The Meet-and-Greet: Paying to Say Hello

Sat, 09 Nov 2019 15:38:00 +0000

Forty minutes before doors, in a corridor behind most large venues on most major tours, a queue forms of people who paid extra to be there. They will get somewhere between ninety seconds and five minutes with the band, a photo taken by a tour photographer against a branded backdrop, sometimes a signed print, and then they will be moved along so the next name on the list gets their turn. It is polite, efficient, and entirely transactional, and it did not exist in anything like this form until relatively recently. The meet-and-greet used to be a favour. Somewhere in the last twenty years it became a product line, with its own pricing tiers, its own specialist ticketing companies, and its own well-documented backlash.

Meet-and-Greet - vo.rs

The Meet-and-Greet: Paying to Say Hello