I can’t pinpoint which infraction sent me over the edge. It might’ve been my fourth or fifth involuntary mouthful of ponytail at Jamie xx’s sold-out concert at History in January, courtesy of the woman dancing near me as if she were in an empty gymnasium. It could’ve been the two folks in the front row at Brittany Howard’s Danforth Music Hall gig last summer, capturing the entirety of her performance on a phone held at precisely my eye level. Or maybe it was the couple at the Phoenix Concert Theatre, loudly exchanging travel bucket lists while, from the stage, Julia Jacklin delivered tearful tales of heartbreak.
Every concertgoer has their own reel of bad crowd experiences. Typically, the emotional arc goes something like this: First comes annoyance (“Can you believe they’re doing that?”), followed by a bid for patience (“Surely, they’ll stop doing that”), which often then descends into anger (“How dare they keep doing that?”). Think pieces on the demise of concert etiquette tend to stop there, concluding with a finger-wagging list of dos and don’ts.
Post-pandemic, this phenomenon has become prominent enough to warrant its own Wikipedia page (“”), extreme enough for artists to issue pleas to their fans, and ridiculous enough to inspire headlines like Rolling Stone’s “.”
But lately, amid the sea of livestreamers, personal-space invaders and attention seekers, I’ve been stuck on a fourth phase of the emotional arc: curiosity (“Do these people not know they’re being inconsiderate, or do they simply not care?”).
If this behaviour can be attributed to a lack of self-awareness, that suggests it can be learned away. I’ll never forget my own formative moment of etiquette education. A teenager at Passion Pit’s 2012 Montreal Métropolis show, I was telling a friend an inappropriately timed anecdote when a fellow (older and cooler) patron tapped me on the shoulder and told me to stop talking. I was mortified then — I’m still mortified now — but shame was an effective teacher. My moratorium on mid-set commentary is still going strong.
In contrast, the last time I told a fan that her elbow was forming new dimples in my rib cage, she doubled down for the rest of the show. As I looked around for backup, I realized I was in the minority. The rules had changed and it was every person for themselves.
ɫɫ music journalist, author and frequent concertgoer Matt Bobkin has also noticed a decline in concert community care since the pandemic.
“Most crucially,” he says, “it feels like there are fewer apologies. Fewer people telling their friends to save their talking for later. Fewer checks to make sure people’s sightlines aren’t being blocked.”
Bobkin recalls a 2023 boygenius concert where the person in front of him began taking selfies, flipping their phone around so that an entire portion of the Budweiser Stage lawn was bathed in flash after flash. When asked to stop, the culprit ignored the request.
Perhaps self-awareness isn’t the issue.
“Before the pandemic, when you’d go to your first 19-plus show, you were one of a few people in the crowd who had never gone to a 19-plus show, so you had to act chill and respectful in order to fit in and not come off like the youngest person in the space,” Bobkin reasons. “But once COVID lockdowns ended, you had two years’ worth of young people — who never experienced this rite of passage — now going to shows together and enabling each other’s behaviour, which then became the norm.”
It’s a norm not merely dictated by disparities in age, but experience. Madison Hayes is a 21-year-old ɫɫ Metropolitan University student who might typically be lumped into the Gen Z intergenerational blame game. But having seen an estimated 50 concerts in the past four years, she’s equally frustrated with the growing disrespect among fans. It’s a shift she’s noticed most among music circles with prevalent “stan” cultures.
“It’s all just stemming from an uptick in individualistic, ‘main character’ mindsets taking hold in what should be communal spaces,” she says.
Poor fan etiquette existed long before the pandemic, but this hyperindividualism sets the current moment apart. Even when faced with irksome behaviour in the past, I’ve always felt that the live music experience creates a sort of network of invisible strings connecting everyone in the room — artists to fans, fans to one another. But lately, it feels more like I’m on an island with my severed string in my hands.
Social media has undeniably fuelled this phenomenon, prioritizing the broadcasting of a moment, or becoming the moment, over the moment itself. The isolation of the pandemic then chipped away at the social mores typically learned in public spaces. Rising ticket prices then injected an unprecedented level of entitlement into the experience: If I paid $500 to see Billie Eilish, shouldn’t I be able to enjoy the concert in whatever way I please?
But this is what leads me to the final stage of the concertgoer’s emotional arc: sympathy. Most discourse around poor crowd behaviour sides with artists and innocent bystanders. Understandably so. Pink doesn’t deserve to have someone’s ashes thrown on stage midperformance, and you don’t deserve those relentless flashes in your eyes. But lately, as I observe my fellow concertgoers lost in their phones and conversations, I find myself wondering: “Are these folks actually enjoying themselves at all? Do they know what they’re missing?”
Research has shown that when people listen to live music in a group setting, their brainwaves sync up with one another. In these studies, neuroscientists found that audience members who experienced this brain bonding tended to enjoy the concert more than their disconnected peers, feeling a deeper attachment to the performers. This might explain that visceral, if fleeting, sense of community you feel at a great show.
These findings suggest a perhaps unsurprising conclusion: the individual thrives in the collective. But when the person to your left is livestreaming the set and the person to your right is venting about their boss, individualism effectively displaces collectivity from the experience. That opportunity for synchronicity and connection is lost, not only between you and your favourite artist, but between everyone in the room. In this way, the demise of concert etiquette is about more than new guard versus old guard. As etiquette is abandoned, the mission and impact of live music become collateral damage. We all lose.
But if peer pressure no longer works to curb bad behaviour, should the onus be on venues to course correct? Dean Metherell is a 32-year-old sound engineer who attends enough concerts to warrant a tracking spreadsheet. After recently moving from ɫɫ to New York City, he noticed some venues enforcing their own etiquette, with positive results. At the Queens venue Nowadays, for example, a set of guidelines is recited to each guest before they can enter the space. These rules cover everything from verbal abuse and sexual harassment to respecting personal space on the dance floor.
“I do feel the crowds at Nowadays are better than most places, but is the Danforth (Music Hall) going to implement this type of policy? No chance,” Metherell says. “I think it’s on the concertgoer to learn the etiquette, but are they actually going to put in the work to do that?”
I’m still holding out hope.
You might tell me to get over it. Times change. Adapt or go home. But as a 31-year-old music journalist, I refuse to accept the argument that I’ve “aged out” of the scene. Some rule books need to be amended, but others are worth fighting to preserve. For that reason, the next time you wave a phone in my face or stomp on my feet like you’re playing Dance Dance Revolution, I’m going to kindly ask you to stop. Consider that my olive branch. My temporarily detached invisible string.
From one music lover to another, I hope you’ll take it.
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