Pearl Jam recently announced their next album Dark Matter along with its subsequent world tour. And what should be a unanimous moment of joy and elation among the Faithfull fans of the band, instead has some not jumping for joy, but rather grumbling for grief as the reality of what the economic toll of participating in a musical celebration of this band that has meant so much to many of us, will take on our finances.
Of course, the prices of everything have gone up in the intervening years between tours of the band, as is the nature of the economy1. And the toll of aging and being the last “original” 90s Seattle grunge band, has exacerbated the Supply And Demand aspect that goes into ticket pricing, as they are only playing a total (as of writing) of 35 dates this entire year2.
Supply is further hampered by Ticketmaster having to have their own cut of available tickets set aside to sell via their own resellers and to apply their own dynamic pricing to fully take advantage of the Cold War that is The Free Market, which they claim acts as a subsidy to keep the majority of tickets at a lower cost3.
The realization that I was not going to be able to afford going to any of their concerts, and listening to this Financial Therapy episode of Depresh Mode, it got me thinking about money and what it means to me. I feel like our relationship is antagonistic, but that’s just on my side. To ask money, I think it would say that it doesn’t even think about me at all.
For me: I fucking hate it. Biggie’s axiom of “Mo money, mo problems,” isn’t true in the inverse because “No money does not in fact mean no problems.” It most likely means All Problems. And therein lies some of the toxicity of our relationship.
Early in elementary school, I didn’t know that school lunch and breakfast weren’t free. I also wondered why not everyone came to school early to get breakfast. I only figured something was going on, because eventually, I had to start paying 35 cents for lunch, but for everyone else it was a dollar. I didn’t know that if your parents didn’t make a certain amount of money, you didn’t have to pay full price — or at all — to be fed at school. I thought it was just something that you got if you did really good in school (which I did).
My family didn’t struggle with money for my whole childhood. Before starting 5th Grade, they were able to buy a house, and we moved to a suburban neighborhood. But it wasn’t one of those Well Off suburban parts of town — it was out in the wilds, outside the city. Suburban sprawl. People had horses — and not because they were really rich, but because there was nothing else out there. They had the space.
As I was finishing school toward the end of the 90s, I didn’t know how I was supposed to take the next step. All I knew was that I couldn’t afford to go to the local university — didn’t know about financial aid or what scholarships to look into. My Senior year, the counselor for my part of the alphabet fucking died right before the year started, so we were kind of shuffled around and given short shrift. Of course, the advice I was given previous years by said counselor was to look into a trade or technical school, even though I wanted to be a fiction writer.
Career guides in the campus library leftover from the 80s had nothing to offer. It was Journalism or nothing. Writing for a newspaper or getting articles published in a magazine. But that might have meant needing to talk to people or interviews to Get The Story. Again, I couldn’t afford to pay for real college on my own dime, so I did the community college thing and put it all on my credit card. And since those who can’t, teach, that is what I went for. The only tangible career gold I could sift from my pan of possibilities.
Years of depression and anxiety continued to impede my pursuit of living life, so I quit the community college after a couple years. Since I wasn’t going to school anymore, I figured I’d just quit paying off the credit card I had used to fund what would remain an incomplete education. This, of course, would end up fucking my credit for many, many years to come, adding to the animosity I would have toward money.
So what is it?
It’s power. It’s freedom. And you either have it or you don’t. It’s a crowbar — a helpful tool that can also be a devastating weapon.
It keeps people hostage. Working jobs they hate. Enduring abuse, because bills must be paid.
It keeps people weak. Unable to even think about seeking medical care, because it’s behind a paywall. Forcing everyone back into a disease minefield, because The Economy.
Sure, you can get things with money, but experience is what holds a truly transcendental value. Even LiveNation admits to it while it tries to gaslight you into not placing any blame on high concert ticket prices on them. Being at and going to places is an exclusive experience. And because we are forced to live within the confines of the three dimensional physical world, only so many people can fit into a specific place. If you’re In, there are people who are Out. And that is a boost in status.
It takes money to travel. And some popular travel destinations are to places where the American dollar has more power than local currency. Giving you more freedom than they have. And with air travel costs rising4, we have to convince ourselves to be content with Staycations5.
And if you have the money, you can also pay for courses on how to speak those languages, or for tutors and apps. The rest of us have to use free apps that are pretty much just games feeding us ads. The only people we can practice language learning with are our immigrant coworkers who are also working manual labor jobs, because we can’t get office work.
One of the key differences between paying for experiences and buying things, is that if you’re hard-up for cash, you can’t go into a pawn shop with your memories. If you’re financially secure, you can afford to spend money on things that aren’t tangible. Education, experiences, travel, live performances.
It forces us further away from each other. It makes it harder for us to come together.
-bcp
I’m running out of room! So here’s a song for an album coming out later this year, and you might just be getting a podcast episode from here soon...
As well as pandemic induced inflation.
If you try to do any research on percentages of tickets Ticketmaster requests, or fees that they tack-on to Platinum tickets, or basically anything having to do with how they run their business, all you’re going to find in web searches are FAQ pages from Ticketmaster’s own website, which will, of course, only tell you what they want you to know. I can’t say for certain that they have paid for search results (it’s not like they don’t have the money), but they have most certainly weaponized their SEO.
Because you know they aren’t spending that money on aircraft maintanence.
If we get our time off approved.