Maggie Rogers’ In-Person Ticket Policy: What’s Not to Love?

Maggie Rogers has announced a tour for her new album Don’t Forget Me, and she’s letting fans have their first crack at tickets the old-fashioned way: by waiting in line, in person.

Here in San Francisco, that means tickets ($39.50–$139.50) to Rogers’ Nov. 1, 2024 show at Chase Center will go on sale at the Chase Center box office on Saturday, April 20, at 10 a.m., before becoming available online the following week.

This is a beautiful thing, and not just for old-school nostalgists who romanticize the fun of waiting in line with other fans for tickets.

As you’ve probably noticed, online ticketing for major concerts is completely broken and exploited by opportunists. So much so that any artist who cares about their fans should follow Rogers’ lead and offer early in-person ticket sales.

How many times have you gone online and selected tickets, only to have them removed from your cart and then re-offered at a much higher price due to “dynamic pricing”? How many times have you gotten your “verified fan” code and tried to buy tickets right at 10 a.m., and bots and scalpers have already bought 90% of the available seats to re-sell them at three or four times face value?

I could go on and on. Captchas, pull-down menus, “convenience” fees and “facility” fees that add up to 50% or more onto the face value ticket price, the phasing out of printed tickets, the Department of Justice’s refusal to break up the Ticketmaster-Live Nation monopoly, the persistent stories of ticket agencies, venues and artists themselves all scalping their own tickets.

Maggie Rogers, heroine of the people, said the hell with that — there’s gotta be a better way. She began selling tickets in person “to combat bots and reduce fees,” as she said in an Instagram announcement today, and “it was so successful and so fun that I decided to do it again.”

Other artists have gone the in-person ticketing route in San Francisco before. Nine Inch Nails did it for their show at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in 2018, and Bob Dylan charged $60 at the door, cash only, for his show at the Warfield in 2010.

Both Pearl Jam and the Cure have famously tried to change the system from within, with varying success. Rogers, meanwhile, is showing up to sell tickets in person in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago — and playing special shows in those cities for what she’s calling “Box Office Week.”

Who knows what kind of deal Rogers had to make with Ticketmaster to pull this off — and for an arena tour, no less — but her commitment here constitutes hall-of-fame public service.