Recently, I waited two hours for a Weeknd ticket I never got. The Bangkok date of his final After Hours Til Dawn Asia tour — October 11 — went on presale two days ago and I logged in early like a good fan.
Then, I waited one hour just to enter the queue. I waited another hour staring at a placid little progress bar that promised I was almost there. And then finally, when the site finally let me in, the seat map looked like a graveyard in real time: every section I clicked greyed out two seconds later, while I was still typing in my card details. I closed the tab somewhere around the tenth refresh, horrified and stunned that the closest I had come to seeing The Weeknd live, after fifteen years of fandom, was a Cloudflare loading screen.
It was supposed to be the moment. Instead, it was Ticketmaster.
Let me be unambiguous: I am not a casual. I was on House of Balloons in 2011, when Abel Tesfaye was a faceless rumour on a Tumblr-era mixtape, before the Grammys, the Super Bowl, the brand consultants. Kiss Land in 2013. Beauty Behind The Madness in 2015. I studied at UTSC, the same Scarborough campus he came up around, and one evening when he was shooting the video for "Secrets" on my university grounds, I trespassed onto the closed set, crouched behind a black screen, and watched him film. Campus police caught me eventually. It did not matter. It was Abel. It was always Abel for me. Yes, I was in Toronto, but I didn’t give a shit about Drake.
So when the Asia leg was announced, after I had spent the entire pandemic relocating to India and watching every other artist skip the subcontinent like a footnote, I thought it was destiny. Bangkok was the cheapest, closest option. Wasn’t it the obvious choice?
Then the presale opened, and I learned what every Swiftie, Oasis fan, and Bad Bunny stan in the last three years has already learned the hard way: the concert is over before it even begins.
The numbers explain the rage. After Hours Til Dawn has crossed a billion dollars in gross and sold 7.5 million tickets across 153 shows, the highest-grossing tour ever by a male solo artist. The Bangkok dates sold so violently that promoters tacked on a second night within hours. Kuala Lumpur added another after both presales for the November 4 show evaporated in minutes. This is not a logistics problem. It is the design.
In November 2022, when Ticketmaster's Eras Tour presale collapsed and 14 million Swift fans were left clutching error codes, the US Senate held a three-hour hearing on whether Live Nation, Ticketmaster's parent since their 2010 merger, had become a monopoly. The Department of Justice and 30 state attorneys general filed suit in May 2024 to break the company up. In March 2026, the case settled. The breakup did not happen.
Ticketmaster's defence is always the same: dynamic pricing fights scalpers, captures value that would otherwise go to touts on the resale market. It is a remarkable argument, because the company that owns Ticketmaster also owns the resale market. Live Nation runs the venues, manages the artists, sells the tickets, and operates the secondary marketplace where those same tickets are flipped at quadruple the price. They are the bouncer, the bartender, and the guy outside selling you a wristband for triple.
So the queue is not a queue.
It is a gate. A filter that quietly sorts out anyone who cannot, or will not, pay the premium. The people who get through are not the ones who love the music most, but maybe the ones with the right credit card presale, the patience of a hostage negotiator, or the disposable income to flip to Viagogo and pay what some Eras Tour fans paid: upwards of a thousand dollars for nosebleeds. Some Oasis resales hit £6,000, can you believe it?
What gets lost in the spreadsheet is what concerts used to be for. Cheap, sweaty, slightly chaotic communions. Now the front row is a phone wall, a content farm, an Instagram flex measured in story views. I do not blame the people standing there. If a ticket costs a month's rent, of course you are going to film it. You have to monetise the experience to justify the experience.
There is a particular sting to this from where I am sitting, in India, where major Western tours still treat the subcontinent like a rounding error. Coldplay's January 2025 Ahmedabad shows produced a BookMyShow meltdown so severe that the Mumbai police filed an FIR against the platform and scalped tickets hit two lakh on resale. We do not even have a Ticketmaster here; we have managed to build the same dysfunction with local characters.
I will, of course, end up on Viagogo. I will pay too much, fly to Bangkok, scream every word to "The Hills" with a hundred thousand strangers and pretend the two hours of queueing and the inflated resale fee did not happen.
But somewhere between the Tumblr era and the Diamond certification, between crouching behind a black screen in Scarborough and refreshing a frozen Ticketmaster page in Gurugram, something I genuinely loved got turned into a transaction I am required to survive.
The concert is no longer the event. The ticket sale is. And the fans have lost.