A few weekends ago, Glastonbury tickets went on sale and hundreds of thousands took to their keypads to book half a year ahead to purchase their right to spend a few days in a field. There are websites devoted to helping you get you to the front of the queue to buy. This is a far-cry from the festival’s origins and demonstrates how “getting in” is increasingly exclusive.
Glastonbury is not a rip-off. It’s ticket price includes a substantial contribution to charity and- as Byron mentions in comments, it generates a lot of money for the West Country.
But Glastonbury is the exception to an increasingly greedy world where the status of the “experience” is now being priced beyond the means of most fans
This means a very few global artists including Beyonce, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen and above them all, Taylor Swift , are able to charge us a minimum of £150 per ticket for some far off view of a screen in a stadium. The prices are set at a level that you don’t have to queue but there’s still a feeding frenzy for tickets that quickly re-emerge on secondary markets like Via Gogo at a big mark up. A pair of “front pitch standing” tickets to see Springsteen at Wembley next summer will set you back more than £1,200 on StubHub.
This is absolute madness and reminds me of my growing up years before punk happened and changed things. Back in the early 1970s , stadium rock was dominated by super bands in much the same way. You either had the money to fund their extravagance or you sat around with your mates learning the chords to Stairway to Heaven, while smoking dope.
I’d rather smoke dope than be a dope.
While I will happily listen to the outputs of bands over the 70 or so years in which rock and roll has been around, I will also listen to the output of composers going back a further 500 years and can do so live at the Albert Hall throughout the summer , standing not in a field, but in a very pleasant venue on my doorstep, where I can have a direct view of world class musicians performing world class music wherever I want to stand.
The social cachet of going to a prom, may not match that of going to Glasto or seeing Mylie Cyrus or Billie Eilish cavorting, but if you get more for less – why not?
There will come a time when pop music will reinvent itself as it did with Presley & Co and did again with punk. It has had many minor eruptions in the UK since – Britpop , Grime and there’s probably something happening right now that I’m too unhip to know about.
But when I see the emails that try to coax me to see “live music”, I am saddened.
Is this really what the great rebellious , disruptive, anarchic force called “rock and roll” has come to?
I am tired of this homogenisation of culture into an identikit experience of swaying bodies , singing along to a few choruses of a few songs from field to field. I am fed up with fake experiences in West End theatres – trying to relive the past glories. The latest incarnation of Take That sounds like Bread on Valium.
What next?- A Cabaret style 100 club where a Johnny Rotten look-alike can spit anarchy in the UK to us as we ear our gourmet meals?
A better way
There is a music scene beyond these “experiences”, try the Great Escape in Brighton where for £15 a day you can go to wherever you can get in around Brighton between 18th and 24th May (no booking fees).
Live music does not have to be an “experience” you pay hundreds of pounds for. You can see great music down the pub or around many towns and Cities where buskers ply their trade.
The billion pound rags to riches stories of an elite few may seem glamorous, but the money you pay Ticketmaster to see bands in stadiums making millions per gig is money that is not reaching the buskers and those applying to get on the roster of the Great Escape.
The better way is not to pay.