Gatekeeping Live Music
It seems like with every new huge concert announcement and its subsequent presale, fans who may have been unfamiliar before have a difficult reckoning with Ticketmaster’s — and it’s almost always Ticketmaster — attempts at ensuring tickets are sold to actual fans rather than scalpers. Today, it was Swifties doing battle as tickets for Taylor Swift’s huge, multi-city stadium Eras tour went on sale, her first tour in four years.
Ticket scalping is a practice about as old as the concert industry itself, with people aiming to make a buck by reselling tickets for far beyond their face value. Like many things, the Internet has made this easier — anyone can go to a ticketing website at 10 a.m. when tickets go on sale, buy a few, and turn them around for a profit. In an attempt to curb this, musicians and ticketing companies alike have turned to a number of methods to get tickets to fans, which is understandable. It would admirable, even, if it was only for the benefit of fans and there wasn’t a financial stake in it.
One of these methods is “Verified Fan,” introduced in 2017, effectively a lottery system which sends prospective buyers a code which grants them access to a presale “smart queue,” preventing bots from snatching up all the tickets instead. It’s effective — Ticketmaster claims it helped reduce the number of tickets scalped from 30% down to 5%. Registering as a Verified Fan is simple, but not all who sign up are guaranteed access, with some instead being waitlisted. It’s a process that has left some Swifties frustrated, and understandably so. “[T]icketmaster should decide verified fan by having people link their apple music, spotify and youtube accounts to show if they actually listen to/are a fan of an artist,” one posted on Twitter. “[H]ell, let us submit purchases as well to get boosts directly from ticketmaster that will actually be taken into account,” they continued in a brief viral thread.
I understand this is most likely a frustrated fan venting about an annoying process, maybe even someone who did, in fact, succeed in scoring tickets. The thousands of likes suggest some people agree. But creating more hoops to jump through just to go to a concert is an absurd suggestion.
Look, I get it. While I’m not one of the frustrated Swifties stuck in a seemingly endless online queue, I’ve been there. I once spent a workday with my laptop propped up nearby in an attempt to get Hamilton tour tickets, and I never did succeed. When Paul McCartney was announced as the debut act for Pittsburgh’s then-new arena, I was camped in a similar digital waiting room for tickets, which fortunately did end in a successful purchase — and great seats, at that. Several summers ago, a Mumford & Sons tour operated under a similar system as Verified Fan, where the opportunity to buy tickets was allotted at random to fans who registered in advance. Friends and I all signed up to increase the chances that someone in our group would be able to get tickets, and although it worked and we were all able to go, it was a frustrating process where our attendance hinged on the luck of the draw. It wasn’t a fair system, and it wasn’t hard to imagine how disappointing it would feel to end up shut out of the sale entirely or to be left with a selection of crappy seats at the back of the venue.
The ticketing industry is broken, it has been for a long time, and attempts to level the playing field and shut out scalpers hurt fans, too. But proving you’re a “true fan” isn’t much better — it’s gatekeeping.
For starters, it’s a lot of effort. No one wants to make sure all of their accounts and devices are connected properly so all of their streams are counted. More pressing, though, are concerns about privacy. With our every online move increasingly being tracked and sold, some — myself included — don’t want to make our listening habits a bigger part of that than they probably already are. The thought of Ticketmaster tracking my listening habits across all platforms and mediums, then having a person, or, more likely, an algorithm, decide whether or not I’ve listened to an artist enough to count as a real fan is a much unwelcome one.
It’s also easy to imagine how this could be exploited. It’s not a foolproof method. Michigan band Vulfpeck released Sleepify, an album of just 30-second silent tracks, for fans to stream as they slept, earning the band $20,000 in royalties from Spotify before the streaming service ultimately pulled the album. Fans could easily take a similar approach to streams determining their fan status, keeping devices streaming but muted when they’re not actually willing or able to listen.
It also doesn’t take into consideration those of us who, say, have years of music consumption behind us that wasn’t online, or physical media like CDs and vinyl, or simply singing along when a song comes on the radio. And spending time and effort submitting proof of purchases — through screenshot? receipt scans? confirmation e-mails? — would be an annoying, time-consuming process. But perhaps that’s part of the appeal here, pushing out people who would be unwilling or unable to do it, thus proving some fans are more dedicated, and therefore more deserving, than others.
Perhaps just as troubling a thought, and as a fan, more frustrating, is the obvious implication with such a system that there’s a point, a magic number of streams or money spent on music and merchandise, where you’re declared a true fan.
Similar systems do already exist, in a way — musicians have long granted presale access to fan clubs and mailing lists. But aside from some fan clubs with entry fees, these rarely cost money or require fans to prove their allegiance.
The more important, question, though, is why?
Even those of us who love music understand it is a commodity we’re being sold, but this would further reduce it to nothing more than a product, a means to an end to make another sale. It takes music from something fun to a depressing way for ticketing companies to make money, while fans don’t just get concert tickets, but bragging rights to go along with them.
Fandom in general — not just in music, and in some corners more than others — already contains a degree of holier-than-thou attitude and always has. Ask anyone (read: women) who’s ever worn a band T-shirt and been accused of not really being a fan and just wearing the shirt because it was trendy or has been quizzed on the songs and albums. But this was exacerbated by the Internet. In the early 2000s, when I spent my teen years prowling many a message board devoted to my favorite bands, it was not uncommon for older fans to judge newer ones, if not insult them outright, for coming along for the ride with this album instead of that one, which was particularly criminal if the newer music was more accessible, i.e. more mainstream. The older fans would openly yearn for the newer ones to move on, leaving them to have their pick of concert tickets. Swifties are already comparing the Eras on-sale to The Hunger Games. We don’t need to make it worse with unnecessary attempts at singling out “true” fans.
I understand the instinct—it’s tempting to fall into the trap of thinking that certain people won’t appreciate the concert enough and therefore shouldn’t get to go. But I also understand how live music feels, and that shouldn’t be reserved for a certain type or level of fan. As an avid concertgoer, I want others to feel the rush of seeing the musician take the stage, of hearing the first notes of your favorite song of their to ring out, of being one person in a room full of anywhere from dozens to thousands of others singing along while whatever problems were facing us disappear a few precious hours.
Most of all, though, determining fan status based on money spent and songs streamed may seem like an indicator of how much someone loves an artist, but it’s really not.
My Spotify streams won’t tell you about the feeling in my chest when I hear the opening chords to my favorite songs. It won’t tell you which songs I know every word to and which lines catch in my throat when I sing along. It won’t tell you which song I danced to at my wedding. It won’t tell you which songs my husband and I have repurposed as lullabies for our young son or which songs are becoming his favorites, too.
Clearly, Verified Fan — and other anti-scalping measures — are far from perfect, and there’s much work to be done to arrive at a system that shuts out scalpers without shutting out actual fans, too. But gatekeeping should not be one of them, and it’s not for anyone to decide who may or may not deserve a ticket.
