After a number of off years for reside, stadium-packing, planet-spanning spectacles, summer season 2023 has been an excellent season for pop music demigoddesses. However you, content material shopper, knew that already. In case you couldn’t handle to get a ticket to Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour or Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, it doesn’t matter. Everybody else in your life appears to have, and so they’ve been posting clips both from MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, or some place else in these United States. Taken collectively, you have got most likely skilled many of the respective live shows, from nearly each angle, in your cellphone—and also you noticed quite a lot of glorious outfits, whether or not on Beyoncé or Taylor, or on their followers. The sheer bulk of the posting is so overwhelming that there’s just one factor to do: choose how near the stage everybody who attended comparatively obtained.
It seems that stadium seating is an ideal visible illustration of social hierarchy. That is technically true for many stadium occasions, like sports activities, however since these two world-famous ladies and their worldwide excursions are the closest factor to monoculture we have now left, and since a crucial mass of persons are attending the exhibits, it’s by no means been simpler to check and distinction everybody you ever knew to every one another solely on distance from the stage as discerned from their Instagram posts. As ever, the nearer you have been to the entrance row or VIP, the extra juice you have got. What you do with that newfound details about the relative juice-having of the individuals in your lives—whether or not you retain it shut in your coronary heart or use it—is as much as you. As a current semiviral tweet succinctly put it: “I noticed the place you sat at beyonce …. We’re Not splitting the Uber babe.”
Live performance tickets have by no means been dearer. This you’ll keep in mind from all of the headlines about how a lot Taylor Swift or Beyoncé tickets have been going for, or from your personal sweaty makes an attempt to purchase six months in the past. In accordance with StubHub information reported by CNBC, the typical worth of Renaissance tickets was $322. And Eras? $920. Every little thing from ticketing firm charges to unregulated resale markups contribute to the climbing prices of those exhibits. And because you or not less than a pair individuals you understand tried to get tickets to at least one, the opposite, or each excursions, you most likely have a psychological Excel spreadsheet of how a lot seats would value. the fabric distinction between row 15 of part 238 and row 12 of part 144. that nosebleed seats don’t essentially correspond to nosebleed costs, however you additionally know that the nearer one will get to Bey’s stage, the nearer one’s checking account probably is to empty.
That is solely the start too. Beyoncé will proceed her US leg of her world tour this August and September, and you will notice precisely how your most random follows are faring. Think about it. Individuals out of your hometown who you haven’t spoken to since center college, there within the tippy high of the Dome at America’s Heart. That particular person out of your freshman dorm who transferred her sophomore 12 months is suspiciously near the stage in Inglewood. This colleague and that colleague in seats that mysteriously correspond by no means to what you understand of payroll. That particular person you met on trip in 2015 is taking a photograph with Greta Gerwig??
Taylor Swift hasn’t even gone to Los Angeles but! Complete group-chat pecking orders could possibly be endlessly rewritten. In fact, you by no means know precisely what’s happening in individuals’s financial institution accounts. Going into debt for Beyoncé? It occurs. You don’t know the lengths individuals went to finances for one present. You don’t even know whether or not these concertgoers are even paying out of pocket. Maybe it’s their cultural capital that obtained them the nice seats—a company connection of some type or different. Maybe you had a distinct form of cultural capital since you are Oprah or Gayle, and also you have been subsequent to Tina Knowles, Beyoncé’s newly single mom, in what seems to be probably the most VIP part of all. Did Oprah pay for her ticket? What about Madonna and her kids?
Probably no. As a result of they’re Madonna and Oprah, and also you’re watching from all the best way up there taking part in America’s hottest sport: How did they get these seats?
