Are You a Toxic Concertgoer? The Unspoken Rules of Etiquette for Concert Crowds in 2024

IWe live in a society of rules. Most of them are the big ones, the harsh, unbreakable dictatorships written and codified by men in old-school judicial wigs. You can't steal; you can't burn a police car; you can't hit the owner with a paddle. We already know that. It's the law. But beneath them, discreetly hidden in our psychosocial cortex, is another set of rules: that slippery, malleable thing we call labelAnd for all the fuss that has been made about supposedly great British politeness, nowhere is the dubious and disposable nature of this etiquette more apparent than at music concerts.

To take one particularly egregious example: last weekend at London’s All Points East festival, photos emerged of young people who had arrived early to see the headliner (indie sensation Mitski) and who spent the afternoon camping out on the ground by the front barricades, watching Netflix on their phones as lesser-known support acts took to the stage. How these people avoided being trampled or drenched by an “accidental” spill of a pint of beer is a mystery (many would say they were asking for it).

Mitski has already complained in the past about widespread breaches of etiquette at her concerts: excessive screaming and creepy, overly familiar cries: “Mother is maternal care“!” is a particularly popular offbeat phrase. This was likely a factor in her decision to perform on her recent tour to seated crowds. It can be tempting to dismiss these off-putting behaviours as a Gen Z-specific problem – the awkwardness of a demographic whose understanding of how to behave in public was thwarted by the social skills EMP device that was the Covid pandemic. But it’s more than that. Everywhere you look, everywhere you go, people are breaking the unwritten rules of concert-going. It’s fast becoming a lost language.

Part of the problem, perhaps, is that these rules are, by their very nature, unwritten. Of course, some have a firm consensus. Smoking, for example, is acceptable in the midst of an outdoor crowd, but is totally frowned upon indoors (not to mention illegal). A decade or two ago, holding up your mobile phone to capture footage of a concert would have been a resounding no-no; now, demographic changes and technological ubiquity have made concert cameras totally and calmly accepted by most audiences. Whether we consider it a major ambiance destroyer or a harmless means of preserving a live performance to re-enjoy later doesn’t matter: it’s too widespread to restrict at this point.

There are, however, plenty of other rules of etiquette that lie in a greyer area. Intermittent talking is generally tolerated, particularly during support acts, but if you speak too loudly, too insistently or too close to the stage, you may be sternly shushed. Tall people are, of course, entitled to stand wherever they like, but the taller you are, the angrier the people behind you will be, so if you're a portly 7-foot Adonis, you're best off avoiding being up front, no matter how righteous you are.

A particularly murky issue is when you're pushing your way to the front of a concert. We've all been there: leaving your spot to go to the bathroom or bar and having to push, slide, and meekly say “um, excuse me” through a crowd to get back to your friends. (If you plan on drinking heavily, it's polite to avoid standing at the front of the crowd, to minimize the amount of laborious moving around.) But alas, how different it all looks from the other side: when you're standing, crammed into a horde of people, enjoying a position that's rightfully yours, when some rude opportunist ruthlessly pushes his way through. The “right of way,” so to speak, of the entire endeavor involves a complicated (and almost entirely subconscious) mental rubric, taking into account crowd density, proximity to the stage, and countless other minor, subjective factors: whether you’re holding a tray of pints, for example, or whether you’re riding behind five people in tandem.

This all depends, of course, on the style and sensibility of the music being played. At an acoustic indie concert, the audience can expect a sleepless atmosphere; at a heavy metal or punk concert, violent pushing and frenzied shouting are not only okay, but probably encouraged. In some cases, they are more rude. No To mosh.

At any live event, there needs to be a certain degree of flexibility in the application of etiquette rules. Most rules are born not out of a life-or-death necessity, but out of basic human considerations; that's why concertgoers (who are, after all, comprised of like-minded people) have traditionally done a good job of self-control. To some extent, it all comes down to something as simple and innate as this: don't be a fool. If everyone could pay attention to that, the music scene would surely be a better place.