After a few off years for live, stadium-packing, planet-spanning spectacles, summer 2023 has been a very good season for pop music demigoddesses. But you, content consumer, knew that already. If you couldn’t manage to get a ticket to Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour or Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, it doesn’t matter. Everyone else in your life seems to have, and they’ve been posting clips either from MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, or somewhere else in these United States. Taken together, you have probably experienced most of the respective concerts, from almost every angle, on your phone—and you saw a lot of excellent outfits, whether on Beyoncé or Taylor, or on their fans. The sheer bulk of the posting is so overwhelming that there’s only one thing to do: judge how close to the stage everyone who attended comparatively got.
It turns out that stadium seating is a perfect visual representation of social hierarchy. This is technically true for most stadium events, like sports, but since these two world-famous women and their international tours are the closest thing to monoculture we have left, and since a critical mass of people are attending the shows, it’s never been easier to compare and contrast everyone you ever knew to each each other solely on distance from the stage as discerned from their Instagram posts. As ever, the closer you were to the front row or VIP, the more juice you have. What you do with that newfound information about the relative juice-having of the people in your lives—whether you keep it close in your heart or use it—is up to you. As a recent semiviral tweet succinctly put it: “I saw where you sat at beyonce …. We are Not splitting the Uber babe.”
Concert tickets have never been more expensive. This you’ll remember from all the headlines about how much Taylor Swift or Beyoncé tickets were going for, or from your own sweaty attempts to buy six months ago. According to StubHub data reported by CNBC, the average price of Renaissance tickets was $322. And Eras? $920. Everything from ticketing company fees to unregulated resale markups contribute to the climbing costs of these shows. And since you or at least a couple people you know tried to get tickets to one, the other, or both tours, you probably have a mental Excel spreadsheet of how much seats would cost. You know the material difference between row 15 of section 238 and row 12 of section 144. You know that nosebleed seats don’t necessarily correspond to nosebleed prices, but you also know that the closer one gets to Bey’s stage, the closer one’s bank account likely is to empty.
This is only the beginning too. Beyoncé will continue her US leg of her world tour this August and September, and you will see exactly how your most random follows are faring. Imagine it. People from your hometown who you haven’t spoken to since middle school, there in the tippy top of the Dome at America’s Center. That person from your freshman dorm who transferred her sophomore year is suspiciously close to the stage in Inglewood. This colleague and that colleague in seats that mysteriously correspond not at all to what you know of payroll. That person you met on vacation in 2015 is taking a photo with Greta Gerwig??
Taylor Swift hasn’t even gone to Los Angeles yet! Whole group-chat pecking orders could be forever rewritten. Of course, you never know exactly what’s going on in people’s bank accounts. Going into debt for Beyoncé? It happens. You don’t know the lengths people went to budget for one show. You don’t even know whether these concertgoers are even paying out of pocket. Perhaps it’s their cultural capital that got them the good seats—a corporate connection of some kind or other. Perhaps you had a different sort of cultural capital because you are Oprah or Gayle, and you were next to Tina Knowles, Beyoncé’s newly single mother, in what appears to be the most VIP section of all. Did Oprah pay for her ticket? What about Madonna and her children?
Likely no. Because they are Madonna and Oprah, and you’re watching from all the way up there playing America’s hottest game: How did they get those seats?