Concert Camping: Fan Dedication or Disturbing the Peace?
At first it seems romantically spiritual: music motivating women and men to leave their safe homes and take to tents to street-meditate like a queuing communal pilgrimage until they receive their relic of melody, standing barrier-side at their deity’s (e.g. Harry Styles) concert, evoking their pure dedication and passion in a spectacle of rewarded patience.
However, there’s another way of looking at it:
Skipping meals, skipping showers, and skipping the others who had to work long hours. Endangering yourself in freezing cold pressures, forcing others to commit to your drastic measures, while creating unfair assumptions of an earned ‘owned’ front-row seat when, in reality, it was general admission and you curated the ‘que’ all on your own.
Tents left once they enter, rubbish all over the streets while homeless people are often persecuted for trying to survive in tents on those streets, a contrast to how these security-protected-spots were safe and then promptly left with pomp and great pace.
This is to say: Concert camping has its cons.
The backlash against concert camping has only been rising with stories of campers in below freezing conditions being made to go back to the end of the line and social media debating its ethics.
This article will identify whether concert camping is a personal or systemic problem.
If we approach camping for a concert under an individualistic lens then it only seems right and fair that if you decide to wait outside the concert before anybody else arrives and continue to wait there until they let people in…well, then it seems appropriate that your difficult time being the first on a patch of street will equate to the first choice of a patch of concert. If you have the time, you can get a better return for your money. Meanwhile, the single parent who paid the same ticket price but had to clean up their kid’s mess, and wait for the late babysitter, gets to enjoy the concert from a-far-far-away. But that’s proper order, because it’s every person for themselves, right? Well, that seems to contradict the nature of a concert: concerts are collective. Their purpose is to take the music each person may have enjoyed individually and to share this joy with others, becoming an impromptu but crucial community.
The philosophy of concert camping impinges on this community as it creates this false hierarchy of fans and super fans. It was less of a problem when only a few would arrive much earlier but it has gained so much popularity that now crowds are going against the agreed upon time, earlier and earlier, and making those without choice to get worse positions. Furthermore, the extreme cases can ruin the experience for others due to their lack of hygiene by smelling out a moshpit all by themselves. Everyone has free will and it is their right to arrive earlier but campers are going against the all for all ethos of a concert and dividing it into factions instead. However, should the blame be placed on the people or the systems that do little to control fair entry and create concert tickets so expensive that people feel the need to commit to such extremes to get their money’s worth?
Concerts seem to be framed by competition from the beginning now. Just as people camp in real life, they camp online, waiting with foot soldiers refreshing online pages until tickets are finally released and they’re all bought and gone like a gust of wind flew over. People race to get the cheapest tickets they can so as to not be tortured by dynamic pricing. Once they have their inflated tickets, it makes the concert feel like more of a status symbol that they have to get the most out of, so they race (still feeling in competition) to get the best spots. This is unfortunate. It is the fault of the industry, not the individual. Let's stop littering tents outside of an eco-conscious singer’s venue. Let's erase competition and bring collectivity back to concerts.
Written By: Ben Lynch @ben_lynch__
Edited By: Kirsten Baldwin @teddys_bookshelf
