.png)
4 hours ago
5
When Harry Styles announced a fall residency at Madison Square Garden, 43-year-old Tara Bess knew she had to be there. She didn’t want to spend hours camping for a prime spot in the general admission area, so Bess bought a VIP ticket for $1,400 from a resale ticket site, which allowed her to enter the arena early and secure a spot at the barricade.
“When you’re up close, you can see him closing his eyes and almost meditating to the music,” Bess said. “You can hear the click of equipment on stage, you just feel very connected to the performance.”
After seeing the show from the VIP area earlier this month, she took her sister to see it a second time for a more modest price. To afford the trip from her home in Florida, Bess worked a second job as an Uber driver and saved up for nine months. Bess is part of a growing number of fans who are shelling out for VIP tickets or other perks in order to secure prime concert seats and increase their chances of interacting with their favorite artists.
Fans are paying thousands of dollars not just to see their favorite artists live, but to get closer to the performance and have a more exclusive experience.
“It’s become more of a norm when you really want to get close to an artist,” said Eddie Meehan, the CEO of Please & Thank You, a VIP events company that’s worked with artists including Robyn and Audrey Hobert. “The growth of it, especially post-Covid, has been astronomical.”
Even artists who have traditionally shied away from charging fans for extras have started offering premium tickets to meet demand, said Randy Nichols, a longtime artist manager. Ultimately, the experience is up to the artist and can include exclusive merchandise, meet-and-greets or access to the soundcheck.
“Fans want to show their love and their loyalty and get to have that interaction and are more than happy to spend the money,” Nichols said. Typically, a higher percentage of a VIP ticket goes back to the artist than a standard ticket. Those earnings can be a welcome boost for artists as revenue from album sales have declined in the streaming era.
The live music industry is noticing the opportunity. Superfans spend 80% more on music each month than casual fans, according to Luminate, a music data company. A 2025 Goldman Sachs report estimated that appealing to superfans could earn the industry an additional $4bn per year.
Fans who don’t purchase VIP tickets still have a chance to make it to the barricade of a general admission area by showing up early. Some venues discourage fans from camping overnight or may announce that lines won’t be honored until the morning of a show. Some venues have started offering fans the option to skip the entrance line for an additional fee, similar to theme parks. At some concerts, this means the first rows are filled with people who have paid more to be there.
Despite the demand, the trend is more typical of larger, corporate-owned venues, said Stephen Parker, the executive director of the National Independent Venue Association. Many venues are wary of charging for these extras at a general admission show.
“That egalitarian access for everyone is something that venues have worked really hard to preserve, and ultimately sometimes that’s not compatible with the VIP experience,” he said.
The extras can rankle fanbases as competition for the best spots of a show has led to concertgoers who don’t pay for VIP tickets to show up earlier and earlier. Music subreddits are frequently flooded with posts asking what time fans need to arrive to get a spot at the barricade. While the answer varies, a two-hour concert can easily extend into an all-day affair to secure a spot in the front.
In a June interview with the UK radio station Kiss FM, Olivia Rodrigo described the extreme lengths some fans go to in order to hold their spots at the barricade. “I’ve been to certain concerts and certain festivals where people wear diapers so they can be front row of the show and that’s been an experience that I have smelled,” she said.
Bess admitted that she avoided drinking water all day before the Harry Styles show, worried about losing her spot once the show got started. But the crowd ended up being easygoing. “I was definitely expecting a much more aggressive environment but it wasn’t that at all,” she said.
Still, for longtime fans who have built a connection with an artist through following their career, paying for VIP is a way to continue supporting the artist.
Kesha was on stage during her Freedom Tour last month when she spotted a fan at the front of the crowd holding up a sign saying she had a tooth to give the pop star.
“I’m gonna have to get these teeth really fast,” Kesha said, pausing the show. She carefully descended down the steps of the stage in a pair of towering gold boots to grab the package. “I collect human teeth, it’s not weird!” she told the crowd.
The tooth belonged to Holly Fisher, who lives in North Carolina and has been a fan of Kesha since high school. After her dentist scheduled an appointment to have a tooth pulled this summer, she knew immediately that she wanted to give it to Kesha. Fisher paid $475 for a VIP ticket, which included access to a soundcheck and early entry to the venue. When the doors opened, Fisher was first through the entrance and grabbed the spot at the center of the barricade with her friends directly in front of the stage.
Being in the front row was a way for Fisher to celebrate Kesha after following her from her early rise to her legal disputes with her former manager, Dr Luke, and now into her new chapter as an independent artist.
“It really was this full circle moment for the people who had been there since the beginning,” said Fisher. “Like holy shit, she did it, she made it out alive. I’m just so happy for her.”
As videos of concerts flood social media, a premium ticket is a way to have a more unique experience than just being in the building, said Amber Harms, who flew to Chicago to see two BTS shows on their summer tour. Harms became a fan of the K-pop group while its members were serving their mandatory military service in South Korea.
“A lot of that connection or that ability to connect with them in an actual real world environment, wasn’t something available to me at the time that I got into the fandom,” she said.
On the second night, she shelled out $3,400 on a resale ticket site for two seats in the front row. While she called the resale prices “ridiculous”, the experience was worth it.
“It’s wonderful to be at the concert, but if you can actually be five feet away from them, it’s even better,” said Harms. When one of the members splashed the crowd with a bottle of water and then tossed it into the crowd, Harms’s mother was close enough to snag it as a souvenir.
“We were screaming like overexcited pterodactyls,” she said.
