The modern-day experience of attempting to get concert tickets lands somewhere near watching a waiter leave a restaurant kitchen with food that could be yours and reading ‘Only one left!’ in an online shopping sale – full of anticipation, with only two outcomes, both equally thrilling or disheartening.
Getting tickets for Harry Styles’ highly anticipated tour for his even more highly anticipated fourth studio album, ‘ Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally’ , is no different.
This week, fans of the former One Direction star battled for tickets to see him and Shania Twain in London armed with pre-sale codes and a dream.
The Adore You singer’s last foray to the iconic Wembley Stadium in 2023 left almost the entirety of London strewn with multicoloured feathers, as concert goers donned feather boas and heart-shaped glasses for what many described as ‘the best night of their life’.
Since the first single of his new album, Aperture , released on Friday, fans’ opinions have been mixed with energised excitement and tunes of hesitant approval, while many agree it’s a distinctly new sound for the pop star.
But it didn’t stop the usual scramble for tickets where A-list musicians are concerned, when at 10am on Monday, fans everywhere pitched up with pre-sale codes to get tickets, flexing their fingers and full of enough adrenaline to re-enter Wembley’s pits and conga to Treat People With Kindness , titled after Styles’ motto.
When I joined the 10am sale, there were 66,490 people ahead of me in the queue. My sister Clara and her friend Amber, who’d be coming with us, each had more than 100,000 people ahead of them. As Wembley has a capacity of 90,000, we knew it would be too late for them and likely too late for me. But there was some hope.
For a little over two hours, I touched my phone screen every few minutes to make sure it wouldn’t switch off as we received updates at 15-minute intervals promising tickets were still available. Sadly, when I did get through, the blue lights indicating available seats were few and far between – and disappeared before my eyes.
When I did click on some to purchase on the bottom tier of seats near the rear of the stadium, the tickets were £300 each. Way out of our budget.
The three of us shared our commiserations and swiftly prepared to enter the fray again for the second sale at 2pm – this time, crucially, with Amber’s boyfriend Brandon in the queue.
After a tense 30-minute wait in the lobby, we were thrown into round two and had our new places: my sister at a devastating 250,000, myself at an exciting 46,000, Amber somewhere in the middle – and Brandon at an incredible 11,781.
Success! After a serious discussion about budgets, we found tickets in the bottom tier of seats in the corner of the stadium were now a tempting £155, rather than the £300 they were earlier. For us, it was this or the within-budget £95 for nosebleed seats right at the top.
When my sister and I went to Wembley in 2023, our tickets were a little over £100 to be in the pit, with the full-surround sound and thrill of the stage ahead of us. This time, we were paying almost the same to be right at the tip-top, very back of the stadium.
After a fast and stressful discussion in our group chat, we went with the cheaper nosebleed seats. Checking out with the tickets resulted in mixed feelings - we had them, we were going, but after about four hours of queuing and for the same price as a much more intimate experience years earlier.
Is hours of virtual queueing, with fans paying anything between £100 and £300 for what seems like the same seats, the new norm the new norm for concerts?
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