IF YOU CLAIM TO STAND AGAINST OPPRESSION, YOU CAN’T ENABLE IT IN YOUR OWN BACKYARD
I have sat on this for over a week. I have written so many versions of it. I have been reading about it every day and I still cannot find a reason why I would not publish this.
Before I begin this article there is a few things I want to get straight. I am pro Palestinian, I am anti establishment, and I am not calling out individuals, I am calling out hypocrisy. Every bone and hair on my body is pro Palestinian and anti establishment. I am 110,000,000 percent for these causes. This is not about cancelling anyone or being holier than thou. I am writing this as a human being who sees hypocrisy.
Straight away I know people are gonna tell me to stop equating dynamic pricing with genocide, but it is not the dynamic pricing itself that I am calling out. It is the fact that these artists are standing with corporate machines and rich businessmen who are part of the very problem they claim to hate. They loudly claim to be against oppression and genocide in Palestine while quietly partnering with the very systems that financially ruin the fans who put them on that stage. That is the hypocrisy I am pointing at.
I’m fully aware that events and travel involve substantial costs logistics, security, staffing, insurance, and infrastructure all add up. That said, the baseline ticket price is already set at a premium level that presumably factors in those expenses. So when dynamic pricing is layered on top of an already inflated starting price, it begins to feel less like a necessary adjustment and more like an opportunistic surcharge on top of what we’re already paying. If the base fare is meant to cover the real costs of putting on the event or operating the service, why is additional surge pricing still being applied during peak demand?
And let us be clear, this is not some hidden thing. Dynamic pricing has been in the news everywhere for years. It is not like the artists do not know. They are fully aware of what is going on. They know Ticketmaster and Live Nation are ripping off fans and they are still choosing to work with them anyway. It does not even need to be a class thing. Regardless of whether somebody can afford it or not, we surely should not be paying these extortionate prices for tickets.
And here is the part that makes it even more blatant. Live Nation, the company that owns Ticketmaster, has a subsidiary called Live Nation Israel that publicly said they stand with the IDF while Israel was carrying out its genocide in Gaza at places like HaYarkon Park in Tel Aviv and Live Park in Rishon LeZion, venues built on land taken from Palestinian villages. This is documented. In December 2025, over 600 artists signed an open letter demanding Live Nation drop that subsidiary, and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel has formally called them out for art washing genocide. Yet the same artists who claim to be pro Palestine are still happily working with them. Before anyone says this is me bringing politics into it, it is already political. The artists made it political when they started using their platforms to speak on Palestine while quietly feeding the machine that exploits their own fans.
People want art to be political only when it’s convenient, aesthetic, or abstract not when it demands consistency.
These are the same complaints made about the Eras tour, about the Bruce Springsteen shows, and about the Harry Styles shows. Fans paying hundreds on credit card debts they cannot afford. Prices rising during the line ups, bots and touts getting whole blocks and selling them for double or triple the price. Getting in debt and not seeing a show they love because they simply have no money left.
When people say “just don’t buy the tickets” the first thing to point out is that many people already don’t and that’s exactly why the issue matters as fans are being priced out of their own culture pushed to the margins of scenes they helped build and excluded from experiences that used to be accessible pretending this is a hypothetical choice when it’s already the lived reality for thousands who simply cannot afford to participate anymore. The second problem with that line is the class blindness baked into it since “just don’t buy them” only makes sense if missing out is a neutral consequence for you but for working class fans it isn’t it’s exclusion being told that music the thing that kept you alive and the thing you grew up with is now a luxury item you’re not allowed to touch which isn’t a choice but a lockout. Then there’s the structural trap where even if every fan collectively stopped buying tickets tomorrow the industry wouldn’t suddenly become ethical but would pivot and blame fans for “not supporting live music” as if the system wasn’t designed to squeeze them dry in the first place leaving fans blamed whether they buy or don’t buy. You can also flip the responsibility back where it belongs as fans shouldn’t have to boycott their own favourite artists just to avoid being exploited when the responsibility sits with the people who set the prices approve the pricing models and benefit from the revenue making it absurd to expect fans to fix a system they didn’t build. And underneath all of it is the real issue of power since “just don’t buy the tickets” reframes a structural exploitation problem as an individual consumer choice problem a way of dodging the fact that fans have no real leverage in this system and the people with power artists managers promoters corporations are the ones who could change it but don’t. If you want the sharper more lived in version it’s this “just don’t buy them” is what people say when they’ve never had to choose between a gig and being skint, a line that reveals more about their privilege than your argument.
I am massively against dynamic pricing. Seeing friends struggle and putting tickets on credit card debt they cannot afford to buy tickets for themselves or their children is boiling my blood. Then ticket touts come to finish everyone off and add insult to injury. Everyone gets fucked over in this day and age by corporations, institutions, and by our government. So when a performer says they are against such systems and then turn around and enable these systems to rob their own fans, it feels like another kick in the teeth.
And before anyone says it is just supply and demand or the artists do not control the prices, no it is not that simple. Artists have huge leverage. They can negotiate, they can speak out, they can choose not to work with companies that are ripping off their own fans. Many just choose not to. And when the UK government and the Competition and Markets Authority are calling it exploitation and forcing changes, it is clearly more than just market forces.
Some people want art without accountability, politics without consequence, and ethics without cost.
