy for us to get wrapped up in what we see online. Whether that’s seeing influencers trying new products, creators buying new things, or even people attending cool events — see I’m getting to it I promise — we are influenced heavily by what we see on our phones and as human nature states, we want what we can’t have.

This is where the concert theory comes in.

Fresh out of Covid, Harry Styles began his Love on Tour series in 2022. This was the beginning of the concert crisis. In the two years he performed and countless countries, Harry played 15 shows at MSG, each one nearly impossible to get tickets for. Devout fans were hungry to get back in the same room as their favorite artist after being separated by a pandemic (and an ocean too I guess since Harry is from England). Word of his tour spread like crazy on social media, and suddenly, people were determined to experience such a coveted and once-in-a-lifetime event. Would Love on Tour be so attractive to non-fans were it not on social media?

Moving into 2023, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour caught our attention. The long-awaited and fantasized event was a production of impossible size, and the empire that Swift had built over the past decade caused millions of fans to join the fight for tickets. The infamous “Ticketmaster War”, in my opinion, was the first time that we saw the calamity of greed that buying concert tickets would become.

Taylor Swift is one of the biggest artists in the world, so the idea of her going on this huge tour sparked the interest of those who aren’t even “swifties” themselves. People began to buy tickets out of pure curiosity, rather than true dedication to her music.

Eras Tour TikTok became the entirety of one’s “for you” page and attending the concert became a trend in and of itself. Influencers were prying brands for gifted tickets, and celebrities were posting greedily about how they “snagged” some tickets for themselves when we all know they were free of charge and compliments of your favorite company.

Yes, Taylor Swift is a huge celebrity and massive artist, but if social media didn’t push the Eras Tour onto our algorithms as much as it did, would it have been so monumental and sought-after?

Without the pressure of wanting what we see online, there wouldn’t be such a push for concert tickets because there wouldn’t be so much FOMO. In fact, it wouldn’t even be possible to have FOMO because you wouldn’t know what you were missing. Not only does social media create impossible expectations of what we should look like or wear, but now it also creates a narrative that if you’re not attending certain events, like concerts, you’re behind on the trends.

This trend (greed) continued way past the Eras Tour and still exists today. Back in the day, a concert was an opportunity to see your favorite artist and sing your favorite song in an arena larger than one’s usual stage: the car. Now, concerts are just chances for people to be in the room where it happened. More than ever, true fans find themselves disheartened when they get beat out for tickets by bandwagon listeners who are anxious to replicate what they see on socials.

We literally just witnessed this a few weeks ago when die-hard Ariana Grande fans basically rioted on TikTok because they couldn’t get tickets for her Eternal Sunshine Tour.

Am I saying people should leave the tickets for the true fans? Like kinda but also no. I don’t think it’s bad that so many people want to experience concerts, and it’s understandable, especially after the pandemic, that people should want to live their lives to the fullest. But I think people should acknowledge that a lot of their greed is motivated by FOMO. We already have to compete with the Ticketmaster bots, why compete with each other too?

What I’m getting at is that we shouldn’t want to go somewhere or do something just to say that we did it. If we all had a little more empathy and realized that FOMO won’t be the death of us, maybe the Ticketmaster war would be more of a contained brawl than an all-out battle.

It’s reasonable to want to experience anything and everything, especially after years of not being able to do that. But, for the sake of internet beef and empty wallets, consider if you actually need to hear that song live, or if you could save it for the shower. And let’s be real: every concert is on TikTok, you’re not missing a thing.