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By Craig Anderson
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Live music is dying at the hands of the very industry built to promote it.
A concert should never feel like a high-end luxury asset, a privilege reserved exclusively for those with the deepest pockets. Yet, that is exactly the dystopian reality music fans are waking up to.
For decades, the magic of the concert experience has never been about the eye-watering price of admission or the production budget, but the rare, transcendent moments when thousands of total strangers melt into a single, collective heartbeat.
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The concert floor has historically functioned as a powerful space capable of binding fractured communities, giving a roaring voice to political movements, and turning a song into a cultural statement that resonates well beyond the stage.
So when we price out the everyday fan, we dismantle a vital piece of our social fabric and silence the very collective energy that gives music its power.
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I still remember seeing U2 at Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom around 1984. During a performance of Gloria, Bono stopped the show after noticing a security guard violently confronting a fan who was trying to reach the stage.
He intervened, checked on the fan, and challenged the guard’s treatment of him. The moment lasted only a few minutes, but it captured something essential about live performance.
An artist had the attention of an entire room and used it to remind everyone that how we treat one another matters. That is the kind of experience people carry home.
Today, even getting into that room has become an ordeal.
A Digital Siege
Automated bots routinely infiltrate digital ticket queues, sweeping up massive quantities of seats before genuine fans can even click "purchase," only to relist them instantly at extortionate markups.
The sheer scale of this digital siege is staggering. UK government research recently revealed that a single ticketing platform blocked more than 40 million bot attempts in just one month.
When software algorithms dictate access to art, the marketplace ceases to serve the community, leaving music lovers to pay the price for systemic corporate failure.
In October 2026, Garth Brooks canceled an additional Kansas City matinee after a ticket sale was overwhelmed by bots. Brooks said more than 90,000 people were in the queue, with most believed to be automated accounts.
The ticketing company, AXS, and T-Mobile Center halted the sale. The additional November 7 matinee was subsequently canceled, while Brooks' two evening performances remained scheduled.
The episode exposed how difficult it can be for artists and organizers to ensure that tickets reach genuine fans, even when additional performances are added to meet demand.
Artists should never have to cancel a concert to protect their audiences. Yet the episode exposes how little control performers can have over the systems through which their work reaches the public.
The Importance of Touring
I understand why touring has become so important to artists. Since traditional music sales have changed dramatically since the arrival of digital distribution, live performances have become a valuable source of revenue.
For established performers, stadium tours can sustain careers. Smaller musicians, however, rarely have the following or financial resources to generate comparable returns.
Their audiences are built one venue, one performance, and one ticket at a time. If fans are priced out or discouraged by the prospect of fighting bots, those artists lose opportunities that may never return.
There is also a cultural cost here. A generation that grows accustomed to abandoning ticket queues, paying exorbitant resale prices, or staying home altogether will gradually lose its appetite for live performance.
The experience becomes an expensive obligation, with audiences expecting a return on a substantial investment. The spontaneity that makes concerts memorable starts giving way to the anxiety of protecting a costly evening out.
I believe a fairer ticketing system could give fans access at reasonable prices. It could allow emerging musicians to build loyal audiences and restore the sense of shared experience that makes live performance valuable.
Otherwise, we retain a music culture where the biggest acts and wealthiest fans occupy the best seats, while everyone else watches from a distance.
Challenging the Status Quo
There are already examples of artists challenging the status quo. Radiohead’s approach to its upcoming Australian and Japanese shows offers a practical alternative.
Working with its promoter and authorized ticketing platforms, the band introduced advance registration to reduce competition from bots and scalpers and restricted resale to official channels at face value.
These measures put access and accountability at the center of the transaction.
This is the blueprint the music industry must adopt at scale; the burden of reform cannot rest solely on individual artists. True accountability requires promoters, venues, ticketing giants, and regulators to establish enforceable, industry-wide standards for mandatory buyer verification, strict purchase limits, and face-value resale.
Tech platforms must be legally required to prove their safeguards work, facing severe consequences when they fail. Until the entire ecosystem prioritizes the audience over the algorithm, live music will remain a hostage to corporate inertia.
An Obligation
I am encouraged by artists who are willing to challenge a system that has become comfortable exploiting their audiences. But goodwill and individual intervention will never be enough.
A major artist might have the leverage to halt a sale or demand a different arrangement. An independent musician playing a 300-capacity venue may have no such bargaining power.
The people running the live entertainment industry need to decide what they are actually selling. If the answer is simply access to a seat, then bots and resellers will continue to treat that seat as a financial asset.
If the answer is an experience shared between artists and audiences, the industry has an obligation to protect the conditions that make it possible.
The next generation should inherit a live music culture they can participate in, not one they have to bid their way into.
Craig Anderson is the Founder and CEO of Craigman Digital, a media production and digital content services company founded in 2000 that works with clients across the music and entertainment industries. All views are his own.
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