It is official now that the UK Government along with the Competition and Markets Authority are calling dynamic pricing and the touts exploitation. The investigation of Ticketmaster led to forcing them to update the information in their line ups and give 24 hours prior notice of changes in tier pricing because customers were not informed. Which came out with an article saying dynamic pricing is going to break the music industry and the touts only help. In late 2025, the UK government conducted a full survey and concluded that they are now creating legislation to make the resale of tickets for above face value illegal. Yet here we have bands completely staying silent about this, while openly protesting on Palestine or BLM. Hypocrisy has been sitting with me all week.
And now just two weeks ago a jury in New York found Live Nation and Ticketmaster guilty of running an illegal monopoly and overcharging fans by a dollar seventy two a ticket. Official. In court. After years of them saying it was just market forces and artists have no control. So when they still try to say that now it rings completely hollow.
It puts me in a really weird situation. On one hand, it feels great because for years now, I have been pushing musicians and performers to speak up on Palestine and other social and political movements, which they finally decided to do in droves. I was genuinely proud because it was refreshing to finally have a big star talking about the issues that matter. But then on the other hand, I see my friends who are genuinely struggling and trying to buy tickets on debts they cannot afford. This is boiling my blood.
For me personally, I just do not understand how anyone can defend a certain group of people and in the next breath work with the very institutions that exploit them. Here it starts getting fuzzy for me. I know some of those people are friends of a lot of people and are probably decent individuals, but this needs to be brought out into the light and discussed. If dynamic pricing is ever going to stop, it will only stop if those people speak up.
You can research to death, read every available interview, dig through every document, cross reference any timeline and track every rumour to the root. You will inevitably miss something. Not because of negligence or lack of thoroughness, but because people have complicated histories that are messy, contradictory, rewritten, sanitised, incomplete and forgotten in some cases. You might miss something no matter how much you researched. This does not make you a poor journalist or an inadequate critic. This is part of covering human life.
They are the same people that have made the bands what they are today. I commend these artists for preaching for oppressed minorities, but should they not have the decency of looking after the fans that put them on that pedestal?
I am bringing this topic out into the open once again because it should not be swept under the rug. We need to keep discussing it, keep reminding everyone about it, keep encouraging fans and artists to speak out because it is becoming increasingly unaffordable to watch them.
How is it that something feels completely right and completely wrong? Art and the artist go hand in hand. The context is inseparable from the work. I just cannot listen to a song in peace after seeing an artist completely staying silent while their fans get financially ruined.
Historically, it did not use to be this way either. In Thatchers Britain, punk rock became a phenomenon because of its sincerity. Crass lived in a commune, pressed vinyl themselves, paid no taxes, and actively criticised the monarchy, the Church and capitalism itself. The same goes for The Clash and The Jam. They were told to get back to making music and shut up. They refused to, and back then, the artist and their work were inseparable. And when the artist said anything, they got banned, lost gigs, deals and sometimes more. But that is what it took because the artist had to choose principle over convenience. Before anyone says you cannot compare it to today, I know times have changed. But the principle has not. If you claim to stand against oppression, you should not be enabling it in your own industry.
Today, we have bands doing both and getting praised for it. They will say something about Palestine or BLM if it pleases them, collect their share of moral points for that and then allow the system to do its dirty work and enable it. Ian Brown said something in 2020 and ended up losing everything for it. A bunch of others decided to choose convenience over principles and keep making money from the system.
However, not everybody decided to do this. Robert Smith from The Cure publicly condemned the dynamic pricing used by Ticketmaster and issued refunds to fans that were overcharged. Neil Young has been fighting corporate nonsense for decades now, taking his music offline, speaking out on artist rights and refusing to be bought. Pearl Jam engaged in a huge fight with Ticketmaster in the nineties when nobody else wanted to. These artists showed that you can fight and survive. That you have to choose principle over convenience, regardless of the consequences.
Look at what happened in 2024 when UK bands got together and told Barclays to fuck off from sponsoring every Live Nation festival because of their investments in arms companies supplying Israel. Barclays pulled sponsorship from Download, Latitude, Isle of Wight, Great Escape, the lot. They actually won. That is what happens when artists use the power they have instead of staying quiet and collecting moral points on Palestine while the same machine fucks over their own fans.
That is what this article is targeted at, every single artist allowing the same. Especially Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen and Harry Styles, stop. Stop the dynamic pricing and stop supporting ticket touts. Even the UK government and Competition and Markets Authority have taken the same stance. Learn from Robert Smith and Neil Young. Learn from the artists that have done it before and proven that you can do this. Because right now, this contradiction is hanging with me like a bad smell. We adore the artists, we agree with what they stand for, but we are tired of this hypocrisy. And no, this is not cancel culture. Calling out hypocrisy is not the same as trying to silence people. It is just refusing to look the other way. And before anyone says you are virtue signalling, I am not doing this to look good. I am doing this because I am genuinely tired of watching the same people who claim to care about justice enable the exploitation of their own fans.
Of course, this is not the sole responsibility of the artist. The burden falls on the listeners too. You cannot separate the art from the individual and ignore it. It will not work because you cannot ignore the context. You cannot hide behind the art and claim that it means nothing and therefore has no responsibility whatsoever. If you choose art, you also choose some of its burdens too.
Perhaps this is the actual message. No matter what the work is, the art is inseparable from the truth that surrounds it. So stop, all of you. Stop dynamic pricing. Fight the touts and stand with your fans as much as you fight foreign policies and corporatism. The truth is inseparable from the mess and you cannot run away from it.
