The Power of a Crowd

Editorial by Sidney Ulakovic

Five years ago in March, when I was still in Toronto attending university, I remember my roommate and I being so excited to go to a concert we got tickets for earlier in the year, only for it to be cancelled as the country entered a state of emergency due to the pandemic. I think we can all agree that concerts are something we missed dearly when they went on hiatus, and with life slowly going back to normal these past few years, it’s been great to have them back. 

Since the return of concert-going, I’ve seen increasing conversation online about poor concert etiquette post-pandemic. I had been to a few smaller shows back home in Thunder Bay since returning after school, and didn’t notice anything much had changed. I thought this might just be the case in major cities where venues have massive capacities, given it had been a while since people had been in crowds and might just need time to acclimate. But then I experienced it for myself.

I’ve been in the pit at arena concerts, to outdoor concerts with crowds in the thousands, and even to festivals where there’s over 40,000 people attending in a day. Concerts get crowded—that comes with the territory. But this phenomenon is deeper than not being mindful of personal space, and it was unfortunate to experience it at Wake the Giant Music Festival, where we’re supposed to be celebrating diversity and inclusion in a welcoming space.

I’ll start by saying that this year’s Wake the Giant itself was an incredible experience, and that the organizers and performers all outdid themselves, especially considering this year was the festival’s first-ever ticket sell-out, with 8,500 people filling Marina Park to participate in this special day. With records being broken and milestones being reached, it was really disheartening to see the new norm in the way some of those attending conducted themselves, however.

I witnessed several incidents of pushing and shoving, both en route to the admission gates and in the crowd, where I experienced some of it myself as people fought their way in to get as close to the stage as possible, despite the fact that the crowd was already pretty well established. I also witnessed racial slurs being directed at people of colour, which in itself is deplorable, but it was especially unnerving considering the reason for the festival. 

I took a deep breath, cooled off, and managed to enjoy the show despite all this, but afterwards found myself reflecting on how the evening could have unfolded differently had anything I witnessed escalated. I wondered what the catalyst of all this was. Is it that we’ve become so consumed with having the best content for our social media feeds that our priority in attending concerts is finding the best way to capture it at any cost? Is it that following artists on their social platforms and being more attuned to their personal lives than ever makes us feel entitled to access them, even if that access is simply nearness? It’s likely a combination of a lot of things that would be hard to diagnose in the space of one page, but poor concert etiquette has become enough of an issue worldwide to warrant a wealth of cultural reporting on the rise of concert abuse in this decade, starting with the Astroworld tragedy in 2021, where a crowd crush resulted in the death of 10 people. 

The consequences of not being mindful of the power of a crowd are pretty steep when the cost is human life. Concerts are supposed to be a place where we’re all united, connecting over our shared love of the artist we’re there to see, and that can’t happen when people might be deterred from attending out of fear of violence, verbal or otherwise.