Concert Ticket Stubs: Another Cool Collectible Bites the Dust

Aah, the good old days of buying a concert ticket the day they went on sale, counting the days until it arrived in the mail, putting it in a safe place until showtime, and leaving the show with a memento of the event. Ticket stubs have been on the way out for some time now as the world becomes more digitized. But the pandemic really put an end to coming home with a tangible concert souvenir in your pocket. Up until the pandemic I had been able to maintain my ticket stub collection, except for a few instances where electronic tickets were the only option. Some concerts offered a choice of electronic or paper tickets. Local outlets were still selling real tickets for smaller venues. Courtney Barnett at the Fremont Theater in San Luis Obispo, CA on February 1, 2020, was my last live show. Two years ago! Concerts are really coming back now. I’ll be back in attendance soon. And all I’ll have to show for it is a QR code.

Baby boomers will remember when the gate keeper tore your ticket in half in the 1970s and early 80s. God, I hated that. You never knew what you’d end up with. The name of the band, venue, and date were almost certainly cut off, sometimes entirely. Perforated tickets were a welcome alternative in the 80s and 90s. Then scanning barcodes preserved the integrity of the ticket and didn’t require any tearing. Then QR codes on your phone. What’s next? Last fall Amazon tested palm-reading scans at Red Rocks.

I’ve had to resort to printing out a copy of the electronic ticket a few times for my ticket album. (Wait, hold up, ticket album?! Yes, a small photo album with plastic custom size pockets for tickets.) While those just aren’t the same, hard copy tickets had become almost as generic. It makes you appreciate when the tickets came adorned with band photos, unique fonts, or cool graphics. Some tours would print commemorative tickets for sale or include them in VIP packages. These are specially designed tickets for the entire tour, not date specific for your show. I hope these become more common. I really don’t need another concert t-shirt but would buy a fancy ticket at the merch stand for sure.

I know most people aren’t upset about these changes in the concert-going experience. The convenience of going digital outweighs whatever nostalgic value a ticket may have. It’s just one of many transitions in consumerism from owning a physical product to the ephemeral experience of the digital one. (And now, owning a virtual product? – you can imagine my brain burst with the concept of NFTs.) It’s difficult for some older folks, particularly collectors like myself, to part with tactile mementos. Vinyl, and by extension classic rock, has made a comeback thanks partly to the children of baby boomers. Vinyl is cool and the music worth discovering by a younger generation. As for the ticket stub, I see no hope for a return – they are obsolete and unnecessary now. In cruising the internet for this article, I see that some of my ticket stubs could actually be worth some money. But not enough money to sell them. I’ll be relying on concert memories and photos from now on…and decades worth of ticket stubs to look back on.

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