Last week, Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTS Tour got more registrations for pre-sale tickets than the amount of tickets even left available. In November of last year, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour broke Ticketmaster as fans flooded to purchase tickets. The list goes on for cases where real fans couldn’t get tickets to see their favorite musical artists. The reason for this is that there are so many new “fans” who grab their tickets before everyone else. Now, what is the reason for this inflation in ticket sales? Many people simply blame TikTok and its use of songs that skyrocket musicians into bigger fame.
TikTok culture has done a lot of things for the music industry. Some musicians debut their first songs on the platform, which then launches into extreme popularity. This isn’t necessarily bad for those musicians, but what happens to other artists? Much of the reason behind fans getting tickets to both Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo is due to a select few or even just one of their songs gaining a following on TikTok. These followers then rush to buy tickets to these musicians’ concerts just to hear their one or few songs and nothing else.
A case of this was seen when a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) where musician Steve Lacy was singing his song “Bad Habit.” In case you’ve never seen a concert, many musical artists will stop at the hook of the song. This could either be the title or the part of the song that captures most of the attention so the audience could sing by themselves. In this case, Lacy did not stop at the hook. He stopped during the chorus and the crowd did not sing. In fact, they were dead silent. He then said into his microphone, “TikTok is insane because why would you go to a whole concert solely for a hook? Nah, this is actually so crazy. So you’re telling me you woke up early to queue for tickets online, spent your parents’ money, got your outfit, traveled to the show and in between all of that time you didn’t learn one other word of the song than the hook? The audacity!”
TikTok has desensitized an entire generation of concertgoers. It’s aestheticized concerts to an unhealthy level to the point where people will just go because TikTok makes it seem cool, leaving no tickets left for the true fans of musical artists.
Nick Keller is an opinion writer. Contact him at [email protected]
