Every once in a while you scroll through Instagram expecting nothing beyond the regular onslaught of picture-perfect photodumps when a zing of excitement rushes through your bones — your favorite artist is going on tour and they’re coming to your city. It’s not long after, of course, that your stomach drops and dread sets in. Because you have to go to Ticketmaster War … again.
The so-called “Ticketmaster Monopoly” strikes every time a popular artist goes on tour: fans get stuck in outrageous queues, prices skyrocket and general onsales sell out in minutes because of massive presales. It’s easy to blame the platform, and while it is a huge contributor to the problem, it turns out artists can help us fight back and many are just choosing not to.
Take Harry Styles’s upcoming Together Together Tour. The announcement incited a massive wave of excitement, conjuring images of colorful feather boas, glittery hats and dance parties for millions world wide, but ticket prices over the $1,000 mark (up to $4,500 on resellers like StubHub) quickly crushed most of those dreams. On top of that, instead of a traditional tour structure that visits multiple cities, Styles opted for a 30 show residency at Madison Square Garden that forces travel and accommodation costs in one the most expensive cities in the world onto all U.S. fans.
What’s more, fans are being asked to spend these thousands of dollars on the unknown. Tour tickets going on sale before an album release is nothing new, but going off the single “Aperture,” the new album Styles will be touring, Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally, is a complete departure from the rest of his pop-driven discography. Fans are being asked to gamble on a new sound they may not even like.
“And suddenly my frontal lobe has developed and i do not need to see harry styles,” said one fan on X. I had the same reaction upon finally reaching the end of the queue after more than an hour of holding out hope all the way from spot 35,187. I’d been yearning to feel the vibrant electricity of a Harry Styles concert for years, but suddenly, the tour and its $1,000 price tag were coming off as a greedy money grab instead of a genuine effort to share in the magic of an arena full of people joining in song.
I resigned myself to the fact that the heavy commercialization of music had transformed concerts from a place where people come together to connect over a piece of art to a luxury good inaccessible to most, that we were doomed to this cycle of excitement, dread and disappointment.
And then Tame Impala showed me a glimmer of hope.
The day before tickets for the North American Deadbeat Tour went on sale, months after the release of the album, Tame Impala took to Instagram stories to announce he would be using Ticketmaster’s Face Value Exchange program in applicable cities. He wrote, “This means tickets are non-transferable and can only be resold at the original price paid, through Ticketmaster … no mark ups, no nonsense … The goal is simple: to keep tickets fair priced and in the hands of actual fans.” “The shows are for you. Let's keep it that way,” he stated. He backed up his promises with $213 floor tickets, an X user calling them “the best concert prices [they’d] seen all year.”
Yes, queues were still enormous and the whole tour sold out within the day — he’s Tame Impala after all — but fans were able to get good tickets without paying an arm and a leg. He was proactive in making the process as painless as possible, prioritizing fan experience over crazy profits, and it wasn’t even that hard. He just toggled on a setting.
If Tame Impala can do it, then all big artists can too. Without fans, Harry Styles-levels of success simply don’t exist, so don’t artists have a responsibility to work towards an environment in which the very people who make up their platforms can get the chance of enjoying it?
Music has a unique way of reaching us, of plucking out the bits of ourselves we hold closest to our hearts, the ones that feel impossible to verbalize, and reassuring us of the simple fact that we are not alone; that someone out there has felt the way we do and deemed those experiences important enough to commit them to song. Music transcends time and space, language and nationality, age and class unlike any other artform and fans deserve the opportunity to witness it in person. While artists like Harry Styles seem to have forgotten, Tame Impala remembered and fought for what live music is supposed to be about: human connection.
In a world where live music is becoming increasingly inaccessible, we need more artists like Tame Impala who are willing to step up and fight with us. Because with artists on our side, good music is worth going to Ticketmaster War for.
Rafaella Gonzalez is a member of the Class of 2026 in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is a staff writer for the Arts & Culture department and can be reached at rgonzalez@cornellsun.com.
