Concert movies are the future of pop music fandom

polygon.com:

Concert tickets are more expensive than ever. Inflation, Ticketmaster’s monopolistic practices, and increased demand after COVID-related touring delays have coincided to create a perfect storm of ticket-buying agony. Tours were never accessible to everyone: Geography, economics, health and safety concerns, and physical or mental ability make stadium and arena concerts — held only in major metropolitan areas, and only in certain countries — infeasible and/or unaffordable for large swaths of global pop music fandom. As fandom’s role as a source of identity and community becomes more precious, and more people than ever want to see certain concerts, the barriers to attending live shows are rising — so it’s no wonder that concert films are finding expansive new footing.

Take Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, an almost three-hour filmed version of the pop star’s ongoing concert tour. The movie is now the highest-grossing concert film of all time. That isn’t just because of Taylor Swift’s expansive fandom — it’s a direct response to the difficulty of getting tickets to her shows. For fans, The Eras Tour offered up-close, intimate access to a show they never would have been able to attend otherwise.

In July, Pitchfork reported that the average cost of a ticket for the North American leg of Swift’s Eras Tour was $3,801 — a 2,321% increase from her 2018 Reputation Stadium Tour, where the average resale price for North American shows was $157. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour tickets are $19.89 for adults. And people buying those tickets don’t even have to wait in the Ticketmaster queue of terror.

In February, one of the other biggest musical artists in the world, K-pop septet BTS, released a filmed version of their “Yet to Come” concert,