When Chante Whyte saw Harry Styles announce his fourth studio album Kiss All The Time, Disco Occasionally, her first thought was blinding joy at the return of her favorite artist. But once the dates were announced for its accompanying tour, there was another feeling that threatened to overtake it: worry.
“I promise you, I had heart palpitations every single night thinking about what the Ticketmaster war was going to be like,” she tells Rolling Stone.
While the Together, Together tour doesn’t start until May 16, tickets sales have already started for almost every date. But fans who signed up for artist and Amex presale were shocked to discover many tickets going for upwards of $1,000. Part of this is because he is Harry Styles — an international pop star who’s had all of his studio projects debut at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — but also a former member of the boy band One Direction. Styles hasn’t toured for several years, and has a reputation for virtually disappearing after finishing a round of shows, meaning many audience members fear that missing out on a ticket could mean waiting another three years — at least — to see him again. There’s also the fact that Together, Together is significantly smaller than past Styles tours, with just 67 dates in 11 cities, including a 30-night run at Madison Square Garden. And the demand is astronomical — more than 11 million people queued up for 500,000 tickets for shows in the New York City area.
And while all these components drive demand, Styles fans also have to contend with the music industry’s longtime battle with ticket sellers. High ticket prices have been a problem for decades — fans complained about how much it cost to see the Rolling Stones in these very pages back in 1969 — but in the past few years, artists and fans have become increasingly vocal about it. In September, the Federal Trade Commission sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster, alleging the ticket platforms hide fees from consumers and encourage bots to purchase large swaths of tickets and drive up the resale price. Ticketmaster denied the allegations, but announced several changes to the platform, including banning of multiple accounts and shutting down price tracking tool TradeDesk. But while the lawsuits and ongoing controversy continue, Styles’ fans are still eager to find tickets — and they’re going to extraordinary lengths to see their favorite artist live.
For Daniella Barone, 24, getting tickets is about more than having a good time on a night out. It’s her second chance to experience a fandom she loves. The illustration student goes to college in Florida but is originally from Venezuela. She planned to be at a Miami show in 2020, but had to leave the country to receive her green card. Then Covid-19 hit, closing the embassy and leaving her stuck in Venezuela for several months. By the time she was able to come back to the U.S., the concert had been cancelled.
“I’ve been listening to One Direction since I was 11 and I’m 24 now,” she says. “I’ve always loved Harry’s music but I also love the fandom. It’s like a little family. That’s always something that has really appealed to me; having that community.”
She tells Rolling Stone that the minute she saw the tour announcement, she knew she had to get cash fast. But as a student, she needed a job that didn’t interfere with her heavy class schedule. Her answer? Plasma donation. She’s donated twice and plans to keep the donations up until she can afford two tickets and plane fare to New York. Everything else? Well, she’s not as sure. “I can only eat once a day, but I’ve done it before!” she says, laughing. (The practice is generally considered safe for those 17 and over who fit certain medical requirements, according to Mayo Clinic and the American Red Cross Association, but it’s important to wait at least 28 days between donations.)
Ava Engle, 18, had a similar idea. The San Diego State University student describes herself as an avid concert goer. “I’ve fought a lot of Ticketmaster wars,” she says. But as a college student, she tells Rolling Stone her schedule has severely limited the type of work she can do to get money and keep up with classwork. She’s deathly afraid of needles, but after failing to find a Styles ticket under $1,000 during the official Ticketmaster sale, she signed up for plasma donation.
Each session nets her around $90, which she says adds up when she also takes on tutoring gigs. During school breaks, she also makes minimum wage working at the front desk of a swim club, so between the three, she’s hopeful she’ll have enough. But having to put so much work into the same tickets some people paid $200 for at the last tour still makes her frustrated.
“I’m terrified of needles, and I was so scared,” she says. “Being in the chair, I was having second thoughts. Like, ‘What am I doing?’ I just want to see one of my favorite artists. We shouldn’t have to be doing all of this just to afford tickets for one night.”
