Back in 2013, we took it upon ourselves to remind music fans that it’s our duty to remain at least somewhat civilized when we attend concerts. We weren’t asking people to stop drinking, dancing, and having fun. We just wanted them to stop acting in super obnoxious ways that annoyed everyone around them.
Sadly, the world didn’t listen. In fact, 2013 seems like a quaint and respectable age now that we’re all living in the twisted dystopian hellscape of 2025. Cellphones were hardly a novelty back then, but most people could at least remember a time back then when they weren’t surgically attached to our hands 24/7. Instagram was fairly new, TikTok was barely a glimmer of an idea in the collective mind of the Chinese Communist Party, and the pandemic hadn’t robbed us of basic social norms that we used to obey when we left our homes.
That’s why we’ve put together this new list of proper concert behaviors. Some of these are updated versions of the old rules, while others reflect the changes we’ve undergone over the past dozen years. And yes, some of you won’t agree with all of these. You’ll think we’re pathetic squares that need to learn how to have fun. You’re part of the problem. And when we revisit this again in 2037, everything will surely be worse.
Keep Your Chatter to the Bar. Yes, Even During the Opener You Don’t Know
When you look around the crowd at any given show, you’re likely to see a somewhat wide assortment of folks. The only thing we all have in common is we bought a ticket to this particular concert. That means we want to hear the music. We don’t want to hear you talking. If you don’t like the opener or you’re bored at any particular moment, head to the lobby or concourse, order a drink, and chat away. You and your buddy can do a live read of the My Dinner With Andre script for all we care. Just please don’t stay in your seats and yell to each other over the music. We can all hear you. It’s incredibly annoying. (And if you’ve enjoyed a few cocktails, you have no clue how loud you are. But you’re very, very loud.)
Help Crowd Surfers and Keep Your Hands Up
This isn’t an issue if you’re seeing, say, James Taylor at the Tanglewood Music Center or Engelbert Humperdinck at the Westgate Las Vegas Casino & Resort. But if you’re at a club packed with youths and some of them begin moshing, be a mensch and help out. Put your hands up, move towards them, and guide them towards safety. It’s not always easy, and it’s possible you’ll receive an inadvertent kick to the head, but the alternative is some poor kid smashing their head on the concrete. Nobody wants that. If you don’t want to deal with crowd surfers, move to the back of the room once things get rowdy.
Respect the Game and Don’t Push Your Way to the Front
Moments after the lights dim at any general admission event, there’s always one or two dickheads who push their way to the front of the crowd. They couldn’t give two shits that many of the people in front of them waited several hours to secure their spots. If you see this happen, and you’re feeling brave, position yourself so they have a hard time getting by. If you’re feeling extra brave, you can even tell them they’re breaking the sacred covenant of the pit. (You might want to phrase it somewhat differently.) And most importantly, don’t ever be the pushy asshole yourself. If you want a good spot, get there earlier. It’s as simple as that.
Stop Looking at Setlist.FM During the Show
For every act like Phish that switches around the songs from night to night, there are about 50 like Lady Gaga who basically stick to one set throughout the entire course of the tour. If you want to know what they’re going to play ahead of time, setlist.fm is here and ready for you. But once the show starts and you’re surrounded by people who may not have peeked, please stop looking at that damn website. I can’t tell you how much of an issue this has become in recent years where I can usually look around and see multiple people staring at setlist.fm. And it’s not even a quick glance. They study it like the Talmud with their screens at maximum brightness. I speak for many people when I say that I don’t want to know what’s coming next. And even if I looked weeks ago, I didn’t memorize it. Please give me a chance to be surprised.
Don’t Throw Shit Onto the Stage
We really need to say this? Don’t throw a beer bottle at the performers. Don’t throw coins. Don’t even throw your demo tape or a handwritten letter. Have you people lost your minds? (Back in 2004, someone threw a lollipop at David Bowie and hit him square in his good eye. He howled in agony and shock. Wherever that lollipop guy is now, I hope you’re proud of yourself.)
