In 1997, David Bowie announced he was playing a concert at the 1,200-capacity Olympia Theatre in Dublin – an intimate venue by his standards. The Starman was coming to earth: specifically to a dimly-lit former music hall on Dame Street.
When we heard the news, my housemate and I decided we had to be there. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a credit card; neither of us had a phone. Never mind: the tickets were to go on sale on Saturday morning, so the deal was that my friend would get up early and head to a payphone with the credit card he’d acquired a few months previously. What could go wrong?
What went wrong was that the night before, we decided to go to our local indie disco and crawled home at 3am. I slept it out the following morning and woke streaked in chips and barbecue sauce. More problematically, my housemate with the credit card slept it out too.
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He was woken by my thumping on his door and promptly pegged it down the road, praying the nearest payphone hadn’t been vandalised again. It was 11am. Tickets, priced at about €25, had been on sale two hours. He arrived home later than morning, covered in sweat but with the happy news that we’d bagged two for the upper circle. The sight lines weren’t spectacular – but we were in.
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We didn’t know that Bowie had announced a second gig, which was what our tickets were for – a fact of which we were unaware until they arrived in the post weeks later. Fate, and that second show, had intervened on our behalf.
Buying concert tickets has changed a lot in the intervening quarter century. The same year my pal pegged it towards the payphone at the end of the street, U2 fans had camped out for tickets for the band’s PopMart shows at the RDS in Dublin. Such all-nighters weren’t regarded as an ordeal but a rite of passage: how better to show your devotion to Bono than wriggling into a sleeping bag outside HMV?
There will be no sleeping bags or dashes to the phonebox when Taylor Swift’s summer 2024 Aviva Stadium dates goes on sale next week on July 13th. Instead, the scrum will be entirely virtual – a dystopian gawp into the void, where fans compete digitally for those super-rare tickets.
That’s presuming they even have an opportunity to join the queue. In what feels like the stadium pop equivalent of the Hunger Games, only a percentage of those who registered with Ticketmaster will be “selected” for a “purchase link” to – potentially! – nab one. Those links are supposedly to be sent today, July 5th. I’ve registered, and like many, I’m surprised at just how much a bundle of nerves I’ve become.
Ticketmaster, which holds a monopoly over ticket sales, is hard to love; nowadays, even artists are taking it to task. At the 3 Arena in Dublin recently, Paramore criticised the company for not getting its “sh*t” together. Having paid €96 for my ticket to review the concert – including €25 in fees – I could only agree.
Paramore weren’t the first to speak out. Taylor Swift herself criticised the company – a division of monolithic promoters Live Nation – when many of her fans could not buy tickets for the US leg of her tour.
Whatever the wrinkle, buying tickets for any Taylor Swift-level artist is a whistlestop tour of digital hell
Artists have been railing against the Ticketmaster system for decades. In 1993, Pearl Jam, the grunge rockers who could never quite escape the shadow of Nirvana, took a stand by refusing to play venues booked through the company. They were letting themselves in for a world of pain. “We had to start creating these other venues where we could play. And we were having weeklong meetings about chain-link fences and porta-potties,” their singer Eddie Vedder told me years later.
“Because we would only play in non-Ticketmaster venues, we had to go to these really out-of-the way places,” guitarist Mike McCready added. “And we had to handle everything ourselves. I remember taking calls about portaloos. It was an ordeal.”
Today nobody would seriously advocate a boycott of Ticketmaster. Not the famous singer who ranted to me off the record about how much he “hates” Live Nation. Nor even The Cure’s Robert Smith, who earlier this year criticised the company over its service charges (Ticketmaster backed down and reduced the charges).
Aside from TicketMaster’s omnipresence, there is the issue of how antiseptic, stressful and fun-free ticket buying has become – an undertaking more Black Mirror than Black Sabbath. You’ll know this if you’ve tried to obtain tickets for shows that are sure to sell out. Perhaps you’ve committed the rookie error of having two browser windows open when searching for tickets (this slows rather than speeds up the process). Maybe you’ve clicked “refresh” at the wrong time. Has it taken too long to confirm your credit card purchase by mobile app? Whatever the wrinkle, buying tickets for any Taylor Swift-level artist is a whistle-stop tour of digital hell.
Is it worth it? I’m not sure. Tickets are so expensive nowadays that you sometimes wonder if you’re getting the best value for money, even at the concert. Should you have sprang for the gold circle, which allows you see the artist up close?
When I paid €54.50 to review Pulp at St Anne’s Park in Dublin – including a €6.75 “service charge” and €2.75 “handling fee” – I regretted not giving up the extra tenner that would have allowed me a closer view of frontman Jarvis Cocker (whose charms were largely lost on me from a distance).
With so much money at stake, small annoyances suddenly seem much larger. Pay €25 to see a band, and it isn’t such a big deal that someone is partly blocking your view. But if you’ve shelled out four times that amount, it’s a different story. With a premium price, you expect a premium experience – in which case, every small irritation can feel magnified into a mood-killing distraction.
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How different it was a quarter of a century ago. At the Bowie concert, my housemate and I arrived early and were up front of the upper circle when he made his entrance singing Quicksand from Hunky Dory (which at the time was a mind-bending 26 years old). At one point, Bowie pointed and waved at my friend. He was shocked – my pal, not Bowie – and the singer pointed again to make it clear he was waving at him. It had been worth it – the panic, the dash to the phone boot, the trip to Dublin. Taylor Swift will undoubtedly be just as much of a sensation at the Aviva next year. But first, there’s that digital hellscape to be navigated.