GEN-Z AND LIVE CONCERT EXPERIENCE: ARE WE THE PROBLEM?
by Alekss Bļiņņikovs
Over the past couple years or so, there has been an increasing number of articles about Gen Zers and their supposed habits of flooding the view with phone screens, throwing objects on stage and acting like entitled little shits who don’t know their place. Many artists like Billie Eilish, Charli XCX and TOOL’s own Maynard James Keenan have been outspoken about this issue in the past. And I’m no stranger to seeing this phenomenon myself; my inspiration for this came from seeing an NME article about Sleep Token fans (plenty of which happen to be TikTok-savvy folks in their late teens/early twenties) dropping crowdsurfers during Louder Than Life festival. Besides that, I’ve seen countless discussions on Reddit and social media such as IG and Twitter (won’t be calling it X, because I’m neither employed by a tech firm nor am I a degenerate) about how kids these days just don’t know how to behave and enjoy the show.
Thus, here lies a million-dollar question: Is Gen-Z really devoid of concert etiquette? Is there something else at play? And most importantly, regardless of whether it’s true or not, what caused this generational divide and what can we do about it?
Historically, before the internet and social media turned into the all-consuming pit of our free time and attention span, concerts used to be the main (and only) way of seeing and interacting with the music, and the artists who make it, at their fullest. It was a well-needed third space to step away from the boring routine and meet fellow unhinged peers who are willing to lose their shit to their favourite songs; in other words: it felt like a community. This also came with higher awareness of your surroundings and respecting the people around you; various customs and rituals, especially in scene-based genres like rock and metal, were upheld to ensure that people paid attention, looked after each other and got to enjoy the show together.
Picture by Kader Azra Namuslu
However, it wasn’t long until this scarce realm of opportunities got promptly stretched wider than the smile of an HR rep who just denied you a job offer after the 7th round of interviews. Platforms like Napster and LimeWire paved the way for the “democratisation” of culture via the Spotify’s and Apple Music’s of the sort; streaming has quickly risen as the default medium, providing cheaper and more convenient ways of consuming music, and thus conditioning the masses to desire it to stay this way, even if it comes at the expense of artists getting paid peanuts for their craft and treated like glorified zoo exhibits by corpos and consumers alike.
You thought that was bad? WRONG! Here’s also a worldwide COVID pandemic arriving with the speed of a stray lime scooter approaching your kneecaps, putting all social life to a halt and altering how we interact with each other and the third spaces around us; for many Zoomers, this should’ve been a formative age of interacting with peers and learning how to socialise, but alas, whoever ate that bat sandwich in late 2019 had other plans. Add technology, mass/social media and the rise of short-form content to the fold, thus giving even more avenues to interact with bands, artists and fellow fans on the whim, both parasocial and not so much. And voilà! Now you have even less necessity to participate in concert/gig culture and the rituals surrounding it, let alone respect these customs, or even musicians themselves, in the first place!
A lot of these things thus far are building a strong case against the Zoomers on why we should just pull our spoiled, entitled selves by the bootstraps and learn how to behave. HOWEVER, the aforementioned environment in which many, especially younger, Gen-Zers were brought up and grew up in certainly didn’t make it any easier to devise from this individualistic, commodified, borderline antisocial habitus, let alone unlearn all its toxic parts to begin with.
Besides that, our wee little Western hemisphere is currently in a recession, and Ticketmaster, alongside its fellow music business moguls, keeps turbofisting the music industry into the Marianna’s Trench, buying out smaller independent music venues across the globe and skyrocketing ticket prices into the Sun, matching that of how much Americans pay for an ambulance ride (VAT included). This, of course, riles up our traumatised horde of unrealised potential and further elevates the expectations through the venue roof; if you were to spend 1/3 of your rent on a KoЯn show at the Ziggo Dome, might as well “get what you’re paying for”, right?
To no-one’s surprise, this entitlement also has detrimental effects on the artists and ‘normal’ fans alike who are here to have a great time and enjoy the show, maybe even make a living doing what they love. Like look, Robin, while I understand your frustration over the state of the world and that you paid €300 for this ticket, you are not entitled to a camping tent at the entrance, a barricade view and a foot massage because you’re 1.50m and bit four people in the ankles to get here, I’m really sorry to break it to you.
To summarise, while Gen-Z does indeed stand out with a uniquely problematic concert etiquette, it isn’t an inherent personality flaw that’s at fault. It’s a fucktangular byproduct of poor upbringing and an environment that breeds desperation through scarcity and values individual over community, convenience over integrity and money over morals. As now-grown adults, it is our collective responsibility to do better, but surely these big boy institutions could step up their game too and make it easier for us to do so.