Be Mindful of When You Sit and Stand
We went over this last time, but it bears repeating. If you are at a concert with reserved seating, especially at a theater with sub-optimal sight-lines, it’s your obligation to make sure the folks behind you can see. You can’t be angry at the entire crowd. But if people are mostly seated, and you feel the need to be one person to get up and block people, don’t do it. We know your favorite song just started and you have the itch to dance, but it’s not worth it. A good rule is to stay down if you have a totally clear view of the stage. Your good time isn’t worth angering a ton of other people in worse seats. (Good people disagree on this one and feel they should get up whenever they like. They should think of older people who can’t stand long or just don’t want to bother the folks behind them.)
Turn Down Your Brightness and Turn Off Your Flash
In an ideal world, people wouldn’t feel the need to use their phones at shows. But if you’re going to surrender to the urge, please turn your brightness all the way down. In the pitch black, a phone is extremely bright and incredibly distracting. I don’t need to see your Instagram feed while I’m trying to watch a show. And if you’re filming, at the very least don’t have the flash on. That not only blinds everyone around you, but it often bothers the performer too.
Enough With the “Freebird” Joke
It wasn’t funny in 1978. It wasn’t funny in 1996. It wasn’t funny the first 9,000 times we heard it. And it’s not funny now. We have nothing against a little humor at concerts. But for the love of God, try a new bit. Screaming out “Freebird!” is more played out than a Shecky Greene nightclub routine.
Stop Filming and Taking Photos!
If you ignore everything else on this list, please read this one. We spend all damn day staring at screens. A concert is a chance to put them down and experience something that’s actually happening IRL. But for reasons that remain absolutely baffling, a giant percent of any given crowd would rather use their tiny cellphone screen to watch it when they could look up and see it with their own eyes in super HD 500K reality. People even do this in the very front row when the performer they paid to see is inches away from them. It’s craziness.
Yes, they’re taking photos and videos. But these are terrible photos and videos that they’ll likely never even look at more than once. Put your friggin’ phone in your pocket. Watch the show. For a precious hour or two, live in the moment. We used to do this all the time. We can do it again. (I know I’m an old man yelling at a cloud here. I don’t care. These stupid phones are melting our brains and somebody has to say it.)
For the Love of God, Don’t Shit Your Pants
We kinda can’t believe we have to say this, but it seems necessary now that both Noah Kahan and Olivia Rodrigo have reported that fans are literally soiling themselves at their shows rather than abandon their spots near the stage. People, what in God’s name are you thinking? Most concerts are about two hours long. You can hold it, especially if you go shortly before showtime. This is also true if you’re in a general admission area, even one packed tightly with people near the front of the stage. We know you waited all day for that spot, and can’t bear the thought of someone taking it. We get that you bought those tickets months ago, and have been counting down the seconds to this day. But that doesn’t mean you need to literally shit yourself. All you have to do is say to the people around you, “Hey, I’m going to the bathroom for a second. Can you guard my spot? Just stretch your shoulders and legs out a bit, and I’ll happily do the same for you once I get back.” It’s not hard. People are happy to comply, especially if you say, “The other options is I poop all over the floor sometime during ‘Drop Dead’ or ‘Willing and Able.’”
Courtesy of Jennifer Precious Finch’s archive 
Josh Martin for Rolling Stone
Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny in a split image
Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny Dealt With Trump Quietly. It’s a Smart Move
Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny are both major superstars — and they’ve shared some parallels in their careers and discographies for several years. Now, they’re even using the same playbook to deal with taunts and baiting from Donald Trump and the White House’s social media teams.
Since Trump took office during his second term, he and his administration have been using social media as part of their communication strategy. The propaganda-like, rage-bait-style clips often lean into internet culture and use popular music to make light of Trump’s most egregious actions, like his immigration policy and war-hungry foreign policy.
Olivia Rodrigo, Katy Perry, Ariana Grande, and Noah Kahan are just some of the artists who have had their music used in these videos without their permission — and vehemently spoken out against these actions and against the president. In the past couple of weeks, the Trump administration seems to have wanted to provoke a response from two of the world’s biggest superstars: Bad Bunny and Swift.
