I don’t think Blue Dot Fever is funny any more.

I was more than happy to make fun of it earlier this week after I was asked to appear on NBC News Now to talk about the phenomena, created by Ian Mohr in a column for Page Six.

I even made a parody video of my NBC appearance, figuring everyone was in on the joke with me.

They weren’t. People have busy lives and not a lot of time to spend thinking about this kind of stuff. Even worse, there is a concerted effort on X by the secondary ticketing industry to push the Blue Dot Fever narrative because they think it proves that promoters and managers don’t know how to price tickets. These same individuals have been arguing for years that they understand pricing better than the primary market itself.

For the handful of you out there who have yet to hear about Blue Dot Fever, the phrase was used to describe the “real” reason a number of tours were canceled this week — namely poor ticket sales, represented by blue dots on a Ticketmaster map showing rows of unsold seats. No doubt, the blue dots are being cited as a sign that a tour was mispriced or that demand was overestimated. As my friend and colleague Randy Nichols pointed out, this type of hype happens every year around this time as scalpers point and laugh at the handful of tours that had to be pulled down due to poor ticket sales.

It dates back to Taylor Swift’s 2018 Reputation tour which scalpers claimed was an abysmal failure because tickets were priced to market, cutting out the scalpers. Gary Adler with the National Association of Ticket Brokers wrote a poorly aged column saying the tours lack of sellouts was a sign that the Reputation Tour had failed. It would go on to gross more than $350 million and set the record as the highest grossing U.S. tour ever. Adler and his stooges were just really butt hurt at the time that tickets were priced more aggressively, leaving little room for scalpers to mark them up. Ofcourse Adler never apologized — afterall, he paid DMV good money to run his little advertorial hit piece. Being dead wrong isnt reason enough to take it down.

That’s what scalpers mean when they say blue dots are a sign of failure…they mean the prices were too high to extract any profit for themselves. And sometimes they are right — sometimes they are too high and the customer is turned off.

But that doesnt mean blue dots are proof of failure. They are a normal byproduct of modern ticketing systems, dynamic pricing, production holds, secondary-market churn, and the increasingly fluid nature of concert sales cycles.

The lesson the Reputation Tour was that the goal of primary ticket pricing is not to guarantee an instant sellout. It is to maximize long-term revenue while balancing artist guarantees, venue costs, production expenses, and fan demand over an entire tour cycle. Sometimes that means holding prices firm even if inventory remains visible weeks before a show. Other times, it means adjusting prices downward closer to the event date. Airlines, hotels, and sports teams have used similar yield-management strategies for decades.

The obsession with blue dots also ignores the broader economics of live entertainment in 2026. Touring costs have skyrocketed. Labor, trucking, fuel, insurance, and production expenses remain elevated across the industry. Artists are charging more because the cost of putting on arena and stadium shows has increased dramatically. Higher face-value pricing is not simply corporate greed; in many cases, it reflects the economic realities of mounting large-scale tours in an inflationary environment.

Most importantly, fans themselves have changed. Consumers now buy later than ever before. The old model — where every show sold out instantly months in advance — no longer reflects current buying behavior. Fans wait for payday schedules, travel confirmations, dynamic price drops, or last-minute plans. That creates visible inventory deeper into the sales cycle, but visible inventory is not the same thing as weak demand.

Blue Dot Fever is ultimately less an industry trend than a media narrative: a catchy phrase designed to generate clicks, outrage, and engagement. It turns the complexities of modern ticketing into a simplistic morality play where promoters are villains, resellers are geniuses, and every unsold seat is proof of collapse.

The live business has real challenges. But blue dots on a map are not a diagnosis of systemic failure. They’re simply the visible mechanics of a far more sophisticated marketplace than critics would like to admit.