This is really happening. Oh my God, this is really happening. My thoughts couldn’t keep up with my emotions as my legs automatically sprang up and down, totally oblivious to the high heels, as my friend and I filed into our beer-stained floor seats of Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour. I looked around, trying to make eye contact with the people around me, wanting to share the excitement with them as the stadium roared to life. Yet to my utter shock, not one of the people sitting around my friend and me seemed interested in talking with anyone who wasn’t their guest. No friendship bracelets were exchanged, no phone numbers were shared, and no one sang along with the thousands of Swifties screaming from the upper bowls. Shocked and slightly confused, I turned towards my friend and screamed along with her, still bothered by the feeling that, out of all of the people sitting so close to the stage, my friend and I were the only ones who actually understood why the Swifties in the upper bowls were losing their vocal cords. It wasn’t until long after the night ended when I finally realized why the crowd around me felt so distanced from the woman performing on stage: the concert’s floor was filled with people who could afford it, instead of the devoted fans who couldn’t.
While I had the privilege of attending many concerts as a kid, I never once went to a seated one. My father, a zealous U2 fan, would plan our entire family vacations around the Irish band’s tours, dragging my sister and me to pit shows where we would see a band we really didn’t know after standing in line for hours. As a preteen, I moaned, whined, and complained every second of the wait in line and every second of the way home to the hotel, begging my dad to buy us seats where we could rest our feet and not spend half the day standing in the sun. He would smile patiently and explain that the concert wasn’t just a live performance of U2’s songs, but rather an experience to connect with and meet new people—a chance to find companionship and camaraderie with those who love the same music as you, even if that’s the only thing you share. For a long time I didn’t understand this concept, but as I sat at that Taylor Swift concert, I wondered how one simple decision—seats or no seats—could change the entire atmosphere of a live show in an attempt to commodify concerts.
Floor seats sell at face value for two-to-three times the price of general admission tickets, and, as we’ve seen in the Ticketmaster scandal of Swift’s U.S. The Eras Tour leg, scalpers resell the floor seating tickets for thousands of dollars beyond their original retail price. In contrast, most other countries have opted for alternative ticketing platforms like Ticketcorner to prevent the pervasive scalping present in the United States and to set caps on resale prices, ensuring that concert ticket inflation and scams do not happen to the extent that they do in the U.S. Unfortunately for American fans, the only people who can afford the closest, most personal seats to these concerts are not the teenage die-hard fans who know every word to every obscure vault track. Instead, it’s the rich, upper middle class folks who either have the time to wait for Ticketmaster to load or the pockets deep enough to pay outrageous fees on second-seller sites such as StubHub. This reflects the reason why so many shows in the U.S., particularly by American artists, don’t have general admission seating—the monetary gain of expensive individual seat tickets is prioritized over the atmosphere of cheaper general admission pits. American concerts’ inaccessibility is amplified by many U.S. venues, despite Swift’s choice to make all of her U.S. shows fully seated and thus theoretically accessible to those with physical disabilities. However, few venues are equipped to aid people with disabilities down to the floor, let alone in navigating the tight, overcrowded, and compact rows these seats are forced into. As a result, the commodification of concerts eliminates not only the accessibility for younger and less financially secure fans to see shows up close, but also the ability to build community with like-minded fans, as opposed to attendees whose sole purpose of attending is posting for their Instagram reel. Guessing song titles based off of the first lyric, debating which song is the artist’s best, and emotionally supporting one another during the bridge of the song that just wrecks everyone—these were the things I missed so dearly at the Taylor concert, surrounded by people so obsessed with their own lives that they couldn’t bother to trade friendship bracelets.
A month before my scheduled trip to Switzerland this summer, my father gifted me an early birthday present—two tickets to see Taylor in Zürich the day before our vacation ended. Unable to articulate words, I was overjoyed, thrilled to have the opportunity to see the best show I’ve ever seen once again. Yet something else was making me smile when I read the ticket labels: General Admission. I was going to be in a pit concert for the first time since my teen years.
My family and I arrived at the arena early that morning in a swarm of Swifties, ranging in age, gender, and nationality. Sitting under the summer sun and sweating in my pink tube top, I was shocked when a fan nearby offered me a friendship bracelet with my era, “Lover,” engraved in pastel lettering. Sheepishly, I told him I didn’t have any bracelets to trade with him (a Swiftie sin, I’m aware), yet undeterred he slid the bracelet on my wrist and we began talking, trading university stories and talking about the political differences between the U.S. and Germany. After waiting in line together for eight hours, we made the decision to join groups on the floor, forming a megagroup of German high school girls, Romanian medical students, and two American women. From offering to film the ten minute version of my favorite song to dancing together during the 1989 set, the people I met that day made the concert a communal bonding experience, something rarely found in the U.S. because of the devaluing of concert community in exchange for corporate success. But I finally get what my dad was telling me all those years ago: the concert starts long before the artist takes the stage.
Kami Steffenauer is a junior in the College studying Anthropology and Women's and Gender Studies.
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