Since the tour went on sale, fans have maintained their outrage over ticket prices. Even Styles’ former bandmate Zayn Malik appeared to reference the controversy at his Jan. 28 show. “I just want to say a big, big thank you to every single one of you for being here tonight,” he said on stage. “Hopefully the ticket prices weren’t too high. Just saying.” As ticket prices have skyrocketed, fan behavior around concerts has also changed. For major stars like Styles, Billie Eilish, or Olivia Rodrigo, who have a younger fanbase, many concert goers offset ticket costs by buying cheaper floor tickets without seats and then camping overnight in front of the stadium in order to be as close as possible to the stage. (Even those tickets can cost $400 to $900 or more.) But there’s also a lack of transparency about how many low-cost tickets are actually available in the first place, which fans say makes purchasing feel less like a first-come-first-serve system and more like a lottery. (Representatives for Styles cold not be reached for comment on ticket prices.) On Wednesday, Styles announced that he was playing “one night only” in Manchester, England, where all tickets would cost £20. Fans are invited to “request” tickets starting this Friday. So far, more than 1.4 million people have liked that post on Instagram.
“I do everything right. I’m not a bot. So the fact that I’m still [100,000th] in line and then when I get in, I see the ticket prices, and there’s barely anything available, and it’s all over $1,000 or like, $700 and they’re not even amazing seats. It’s so frustrating,” Engle says. “It’s like, ‘Harry, what are we doing?’”
Aaron Fern, 28, wasn’t a huge One Direction fan. But when he heard Styles’ first solo album, he fell immediately in love. Styles has been one of his top artists every year since 2019. When he and his friends saw the tour announcement, he immediately rushed to their group chat. “It was like, ‘We need to get tickets,” he says. “It felt like, ‘We need to go now,’ or else it’s going to be another five years until we see him.”
Fern signed up for dozens of presale opportunities for the shows at Madison Square Garden — but he’s still planning to go into more credit card debt to buy tickets. His expected budget was around $1,000 for two tickets, but after failing at several pre-sales, he says he’s going all in and just looking for second jobs. “I’m really surprised. I don’t blame [Harry] because it’s like blaming the weather man for the weather. But it is crazy,” he says. “I’m looking for bartending gigs, restaurant work, record stores. Anything that I feel like I have experience in but could also make me money the quickest.”
When Whyte, 25, thinks about her dozens of times attending Styles concerts, she calls them “life altering” experiences full of friendship and community. “Last time Harry went on tour, I went to almost 30 shows. It’s actually kind of insane,” she says, laughing. “I tell my mom all the time, there’s a brain cell that’s short circuited when it comes to that man.”
Because ticket prices are so high, Whyte, a law-school graduate who is currently studying for the Bar Exam, says she’ll have to make a significant dip into her savings in order to see Styles play live. It’s a sacrifice she’s prepared to make — especially since she plans on going to as many shows as she can possibly get tickets for. But Whyte tells Rolling Stone the high cost of tickets is more than upsetting — it feels antithetical to the themes Styles promotes.
“There’s an allure of being at Harry Styles. Yes, it’s Harry. But it’s also about the community you join, being in the pit, dancing together, camping out. It’s that feeling of belonging that keeps me coming back,” she says. “I find it ironic that the whole tour is called Together, Together and it’s this idea that we belong together, when the ticket prices clearly are saying something else.”
A past show produced by The Concert Production for Sidhu Moose Wala.
The Concert Production founders Sohail Mansuri and Zeeshan Siddiqui. Photos: Courtesy of The Concert Production
Drake onstage in Toronto last year
Everybody Likes Drake Again. That Means We’re Healing
Not to be dramatic or anything, but not too long ago, listening to people talk about Drake, you’d think he would never top the charts again. But here we are: With Iceman, he’s broken his own record, earning a 13th week atop Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart on Sept. 5, surpassing Take Care’s 12-week run more than a decade ago. The achievement comes after the great rap civil war of 2024, which was framed as everything from a referendum on Drake’s character as a human being to a cleansing of what popular radio host Ebro would describe, in February 2025, as “a sickness in the game.”
Again, not trying to be dramatic, but even if you were skeptical of the discourse circa 2024, it is a bit shocking to hear the public’s recent re-embrace of Drake. Consider how far the frenzy around the most salacious allegations on Kendrick Lamar‘s “Not Like Us” extended. There was Christopher Alvarez, a disabled journalist, being dragged into conspiracy theories. There was the woman from the resurfaced concert footage, now 31, having to publicly dispute the creepy significance strangers had assigned to an onstage kiss from when she was 17. Drake said in his lawsuit against UMG that the threats had forced him to pull his seven-year-old son out of school.
What now feels like the absurdity of the moment registered as something deathly serious at the time. By September 2024, Lamar was releasing the ominous “Watch the Party Die,” just days after his Super Bowl halftime performance was announced. Oh, also, a major talking point in American culture a year and a half ago was whether one of the biggest superstars in the world would be publicly branded a pedophile during the Super Bowl.
