News piece – The Guardian
Harry Styles ticket prices cause outrage amongst fans
Styles announces a seven-city tour, with prices that shocked ticket buyers
Harry Styles’ long anticipated return is here. With the imminent release of his fourth album, Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally, on 6 March, a seven-city tour was announced. Fans with pre-sale access for his 12-date residency at Wembley stadium were met with long queues, as tickets were in high demand.
Ticketmaster confirmed that prices ranged from £44.10 to £466.25 (including fees), with general standing tickets costing £144.65 and the higher tier front-standing costing anywhere up to £279.45. In response to concerns over the “dynamic pricing” that took place in artists such as Oasis’ tour sales, ticket prices were fixed.
However, this did not stop fans reacting with outrage after seeing how much the more expensive seats would set them back. Ticket buyers took to social media to share their shock surrounding the steep prices. One person on TikTok described the ticket pricing as “embarrassing”, while another asked “can’t we bring back tickets starting at £30/£40?”.
In November 2025, the government announced that they plan to make it illegal to resell tickets above face value. This deals with dynamic pricing, however, there is an underlying issue surrounding the increasing original cost of concert tickets that this does not address.
Expensive ticket prices reflect the rising costs for touring musicians. It is becoming more and more costly to put on shows, especially of the size and standard of a stadium show. Many artists now are hiking up ticket prices in order to cover these costs, which has made paying over £100 to see your favourite artist the new standard. For example, Taylor Swift tickets for the 2023 Eras Tour ranged from £58.65 to £749 for the VIP packages.
Even prices for Harry Styles’ 2023 Love On Tour were anywhere between £50.65 and £326.20, which means in just three years there has been a £140 increase in the most expensive tickets.
Opinion piece – The Guardian
Concert ticket prices are skyrocketing…what are artists like Harry Styles doing about it?
Live music is becoming inaccessible for the very fans who are responsible for an artist’s career, and Styles’ upcoming tour is no different
Fans have eagerly awaited Harry Styles’ return, and along with the announcement of his fourth album, Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally, released on 6 March, a seven-city tour was announced. This includes a 12-date residency at Wembley stadium, for which the queue for tickets was long, and the cost buyers were met with overshadowed any excitement.
Prices ranged from £44.10 to £466.25 (including fees), with general standing tickets costing £144.65 and the higher tier front-standing costing anywhere up to £279.45. This caused backlash online, as fans shared their disappointment and, in some cases, outrage at the steep prices. One person on TikTok called out Styles saying “it’s embarrassing to take advantage of your fans” and another joked: “celebrities are starting to go broke”.
And this is not the first time this has happened. Has Styles’ team not learnt from the mistakes of others? Artists such as Oasis and Taylor Swift have been criticised for their ticket prices in the past, particularly when dynamic pricing was involved. In November 2025, the government announced plans to make reselling tickets above face value illegal, which largely dealt with these issues. However, as promising as this sounds, how much difference can this really make when the original prices of tickets are skyrocketing beyond measure?
Attention then turns to the artist and their responsibility to make shows accessible for everyone. Although touring costs have significantly increased over recent years, expenses should not be passed on to fans. Paying over £100 for concerts has become the new standard, with artists like Taylor Swift hiking up ticket prices to pay for their, sometimes extravagant, show.
However, with more artists like Olivia Dean fighting for their fans’ rights and calling for live music to be “affordable and accessible” after her own ticket pricing debacle, it makes one wonder if some of the biggest (and richest) artists today could do more. To be fair to Styles, £1 of every ticket sale is being donated to small music venues threatened with closure, so he is taking a stand, albeit a quieter one.
He also put on a One Night Only show at Manchester’s Co-op Live, where tickets, costing only £20, were assigned randomly to people who signed up. This was a great gesture, however, if this was possible once, this surely means that tickets for the rest of his tour could have been at least slightly cheaper. But unfortunately this seems to be the new normal, and it is becoming difficult to remember a time when buying concert tickets didn’t require putting aside a month’s rent.
Interview feature – Rolling Stone
TWINSIZE ARE AIMING FOR ‘WORLD DOMINATION’ – AND THEY JUST MIGHT SUCCEED
Leeds alt-rock band talks about their debut single and what the city’s music scene means to them
By KAYA POTTS
APRIL 12, 2026
PHOTO BY LEWIS BROWNE
Twinsize are busy in rehearsals for a run of gigs they have in just a few weeks, however this doesn’t stop them finding time to have fun. Frontperson Emily Lowe and bassist Sacha Warsop burst through the door of Hyde Park Book Club in Leeds, coincidentally the venue of their headline gig they are gearing up for, apologising for their lateness and the absence of drummer, Ben Harrod-Edwards, due to a party they attended the night before. “Ben was meant to be here but, um, I think he fell asleep” says Emily, looking put together nonetheless with matching green coat and hair.
Harrod-Edwards is a new addition to the Twinsize line-up, however there have been many iterations of the band before this. Lowe and Warsop have been bandmates since they were at college and still dabble in external projects together, including Sad Songs For Sad Women, which is exactly what it says on the tin. Lowe credits this project as the turning point of her songwriting. “That’s when I felt like I could actually start writing music and songs that I really enjoyed and that I felt was like a piece of me…I never wrote in the other bands. I never wrote anything because I was so embarrassed.” This is when the first seeds of Twinsize were sown.
