Game of groans: How to win seats in a digital age
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve probably noticed that in recent years, more and more Filipinos have been gobbling up live entertainment like Pacman on Power Pellets: from sporting events to stage plays, from fan meets to concerts. I’m simply amazed at the amount of money and time being spent to be “in the moment” and to be able to preserve it on social media.
Yet, in spite of the all the euphoria a live act brings, one should still expect some anxiety, hitches, and heartaches even before the show begins.
There was a time when concerts were rare treats, not routine events. Local acts dominated the scene, and foreign artists were the stuff of legend. Ticket prices were often a line drawn between the haves and the have-nots, with fans saving up for months to secure even a nosebleed seat—if they’re lucky enough to hear about the show before it sold out.
I still remember with mixed feelings Michael Jackson’s HIStory World Tour. It was one of the first concerts I splurged on, and the open-air show ticket price seemed steep even when I was already gainfully employed. Watching him in person was unforgettable, as was his lip-syncing.
By 2013, when Julio Iglesias performed at the Manila Hotel with ticket prices even higher, I thought I’d seen the peak. Now, with acts like U2, Coldplay, Adele, Taylor Swift, and Suga (a.k.a. Agust D), high prices feel like the norm, but tickets are snapped up within seconds.
Concert culture has certainly undergone a profound transformation, with the journey from physical lineups to digital lotteries now shaping the way fans experience live music. For those who remember scoring concert tickets without battling millions of others online, today’s ticketing landscape feels almost like stepping into a sci-fi story, an alternate reality where a stoic AI decides your fate.
Gone are the days of grunt work entailing sweating it out, risking being drenched by rain or victimized by pickpockets, or duking it out with pa-dedma queue cutters.
Today, the stakes are high. If you want to see someone like IU or Bruno Mars, you need more than money. You need membership in fan clubs, presale codes, and—as Prof. McGonagall would have phrased it—sheer dumb luck.
I have it on good authority (translation: my daughter educated me) that fan club memberships afford advantages with a catch: They offer perks like access to pre-sales and raffles, although it’s not as simple as it sounds. Even with a fan membership, you might still need a code from the ticketing site, which could only put you in the waitlist.
For TXT’s World Tour last year, for example, Filipinos had to enter their fan club number just to access the seat selection window. Raffles in Korea and Japan take it up a notch, automatically charging the credit card you register if you win, and they’re strict about ID checks to avoid scalping —but crafty fans still manage to work around it.
Ticketing sites differ by country, but the queuing ritual is universal: Fans log on early, and sit in a “waiting room” to be randomly assigned a queue number. Getting a low number is akin to finding a Wonka Golden Ticket, so friends team up to increase their odds. My daughter told me she bought Suga tickets in Singapore because she got in first, while her friend handled Bangkok. They usually buy the maximum number of tickets and resell them at face value to fellow ARMY members, often over Twitter, to block scalpers, though it’s risky, with scammers lurking. To be safe, authenticating measures are necessary just to prove the absence of a con. Talk about “HYBE” mentality!
Helping fans get tickets is a whole side hustle now. For a fee, people will queue online or offline to try and snag tickets for you, with or without success. This is yet another permutation of scalping. Rumor has it that for high-stakes K-pop shows, especially in the US and Korea, some people pay hackers to score lower queue spots or dodge purchase limits. As part of the modern concert experience, this secondary market has become more common with rising demand. Anti-scalping ordinances exist in some cities like Pasay and Quezon City, but tech-savvy resellers always find a way around them. A similar law filed in 2018 never took off.
The raffle process, oddly enough, seems to have leveled the field in a way my generation never saw. Wealthy or not, everyone will have to rely on kismet. Is this, then, our “great equalizer”? Or are there clever hacks yet to be devised?
For today’s fans driven by a potent mix of FOMO and YOLO culture, concert-going is less about the music alone and more about the experience. The hunt, the excitement of getting that digital “congratulations,” and the validation that follows a successful purchase make it all worthwhile. Concerts are currency, too. They are proof of dedication that fans display proudly across social media.
Notably, for K-pop fans, the concert experience has a digital twist. Many acts offer online livestreams of select shows, available as ticketed events with unlimited purchases. For those who miss the initial stream, there’s usually a replay a week later, with refined and synced subtitles.
In physical concerts, most K-pop acts speak in Korean, with live interpreters translating after every few sentences. In the US and Singapore, interpreters translate to English; in Bangkok, it’s Thai; and in the Philippines, Taglish. Korean shows, however, usually skip live interpretation altogether. Online livestreams have a slight subtitle delay, but the replays come with synced translations.
The changes go beyond ticketing systems. Concerts used to be held only at the Araneta Coliseum, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and the Folk Arts Theater. They’re simply ancient by today’s standards, but the acoustics are generally better. There’s still a dearth of decent concert venues, even now with the Mall of Asia Arena, the New Clark City Athletics Stadium in Tarlac (because, why go to Manila when your plane landed at Clark International?), and the 50,000-seat Philippine Arena in Bulacan. Horror stories about the Philippine Arena abound: Between the notorious traffic, sparse parking, and the total lack of nearby hotels, attending a show there can feel more like a road trip than a night out. Yet, it’s always fun to hear artists faithfully shout, “I love you, Manila!”
Concert promotion has evolved as well. Back in my day, news of an upcoming concert trickled down the analog way: newspaper ads, a TV spot, or the occasional word-of-mouth buzz. Concert promotion meant waiting and suspense—announcements made weeks or months in advance that fueled anticipation by the day.
Tommy posted to his instagram story pic.twitter.com/JxcXZYu7US
— Tommyinnit Updates! 💛 (@Tmmyupdate) March 31, 2024
Today’s concert teasers are all-out digital spectacles. Artists are hyped on social media long before tickets even go on sale, with livestreams, countdowns, and influencer collabs flooding Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. Instead of waiting for tangible notification, we’re hit with #TheErasTour or #oliviarodrigoinmanila trending on every platform the moment tickets go on sale, and fans dive into presale sign-ups, QR codes, and access links. It’s nearly impossible to miss an event with the deluge of digital alerts.
As I watch the next generations chase their favorite artists, I see their similarities and differences with ours. With each new innovation, I marvel at how concert-going has evolved into a highly coordinated, digital pursuit fueled by dedicated fans.
But although the hunt may have changed, the thrill of success remains timeless for us concert junkies.
