Taylor Swift kicked off her Eras stadium tour a few weeks ago, and I have a weird feeling some fans will come back from those gigs disappointed.
Let me be clear: I don't expect any fans to admit this. Everyone will say they had the best night of their life and that the show was absolutely spectacular and that they can peacefully die now. And in fairness, I think that will be true for a lot of folks. I have no doubt the energy in those stadiums will be felt from the parking lots.
But TikTok just fundamentally changes the mindset of anyone walking into a huge gig like this nowadays, and I don't see a scenario where that impact is anything but negative.
Until TikTok, you walked into concerts with no expectations for what was going to happen. Maybe you checked setlist.com to get a sense for what songs you might hear. Maybe you went on YouTube and proactively spoiled the experience for yourself by watching some clips. But generally speaking, you went in with a mental list of songs you were hoping to hear and maybe a prediction on what the encore would be, and outside of that, you just strapped in for the ride and let the night go wherever it may.
That is no longer the case. If you are one of the 150 million Americans on TikTok and you love an artist, you are probably inundated with clips of their concerts. Every single Taylor Swift fan I know of is having this experience, and every single video they see of the show is directly adding to their expectations for what's going to happen that night. You're no longer walking into a show blind; you're walking into a show with military-grade orders for how the night's going to play out, and you're just monitoring progress as it happens.
As a rule, attending something with no expectations will practically never leave you disappointed in the end. You will either leave happy because it was great or leave sort of indifferent because it wasn't great but you didn't expect anything more. Attending something with expectations opens yourself up for failure. Now all of a sudden you have a benchmark that must be met for the night not to be a disappointment.
And I think drawing that benchmark based on TikTok videos is dangerous. No one ever goes viral from the nosebleeds. If you're watching Taylor Swift concert videos, you're probably watching someone who either filmed from the pit or filmed on 3x Zoom when the reality is you will get to your seat in the stadium and Taylor Swift will be the size of a Skittle. People will build an unattainable fantasy in their head for what the concert will be if they watch enough of this footage.
Besides, expectations for these shows are already unattainably high. We don't need to exacerbate that any more. At the end of the day, Taylor Swift is a musician, and we can position the Eras Tour as a religious experience all we want, but functionally, it's a concert. She's still confined by the laws of physics.
It's not like I'm rooting for this disappointment, and it's not like I think you're a bad person for watching Taylor Swift concert videos before the show. Unless you delete all social media, avoiding them all is probably a lost cause. But if you truly want to have the night of your life, go in with the least amount of expectations possible. Don't look at the setlist. Don't talk to anyone about their experience. And most importantly, just avoid all the videos. Enjoy the show for what it is, not what you thought it would be.
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