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.’”
Holzman and Hughes at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.Courtesy of Ekko Astral
Holzman and Hughes in Brooklyn, May 2026.Griffin Lotz for Rolling Stone
There’s no immediate resolution in any of this. There’s no surrender either — and a lot of great escape. White’s slide guitar in “Dollar Bill” sounds like a National Steel on steroids until the solo, when it turns into what seems like a theremin gone postal. “I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing” has a great pop-wise chorus closer to the Pretty Things than Son House. And don’t miss White’s wry aside to the White Stripes’ old creation myth in the second verse of “G.O.D.,” on the way to the real business at hand. “Well, it’s the beginning of the world now,” he declares at the song’s end. “Let’s do it all over again.”
Jay-Z has turned the 30th anniversary of his classic debut album into a major marketing event
Jay-Z Knows the Past Still Pays
There’s a pleasant absurdity to the advertisements for JAŸ-Z30 that are currently found across New York’s subway tunnels. Their dramatic imagery — a stark black backdrop pierced through the center with a pair of hands, presumably Jay’s, fixed into the famous Roc diamond — invites a kind of religious authority that feels a touch ironic for anyone who’s old enough to remember all types of handwringing over those very hand symbols only a few years ago. And maybe that’s the point. By now, nostalgia’s grip extends layers deep. So much so that you could find yourself waiting for the train, reminiscing on the days when people still made jokes about the so-called Illuminati.
Jay-Z’s months-long campaign commemorating the 30th anniversary of Reasonable Doubt and the 25th anniversary of The Blueprint has indeed resurfaced the rapper-turned-mogul’s success story. Reasonable Doubt, released in 1996, positioned Jay as not only a resonant voice in hip-hop but also in the increasingly lucrative business around it. After major labels passed, the album was released independently through Roc-A-Fella Records and Priority Records, setting the tone for Jay’s career as a business…man.
And in the full-court press campaign around this summer’s anniversaries, culminating in this weekend’s trio of performances at Yankee Stadium, Jay’s business acumen is again at center focus. You’d be forgiven for throwing around buzzwords like “multichannel” or “cross-platform” to describe the slate of festivities. There was a Spotify-backed takeover of the J and Z trains; custom JAŸ-Z30 subway maps and a Google Maps guide; commemorative Brooklyn Public Library cards; and most recently Bowery Station and DUMBO pop-ups with archival footage and merch. (That these Yankee Stadium shows come on the heels of Taylor Swift’s wedding at MSG suggests some sort of mega-rich takeover of cultural institutions, but let’s leave that one for another day.)
The moves come as nostalgia continues to drive a considerable chunk of the music industry’s profits. In an era when old songs can circulate infinitely on streaming platforms, gaining new life in the form of everything from samples to memes, and when superfans are willing to spend on physical goods, limited merch, and live experiences, album anniversaries have become their own product launches. Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt campaign is only the splashiest recent example.
No wonder, then, that Beyoncé already appears to be setting the stage for her own run of commemorations for the upcoming 20th anniversary of her album B’Day in September. Over the weekend, she released her first new song in two years, titled “Morning Dew (Donk),” to tease the upcoming reissue. According to Luminate, older music still dominates attention, with only 43 percent of U.S. on-demand audio streams in 2025 coming from tracks released in the previous five years. This is also one reason why vinyl and physical formats have seen renewed value in recent years, with the RIAA reporting that vinyl sold 46.8 million units in the U.S. in 2025, compared with 29.5 million CDs. Luminate says superfans are 20 percent of U.S. music listeners and spend heavily on live events and physical merchandise; 73 percent of these fans purchase physical merch, versus 26 percent of general music listeners.
In today’s industry, having a major anniversary is like having a new product to promote, a way to participate in an already thriving marketplace for nostalgia. The demand is visible well beyond official artist stores: Vintage concert tees now trade as collectibles, with one 1967 Grateful Dead shirt selling at Sotheby’s for $19,300 and rare rap tees treated as wearable archives of hip-hop history. Anniversary campaigns give artists and labels a way to reclaim that energy, turning the secondary market’s appetite for old symbols into new, officially sanctioned products.
Jay-Z’s official anniversary store turns that logic into a menu of objects: a $1,500 collector’s crate, a $300 cassette box, $400 Yankees jerseys, and four-figure varsity jackets. Of course, Jay is far from alone when it comes to legacy acts cashing in on nostalgia. He’s more like one salient example of a much larger wave of artists and promoters marketing anniversary products that includes the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness 30th anniversary super-deluxe edition, My Chemical Romance’s Black Parade stadium tour, and the returned Warped Tour, among many others.
Five years before Reasonable Doubt became the occasion for library cards, pop-ups, collector crates, and stadium spectacle, its 25th anniversary was marked by an NFT. In 2021, Sotheby’s and Roc Nation auctioned a one-of-one Derrick Adams artwork tied to the album, billed as the only official Jay-Z-authorized commemoration of the anniversary. Around the same time, Roc-A-Fella was in court over co-founder Damon Dash’s attempted sale of a Reasonable Doubt-related NFT, a dispute that ended with a judgment making clear that no shareholder could sell or dispose of an interest in the album — including through an NFT — without the company’s authorization.
That ownership question is becoming harder to avoid as music enters the AI era, where the archive is not only something to reissue, exhibit, or sell, but something that can be scraped, modeled, and trained on. Last week, SZA took to Twitter to express frustration with AI music company Suno, notably calling out Diplo by name as one of the company’s investors. “DO NOT GIVE AWAY YOUR VIBRANIUM !!! DO NOT TRAIN AI WITH YOUR GENIUS,” she wrote on Twitter. Her complaint was joined by Kenneth Blume, who said Suno’s workers were “stealing from countless struggling musicians.”
For an artist with a legacy as impactful as Jay-Z’s, the current anniversary boom feel like the latest phase of a longer project of deciding who gets to turn hip-hop history into intellectual property. Jay-Z’s legacy deserves preservation; few catalogs have made a stronger case for it. But the more that preservation arrives through limited-edition objects, auction platforms, luxury merch, and authorized experiences, the more it has to answer a harder question: When does protecting the archive become another way of extracting value from it?