Thirty minutes before the presale tickets for Harry Styles’s “Together, Together” tour at Madison Square Garden were released this week, I sat nervously at my office desk.
I was number 11,173 in Ticketmaster’s online waiting room queue—which, if you are familiar with the concert ticketing platform, can be a real roll of the dice—and my palms were sweating. What if my page crashed and I lost my place in line? What if my internet froze? What if there were no tickets left once I actually made it into the main site? The pressure was on, and I wasn’t especially hopeful.
This was not a new feeling: In recent years, getting tickets to see your favorite artist in concert—from Beyoncé and Taylor Swift to Oasis—has begun to feel like playing the Hunger Games. Not only are you battling it out with thousands of diehard fans, many of whom will gladly travel internationally to see a show (they call this gig-tripping), for the same limited number of seats, but you also have a bevy of technological hurdles to clear. Popular tours are known to have excruciatingly-long cue times, meaning one wrong click, you lose your place in line—and sometimes, even when you do secure tickets, Ticketmaster will accuse you of being a bot and summarily cancel your purchase.
It’s a far cry from the glory days of the early aughts, when you could save up a few hundred bucks, log online, and simply click “buy.” I saw Britney Spears, the princess of pop, at her Circus tour in 2009 for under $300—easily puchasing tickets from my rural Canadian home with dodgy internet access. Now, you have to approach sale dates like an assassin, armed with a very clear course of action (basically, you must grab the first seats you see), reliable WiFi, and, of course, a credit card at the ready. Every second counts, after all: You only have a few minutes to check out before the system kicks you out—and that’s if you’re lucky enough to make it that far in the first place.
As my Harry Styles waiting-room queue ticked down to 1,000 people in front of me—only a few more minutes of waiting, I thought—I checked what fellow Stylers were saying online about the process. Naturally, many were frustrated with the long wait times, and particularly outraged at just how pricey the tickets were selling for this time around (upwards of $1,000 a ticket). “I cannot justify spending an entire paycheck on 2 concert tickets,” wrote one user. Others were frustrated about the site freezing as they attempted to make a purchase.
Then, all at once, I was in. I took a quick glance at the seating map and—shocker—there were no seats available. Nothing was left! Not even the extremely-pricey ones.
It’s no secret that concert tickets are fueled by a corrupt, capitalist system. At the end of the day, artists and venues don’t really care about what’s fair to the fans; they just want to make a buck. But new laws are slowly being implemented to stem the tide. In 2024, the House passed the TICKET Act, which would require sellers to list the total cost of a ticket (including hidden fees) before checkout, and require secondary sellers to provide refunds to customers in the event of a show’s cancellation.
Defeated, I lingered on the “Together, Together” Ticketmaster page, ready to accept my fate. Perhaps I will try my luck again on the general sale date. Maybe I need a faster WiFi speed—or need to have multiple tabs open—to roll the dice even more. For now, though, the show is sold out. But the fight is not over yet, Harry fans: Don’t lose hope! There are still plenty of dates that have yet to go on sale (he is, after all, playing multiples dates in multiple cities.) Play the waiting game, stay ready, and you just may—maybe—be able to see the superstar on-stage. Oh, and maybe swap out your modem.