Lowe recalls meeting Twinsize guitarist and producer, Presley Bayley, at a Halloween party in first year of university. They studied music together at Leeds Beckett and, after bonding over their love of Radiohead, she proposed the idea of Twinsize. She remembers her brutally honest elevator pitch sealing the deal. “[Presley asked] what would we do in the band? And I think I was like ‘world domination and then fall out with each other and never speak to each other again, but also make good music’.”
World domination is no easy feat and Twinsize have paid their dues. Working their way up from their first live performance at a small open mic, they have learnt a lot. “Presley will kill me for saying this, because he hated it…we sound so bad” Lowe jokes. “It felt like we were showing our mum our dance we made in the kitchen, and yet none of us have got any coordination.”
Now off the back of the release of their debut single ‘Something That Bites’, this feels like a distant memory. Releasing on Monomyth Records and self-producing, Twinsize have found their feet as a staple in the Leeds alt-rock scene. Their mix of influences are clear, with Lowe citing Paramore as her main inspiration. “I felt the trajectory of my life shift…as soon as I saw Paramore it was like, wow, everything is going to change.”
It is at this point that a somewhat hungover Ben Harrod-Edwards shows up, just in time to talk about the production process, in which he plays a big role after studying Music Production at Leeds Conservatoire. “Are you hanging out your ass as well, Ben?” Warsop jokes. “Uh…wait, what was the question, sorry?” It takes him a second to catch up.
Production-wise, Twinsize seems like a well-oiled machine with other guitarist, Milo Jacob, on engineering, Bayley on mixing and mastering and Harrod-Edwards on transferring this to their live shows. Lowe speaks highly of Bayley’s production – “I always feel so proud because he really puts a lot of work into his craft. He really cares about it.” “Some of the new stuff that’s coming, whenever it comes, sounds freaking massive” adds Harrod-Edwards.
Likewise, their songwriting process is an all-hands-on-deck situation. With Bayley bringing the majority of the instrumentals to the table, Lowe adds her lyrics on top. Lyric writing is personal to her. “My lyrics…this is a piece of my brain, take it, run away with it.” She has previously described ‘Something That Bites’ on social media as “full of female rage”. “It is just full of random experiences of what my friends have had and what I’ve had with men that just piss me off and I just threw it all there to Presley’s music.”
The release of this song was the start of many great things for Twinsize. They played Live At Leeds and even have a tour date lined up in Iceland later in the year. The Leeds music scene is something close to their heart and the “community” it provides is essential for Lowe. “I mean that’s how I got into Twinsize!” recalls Harrod-Edwards. He had met Lowe “in this very room” whilst seeing another gig and found out they needed a drummer, so clearly Leeds has been an integral part in Twinsize’s journey.
It is only upwards from here for the band. With new releases lined up and a headline gig approaching, they are definitely ones to watch for the coming year.
Live concert review – Pitchfork
Madison Cunningham Live Review: Ace is the Word
Madison Cunningham delivered a transcending performance that took the audience on a journey through her recent album, Ace, with a few surprises along the way.
By Kaya Potts
April 13, 2026
Madison Cunningham, often associated with driving folk-rock tunes, traded in crunchy guitars for piano-based orchestral arrangement on her 2025 album, Ace. Soundtracked by Philip Krohnengold, yMusic’s Rob Moose and Jesse Chandler (the latter of which joined her on this tour), this album explores conflicting feelings in the wake of her divorce from a man she knew since they were teenagers.
It is only fitting, therefore, that the venues Cunningham chose to play were intimate and fit for an attentive audience. Looking around Manchester’s RNCM Concert Hall, it became clear that a large chunk of the audience was made up of musicians (a fact support act Martin Luke Brown joked he was far too aware of) and you could almost hear a pin drop as Cunningham took her place at the grand piano.
Every person in the room was immediately transfixed as Cunningham launched into the first few songs, leaving no room for applause and instead playing grand transitions with the help of Chandler on bass clarinet. The audience erupted as this came to a close, but just as everyone thought they knew what to expect, a familiar chord progression was noodled around and a genius reimagining of one of Cunningham’s older folk-rock songs, “All I’ve Ever Known”, was played. This really showcased the level of musicality that Cunningham is capable of.
She then moved over to her acoustic guitar which was running through a pedalboard and amp to create one of her unique, gritty tones. “Break The Jaw” is a highlight here for me, with her meandering melodies and virtuosic guitar playing not a single note was missed. If you closed your eyes, you could nearly be tricked into thinking you were listening to the album. However, Jesse Chandler is maybe the most impressive part, humbly multi-tasking in the background, not only running an array of woodwind instruments into a loop pedal but simultaneously creating luscious soundscapes with several synthesisers. The show certainly would not have been the same without him.
After a near-perfect set list (albeit one that omitted some of Cunningham’s most popular tunes), there was only one song everyone was expectantly waiting for, and the encore did not disappoint. “Life According To Raechel”, a beautiful ballad about grief, reduced most of the crowd to tears and left a lasting impression on a very sniffly audience.
