Accessibility at concerts is a ticketing failure, not a courtesy

Imagine a ticketing platform whose checkout failed for one in every few customers, and whose fix was a polite apology and a phone number. It would be called a broken product. When the customers affected are disabled, the industry calls it "accommodation" and treats it as a favor.

That is the frame we would like to retire. Rolling Stone's report is headlined "Disabled Fans Say the Live-Music Industry Can Do Better," and its core point is that disabled music fans and advocates want venues and promoters to improve accessibility at concerts and festivals. The Americans With Disabilities Act was passed in 1990. We are now in 2026, thirty-six years on. In our view, "can do better" is not a progress report at that point. It is an indictment.

Access starts at the checkout, not at the gate

Most conversations about accessible concerts start with the venue: ramps, sightlines, platforms. That matters, but the first barrier is usually the purchase. Teen Vogue argues that the industry makes it hard to buy accessible tickets, and that truly accessible venues are lacking. Those are two separate failures, and the first one is a software and process problem. It is the one the industry is best equipped to fix.

The rules are not mysterious. The ADA's guidance on ticket sales says that people with mobility disabilities who need accessible seating because of their disability are permitted to buy tickets for accessible seats. Note the verb: permitted. The law sets the floor. It doesn't ask anyone to make the experience good, and a floor is where a lazy industry stops.

The friction described elsewhere is bureaucratic. A 2023 piece in The Boar says that, to be eligible for accessible seating or carer tickets, many venues in the UK require proof of PIP, a disability benefit whose application involves twelve pages of forms and lengthy waits. That is a British example, not an American one. But the logic travels: a system that makes the fan prove their worth before letting them pay is designed around the seller's anxiety, not the customer's need.

"Compliance" is a ceiling the industry mistook for a goal

There is a whole business built around meeting the legal minimum. Accessibility Live, formerly Ten Fifty Entertainment, describes itself as the nation's leading provider of ADA compliance and accessibility services for the live entertainment industry. We have nothing against specialists. Hiring experts is what a serious company does. But outsourcing the problem to a compliance vendor can also be a way of keeping it off the product roadmap, in the same drawer as insurance and fire exits.

Our view is that this is the core mistake. Compliance is about not being sued. Product quality is about whether the customer can do what they came to do. A promoter who sells a festival pass and then relies on a side-door process for disabled attendees hasn't built an accessible event. They've built an event with an exception.

Some organizers have started from the opposite end. Disability Belongs highlights Shine Music Festival, created by Shawn Satterfield, as a universally designed festival with comprehensive accessibility measures and adaptive technology. We can't judge how well it works from a blurb, and we won't pretend to. But the idea is the right one: design for everyone first, instead of patching for a few later.

Judge access like a product, and complain like a customer

If accessibility is a product feature, then it should be judged like one. In our opinion, ticketing platforms and promoters should be held to a few simple questions, and reviewers and fans should ask them out loud:

• Can a disabled fan find, understand and buy the right ticket in the same flow as everyone else, without proving anything beyond what the law requires?
• Is the information about the venue, the seating and the facilities clear before the sale, not after?
• Does the company treat feedback from disabled fans as bug reports, with fixes and follow-up?

Nobody should have to plead their case to be allowed in. Disabled fans are customers, and they are also the people who tend to find the failures first. One writer in the Rolling Stone piece, in a first-person passage, says that until recently they never had to think about disability accommodations at concerts and could stand and dance for hours and navigate steep stairs. That line is a reminder of how arbitrary the boundary is. Most of the audience is probably one injury or one diagnosis away from needing the system to work.

Our verdict: stop applauding venues for doing the minimum, and stop calling accessible ticketing a courtesy. It is a core part of selling a live show. Until promoters and ticketing companies are criticized for a broken access flow the way they are for a crashed on-sale, thirty-six years will become forty, and the conversation will still be about doing better.