I like listening to NPR’s It’s Been a Minute and today’s episode was a real doozy. Here’s the descriptive paragraph from the NPR page for the episode:

Every couple of weeks there’s a new story of a fan at a concert misbehaving. One fan threw ashes at Pink, another hit Drake with a cellphone, Miranda Lambert stopped her show when fans took selfies with flash photography. Extreme instances have landed performers in the hospital, but more often attendees have noticed the audience has gotten louder and more distracting than ever. Where is all of this coming from?

The year concert etiquette went to trash and why

The thing is, if you look at all the names mentioned there, they’re all the big-name bands. I’m not a musical snob – I listen to Taylor Swift and Fall Out Boy and other big name bands. But the ones I go see in concert are the small bands that are usually doing club shows. I’d always talked about how I love the intimate atmosphere and the cheaper price, but I guess there’s another great reason – people aren’t being jerks. At the last show I went to – Bad Time Records – there was a ska circle and moshing and crowd surfing and everyone there was extremely nice. If you weren’t purposely participating in the moshing and someone bumped into you, they would apologize. When people were falling from the crowd surfing, everyone would try and catch them.

I think, and Brittany Luse and Tiffany Furguson discuss this, that it’s precisely because the big acts are so removed from the fans and cost so much that the bad behavior is happening. I don’t think it’s excused and I don’t think that’s what the hosts are trying to say, but it could help explain the psychology that’s behind the bad behavior at big name concerts. They go through a number of possible explanations and I think the episode is definitely worth a listen.

What do you think?