In what world would any celebrity recover from that?
Except, with time, the online frenzy surrounding the Drake and Lamar feud reads more like a mass-psychosis event than a cultural reckoning. The music, oddly enough, often seemed secondary to the certainty of everyone discussing it. “Not Like Us” was a veritable hit, absolutely. But its cultural dominance became bound up in a widespread vilification of Drake that curdled online, where the most damning interpretation of anything could quickly become the accepted one. For a while, even putting on a Drake song could feel like something you had to explain, as if listening amounted to taking a position on the allegations.
That this all happened in 2024 is meaningful. This was right in the peak of Elon Musk’s reconstruction of Twitter, privileging rage bait and engagement tactics that helped misinformation disseminate like fact. It was also the beginning of AI tools becoming sophisticated enough to produce convincing-sounding tracks. Even before Drake released his first response, “Push Ups,” AI-generated response tracks were circulating across social media. And so, in many ways, the well of public opinion was already poisoned.
Listeners’ recent embrace of Drake feels settled in a broader cultural shift brewing since 2024. The beef, in hindsight, feels like a dying vestige of whatever people want to call “Woke 1.0”: a particular faith that exposing the right person could amount to a cultural transformation. For a moment, defeating Drake seemed to promise something about the future of hip-hop, about who would belong in it and what it would tolerate.
There were obvious holes in the argument, namely who exactly these arbiters of culture were and why they were uniquely qualified to speak for the entirety of Black people, questions that Drake pokes at on “Ran to Atlanta” from Iceman. Still, these were never even supposed to be binding philosophical truths in the first place. To hear levelheaded commentators discuss it, this was all simply entertainment — two of the genre’s greats duking it out. Even one of the beef’s catalysts, Metro Boomin, echoed the sentiment, lamenting how online fans had turned the battle into something sinister. Hell, even Jay-Z said something similar before himself tossing a few jabs at Drizzy in a freestyle at the Roots Picnic this year. But the artists themselves supplied the allegations. The ability to raise those stakes and then retreat into “simply entertainment” was part of the dynamic, too.
Even so, how it all devolved into a pseudocultural reckoning says more about the environment fans exist in today than it does about either Drake or Lamar. In the years around the beef, shocking revelations about Diddy as well as the global elite’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein have become folded into the background, alongside a sense that accountability remains selective. This atmosphere of collective powerlessness offers one explanation for the conspiratorial thinking at the heart of Lamar versus Drake. A frustration with an increasingly degraded world and dwindling resources to change it means outrage can mobilize an enormous number of people very quickly, with little holding them together once the moment passes.
The language of exploitation and cultural extraction gave the battle a purpose that seemed to extend well beyond either rapper. But even if you took the least charitable opinion imaginable of our Canadian hitmaker, what was supposed to happen after Drake was defeated? The industry whose supposed wickedness Drake allegedly embodied carried on selling the spectacle itself.
What everyone was caught up in was an appetite with a longer history than the social media platforms now feeding it. Lance Oppenheim’s new film, Primetime, returns to Chris Hansen and To Catch a Predator, a television format that made public humiliation feel like a public service. The connection is in the experience offered to the audience. The viewer could enjoy the confrontation with the reassuring sense that watching served some larger good. Never mind if anything that was unfolding on screen amounted to justice.
In the historian Anton Jäger’s book-length essay Hyperpolitics, published earlier this year in English, he describes how the past decade’s surge of political feeling has coincided with a continuing withdrawal from communal life. More isolated digital environments can fuel extraordinary mobilization without the actual community organizations that might turn it into something tangible. Negating Drake, then, became a gesture in itself. A means of signaling a broader dissatisfaction with the direction of hip-hop culture. Where the problems extend to technology and the demoralizing margins of streaming music, for a while it felt good for people to just wrap it all up in one word: Drake.
But on Iceman, it’s hard to take the idea of Drake as an evil force within hip-hop very seriously, even as he himself makes an effort to lean into the role of the villain. Drake’s music is most potent when it’s aimed at the masses, even if he swears his nice-guy days are over. This is the Degrassi kid turned global superstar rivaling Taylor Swift, after all.
Now, with Fear of Missing Out, Drake’s cryptically announced project slated for release this week, we’ve entered a second kind of Drake Renaissance. However delusional it seems, there was a moment when it felt somehow wrong to play Drake. His return to the top of the charts suggests a good deal of people were eager to get back to listening.