There is little more tiresome to me than people who sneer at pop fans and the money they spend on concert tickets. Oh, £100 is ridiculous, is it? Oh, it’s just a load of people watching the gig through their phones, is it? Oh, £45 on a limited-edition T-shirt that marks the most significant night of your life is a waste of money, is it? Oh, you can go and see a local band who are just as good in a pub for £15, can you?
Spare me. How very joyless your life must be if you have never deeply loved an artist, never made the pilgrimage to see them, never trembled as you behold them in flesh and bone, never had your soul restored by their music and the communion with thousands of other people who feel exactly as you do, never stood close to the front and for a fleeting moment felt them lock eyes only with you.
That is why Harry Styles fans have travelled from all over the world to see him perform at Madison Square Garden. He is currently in the middle of a record-breaking 30-night residency at the arena in New York City, his only stop in the United States (or Canada) on his seven-city Together, Together world tour, whose European dates were also exclusive residencies: 10 nights in Amsterdam and 12 nights at Wembley Stadium.
The justification for this style of tour – whose other stops are Sao Paolo, Mexico City, Sydney and Melbourne – was to allow Styles to “stay in my life while I’m doing it. And therefore I think it allows me to take care of myself better, which I think makes me better at doing the thing”.
Classic Harry – sensitive, progressive, always looking out for others as well as himself! “It’s not like I’m saying I’ll never travel again,” he said to Zane Lowe back in March. “But I want to see what it looks like if you do it a different way – and people in my band have families now and kids, and some aspects of that too. It’s really important to me that they’re on the road, that I would love to have them. I don’t want to make it near impossible for them to be able to come do that with me.”
It made it near impossible for plenty of his fans to come do it with him – but such is their devotion that thousands of them did cross countries and continents, seizing their only chances to see the tour until – who knows when?
Harry Styles at Wembley Stadium in June (Photo: Live Nation)Well, until next year, as it turns out, because nice-guy, fans-first Harry Styles has just announced 25 more shows in 2027, including six more cities in North America, five new cities in Europe, and a return to London. If I had spent several thousand pounds on tickets, flights, hotel stays and all the other attendant costs of travelling for a concert – which I have done myself more than once – to one of the most expensive cities in the world, only to discover I could have done, say, a four-hour road trip instead, I wouldn’t just feel out of pocket. I’d feel betrayed.
It’s just as well the internet and social media have led to a modern culture where pop fans are more intense and more obsessed with their idols than ever before, because artists need them to be. They’re not getting the revenue on their music that they used to – streaming services put paid to that – and so they rely on the sale of concert tickets (whose high prices I often defend, especially given the cost of touring) and merchandise to make their money. They know that their fans will spend it: for the experiences, to feel a close connection to their favourite artist, to feel part of a tribe.
Unfortunately, this knowledge is too often exploited. I would not like to calculate the money I have spent on Taylor Swift in the past 20 years – although I don’t regret a penny. But I have real concerns about aspects of her business model, especially when it comes to releasing multiple, minutely different versions of her album on vinyl available only as a limited edition, encouraging a wasteful “collector” mentality among her predominantly young fan base. Swift is known for her relationship with and gratitude to her fans – but on this, she lets them down.
Other artists should condemn it. Instead, they want in. Only last week Beyoncé flogged a £950 wooden LP box on her website to mark 20 years of her album B’Day, and this week the Spice Girls teased what many people thought would be another reunion (please, no) but which turned out to be a £277 box set of every song ever recorded (an empty box in this case might be more valuable).
These are not struggling artists who need the money and really suffer from the demise of physical sales or the death of grassroots venues. They are millionaires and billionaires, shamelessly rinsing their fans for all they’re worth.
Harry Styles has at least announced that he will not be using dynamic pricing for his extra shows and will be releasing a limited number of £20 and $20 tickets. Great. But don’t let it distract you – extending his tour confirms he’s just another greedy pop star.
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