The most passionate have tickets for multiple shows of his Madison Square Garden residency that starts this week
By Elias Leight
Starting this week, Harry Styles will play 30 shows at Madison Square Garden. Lindsey Burton, co-host of the podcast “What Makes You Fangirl,” will be in the crowd for 15 of them. All told, tickets cost her $6,196.87.
She has been devoted to Styles since his teenage stint in the boy band One Direction. “Those guys shaped so much of my life,” said the 28-year-old Burton. And living in New York, the shows are “so close, I feel like I have to be there.”
Pop stars like Styles have broad appeal; in March, his new album coasted to No. 1. But not all fans are created equal. The passion of some far exceeds the rest.
Burton estimates that she has spent more than $20,000 to date on tickets for Styles concerts and merchandise at his shows. Alison Romero, 28, also puts her total spend at around $20,000. She has seen him more than 40 times in total, including concerts earlier this year in London and Amsterdam. While 40 seems like a lot, it’s kid stuff compared with the roughly 130 times she has seen Louis Tomlinson, another former member of One Direction.
A number of Styles’ most committed fans work side gigs on top of their 9-to-5 to earn extra money for extra shows: dog walking, babysitting, or helping brands with their social media and digital marketing.
Romero started a business online selling custom-made souvenir concert tickets for $5 a pop. “Concerts used to give you a physical ticket and then they stopped,” she explained. “But fans still want that, so they would send me a list of the shows they had gone to, and they wanted souvenirs for all of them.” Since both TikTok and Meta have set up funds to pay creators with high-performing videos, Romero has also made money from posting clips of her travels and shows.
She maintains a spreadsheet to track every dollar she spends. “I think there’s a conception that people are in so much credit card debt or using their parents’ money” to go to a lot of shows, she said. Far from it. “I’m very sensible. I’m not going out to eat or buying clothes. I really put all my spare money toward this.”
Devoted fans are hardly a new phenomenon. “Think of Beatlemania or the people who follow the Grateful Dead or Phish,” said Emily White, a former Spotify product leader and the author of a newsletter on fandom, technology and culture.
But artists and labels are increasingly focused on these uber passionate followers, White continued. “The music industry is looking for its next growth story, and superfans—a highly engaged, under-monetized segment of listeners who spend disproportionately on concert tickets, merch and artist experiences—are an attractive solution.”
Unlike the Grateful Dead or Phish, who are known for their rangy improvisations, one Styles concert is usually not that different from the next. That means small changes generate big reactions: On his last tour, “everybody would freak out” if he played an unreleased song, according to Amanda Kramedas, 29.
Even if the set list is often similar, though, she has a group of friends to hang out with at many of the more than 30 Styles shows she has attended. Delaney Scott, 25, a veteran of more than 40 of the star’s performances, likes to joke “that we kind of treat these shows as going to the club, just a very expensive club in different cities in different countries.”
It wasn’t always so pricey. “In 2019, we were paying under $100 per show” to be on the floor, Scott reminisced. “To be in the nosebleeds was under $50.” Now tickets can cost 10 times that.
Scott works adjacent to the entertainment industry, so has been able to nab free tickets to Styles shows in the past; she puts her total spend on the star at around $5,000. While she flew to Amsterdam in May to see the opening show on his tour, she hasn’t yet scored a ticket to one of his New York performances.
As the cost of the shows rises, one side effect is that the coterie of Styles die-hards has become even more tightknit. Leah Cunningham, 31 has spent between $6,000 to $8,000 on 16 Styles concerts and plans to see him six more times during his New York run.
“It’s not like I can casually bring my boyfriend or a random friend who listens to a couple songs”—they balk at the high prices, she said. “We’ve sort of formed our own community where it’s like, we all are that level of crazy.”
