Rob Shapiro

Apparently concert venues are having a hard time getting Millennials to fill the seats. Well, hello. Millennial here. I think I can help. DEAR CONCERT VENUES: 🎟️ Just tell me what the ticket costs. I do not want to select a $79 ticket and discover at checkout that it is actually $146 because of a facility fee, service fee, processing fee, and a fee for having successfully paid the other fees. 📱 Stop making ticket buying a military operation. I should not need three apps, a verified fan code, a presale password from a credit card I don’t own, and 11:00 AM availability on a Tuesday to buy two seats. 💺 Assigned seats. We did our time standing shoulder-to-shoulder at shows in 2008. Some of us have mortgages now. Some of us have sciatica. 🕖 Start earlier. A 7 PM show is not embarrassing. In fact, I would like to formally recognize whoever invented the 7 PM show. ⏰ And tell us the actual times. “Doors at 7” is not useful information if the opener starts at 8:15 and the person I came to see appears at 10:07. 🚗 Parking instructions written for a normal person. Tell me which garage to use, what it costs, and whether I will spend 55 minutes trying to leave it afterward. I am willing to pay $20 for certainty. 🍺 I will buy your $14 beer. I have accepted this. But if I miss three songs waiting for it, you have broken the social contract. 🚽 Enough bathrooms. We are in our 30s and 40s. Half of us have had children. This is now infrastructure. 🔉 It can still be loud. We are Millennials, not the Greatest Generation. But some of us are bringing earplugs now and we are no longer ashamed of it. DEAR ARTISTS: ⏰ Please go on roughly when you said you would. We have babysitters. The babysitter has an end time. This is now a logistics problem involving several adults. 🎤 Play the songs from 2004–2014. You know which ones. We know which ones. Nobody needs to pretend otherwise. 🎶 Play some new stuff. Absolutely. We support your continued artistic development. But there is a point in the evening when you need to play the song that was on our iPod Nano while we drove to high school. 📵 You can tell us to put our phones away. We secretly want someone to make us do this anyway. 🪑 An intermission would not offend us. We can use the bathroom, answer the babysitter, check whether the dog has destroyed anything, and look at Zillow for eight minutes. And please understand: Millennials still like concerts. We have disposable income now. We are nostalgic. We will absolutely spend irresponsible amounts of money to hear a band we first discovered on LimeWire. But we also have jobs, children, dogs, mortgages, lower-back problems, and a very clear memory of when concert tickets cost $35. You want Millennials back? Make it easy to buy the ticket. Tell us when the show actually starts. Give us somewhere to sit. Play the song from 2007. We’ll be there. We just need to be home by 11.