On July 30, the official White House TikTok used “La Mudanza” for a particularly tone-deaf video about immigration that celebrated the number of deportations under Trump. A week later, a video with text that said, “mood because it’s August and Donald Trump is your president” set to Swift’s “August” was uploaded by Team Trump, the president’s official campaign account. The caption was an overt provocation: “I’m sure Taylor Swift is going to be super excited we used her song,” it read. Days later, another clip from the same account featured an edited version of Swift’s Red album cover with text that said, “Did you know that Taylor Swift wrote a whole album about the color of the Republican Party?”
Neither musician has released a public statement denouncing the use of their music in Trump’s videos. Instead, two of the world’s biggest superstars quietly removed their songs from videos posted by official accounts linked to the Trump administration. (It’s unclear if there is a TikTok feature that allows selective sound muting on videos or if the respective teams reached out to the social media accounts directly.) The tracks are still available for other TikTok accounts to use in their videos, making their silence a pointed — and smart — approach. Both Bad Bunny and Swift seem to recognize the president and his administration’s tactics for what they are: antagonizing moves that keep the Trump conversation centered on his social media presence, rather than his actual policies and the harm they commit. Why would they add their star power to the conversation and stoke the flames when that’s exactly what the White House appears to want?
Some people argue that celebrities should wield their platform to denounce Trump at any chance if they are truly not politically aligned with his MAGA politics. But because they hold so much influence, these superstars need to be strategic about how they use it.
Benito, in particular, has been incredibly outspoken about his politics. He stood on two of the world’s biggest stages and used them to voice pro-immigration messages, denounce Trump’s policies, and highlight Puerto Rico as it struggles with the effects of U.S. imperialism. “Before I say, ‘Thank God,’ I’m going to say, ‘ICE out,’” the Puerto Rican superstar said at the 2026 Grammys. “We’re not savage. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans.” Last summer, Bad Bunny’s music video for “Nuevayol” used a voice that sounds a lot like the president’s to deliver a pro-immigrant message. “I made a mistake. I want to apologize to the immigrants in America. I mean the United States. I know America is the whole continent,” the voice bellows out of a Seventies radio toward the end of the video. “I want to say that this country is nothing without the immigrants.”
Fans were convinced that Benito would speak out against the official White House TikTok account when it used one of his most political songs. But commenting on the video would only blow up the discussion for a wider audience. When Rodrigo, Perry, Grande, and Kahan made public comments, spokespeople for the White House used the opportunity to spread hateful rhetoric. “We’ll say this one last time: what’s actually barbaric, inhumane, and heinous are the criminal illegal aliens who have injured and murdered innocent American citizens,” Abigail Jackson said in a statement to Rolling Stone after Grande spoke out. It’s the antithesis of what Benito said during his Grammys speech this year: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”
Swift, on the other hand, has dealt with Trump and the right-wing’s instigations for years, each one crazier than the last. The TikTok videos from the last week aren’t even the first time that the administration has used the singer’s music for social media videos. Last fall, both the official White House TikTok account and Team Trump used songs from Swift’s then-newly released The Life of a Showgirl in separate videos. One plucked the lyrics “pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes” from “The Fate of Ophelia” to celebrate Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and the first and second ladies. The others boasted about Trump by using “Father Figure” and honored Melania Trump’s Patriot of the Year award with “Opalite.” As of Aug. 10, the audio is not available under all of these specific videos.
The pop superstar has not spoken publicly about these instances. But she has made her disdain for Trump clear. Over the years, Swift has criticized Trump’s autocratic leadership. On X, she wrote “we will vote you out” and endorsed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the 2020 and 2024 elections, respectively. In 2019, Swift told Rolling Stone, “There’s literally nothing worse than white supremacy. It’s repulsive. There should be no place for it.”
Even though she’s shared her liberal viewpoints on issues like abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and racial inequality, Swift has still faced ridiculous claims of being MAGA-aligned and folding in right-wing dog whistles to her music — and that’s without ever naming Trump. If Swift were to make a statement about her music being used by the Trump administration, the attention-seeking president would absolutely revel in it. Getting Swift and Bad Bunny to weigh in is exactly the type of headline grabber he would love to draw attention from his remarkably unpopular presidency.