No Ticket, No Problem: The Role of the Pop-Up Concert in Marketing Music

Concert culture always follows a concrete structure. The cycle starts (usually on TicketMaster) fighting to claim tickets ranging anywhere from $200 to $900. If you're lucky enough to win the Ticketmaster war, you then spend months preparing an outfit, finding the closest hotel to the venue, and spending a good four hours getting ready day of. You've spent months building up to this moment, and once you're there you're surrounded by people who all love the same artist you do, everyone's equally as excited to see a performer who until this moment, was months away. So what happens when you take away all the logistics of concert attendance and performance? What would you do if your favorite artist posted that they were doing a show at the park across the street from your house in one hour?  

In the past few years, many artists have taken a spontaneous approach with their live shows. Free pop up concerts are a new trend of performance art that takes everything about traditional concert culture and completely flips it. So why do pop up concerts work so well?

The most notable example of this is Lady Gaga's record breaking show in Rio De Janeiro. In attempts to revitalize the city's economy during the off season, Rio paid for Lady Gaga's concert on Copacabana beach, burdening no ticket expense on fans. Lady Gaga's Rio show is a perfect case study of modern branding excellence. The city of Rio was marketing an experience, with no payment required, the goal of the concert was to create an iconic cultural moment as well as represent the strength in Rio's community. 

Charli XCX’s best album is one of the most successfully marketed artist campaigns of the last decade. Charlie's iconic “brat green” and the minimalist font that accompanies it have been unavoidable for the past 2 years. Brat has without a doubt become a cultural phenomenon, and in true cool girl fashion, Charli herself hopped on the pop up concert bandwagon. With an announcement made only 30 minutes before showtime, Charli XCX shut down Times Square with a surprise performance featuring 5 songs off the Brat Album. Charlie's Times Square performance was short lived, but its legacy on social media had a lasting impact. Fans at the New York performance were quick to post the chaos of Times Square, with cheering fans and flashing billboards, the rest of social media users felt a collective "fomo” effect. 

So what makes the marketing of pop-up concerts so successful? Well for starters, pop up concerts create huge conversations around artists and get people talking on social media. Although these concerts are free to everybody, social media users promote the experience as being exclusive, an “if you know, you know” event that rewards those who are tuned in. People value word of mouth, and people especially value authenticity. Pop up concerts create a level of authenticity and community that can't be bought solely with tickets. With a recent discourse on the desire for third spaces, free concerts are such a genuine approach to creating belonging and community for an event that would otherwise be inaccessible for many people. Free shows create opportunities for locals, older generations, and working class people to experience artists that otherwise would be difficult and expensive for them to access. Pop up concerts open a very important conversation around what consumers of marketing are craving. In the case of live music it is clear that community interaction and authenticity are things consumers value heavily. Pop up concerts are paving the way for a new era of live music, showing that concert culture isn't just about access and wealth, and that costless concerts can be just as valuable to an artists reputation and image as a paid tour.

Written by Emma Leonard