The great Ticketmaster war of Bristol clubbing

I still remember the faded nostalgia of an OMG Friday. Rocking up at 12 am, getting in straightaway, paying £5 to secure yourself a night of guaranteed fun and chaos. This time it was steadily getting busier but not yet rammed – an early forewarning of OMG’s revolution into a jam-packed Friday night free-for-all. We didn’t know how good we had it, and why should we have? The insane scramble of getting into any popular student club right now feels caricatured, and if £8 remains the new baseline for entry, I may just burst into a puff of smoke. 

I don’t know if it’s just me, but the fabric of clubbing feels different this year. Fun is still had, but that fun has become too dependent on planning, strategy, and simply being in the right place at the right time. If you want to go to OMG, you have to be trekking down Park Street before you’ve even hit Spoons to secure a wristband, which has become something of a safety net. Without it, you must stealthily weave through the hour-long queue only to be met with an even denser abyss of bodies when you finally get in. 

You enter the main dance floor with trepidation, the alcohol somehow intensifying the sobering fear that someone will end up in free fall. When you go clubbing, you want to let everything go, to release every cumbersome daytime thought and enjoy the mindless hedonism it’s supposed to provide. So why are we forced to jolt our inebriated brains back into action? Why have clubs facilitated conditions which don’t prioritise health and safety for the demographic that needs it most?

On a Wednesday night, the Triangle shares the same fate. If you and your friends want to go to a Fishies event, best believe you’ll be texting everyone and their dad to try and get the male tennis discount code, because it’s 10 am on a Wednesday and that’s the only tier of tickets left. That leads me to a bigger concern. Frantic queuing and price inflation are things we would expect in a Ticketmaster war to see our favourite, world-famous artist, but when they become prerequisites for a regular night out, one must wonder if there’s something bigger fuelling the shift.

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With the new academic season in full swing, the University of Bristol’s student population is back and bigger than ever. Whilst the new Temple Meads campus accommodates an additional 4,600 students and purpose-built accommodations (PBSAs) are in constant proliferation, student enrolment has been rapidly rising for years. The long-term result is that recreational spaces that used to accommodate around 18,500 UoB students back in 2010 are now confronted with a student cohort of over 30,000 from the University of Bristol alone. 16 years after OMG opened in 2010, demand has risen staggeringly whilst supply stays relatively stagnant. Although clubs cannot be held responsible for taming the burgeoning student population, it is their duty to adjust their services to safely manage the numbers: something which they have seemingly failed to do.

Night clubs are supposed to be a haven for people to seek solace in and be momentarily cushioned from the problems of the world. Recently, though, they feel more like a microcosm of the city’s most topical economic issues: a steepening cost-of-living crisis and a lack of adequate housing. Though clubs cannot be entry price-hikes and massive OMG queues undoubtedly pale in comparison to these problems, they are nonetheless signposts of the city’s socioeconomic direction. 

Students are not to blame. To expect young people to simply disperse from their go-to places and redistribute themselves is both unrealistic and insensitive to our primal need for familiarity and connection. In other words, we’re sheep, and most of us will continue to be steered where we think is most ‘active’, undeterred by the financial or mental cost (a perfect formula for clubs that want to make money). Profits would surely still flourish, however, if these establishments were simply realistic about the number of people they can take on, instead of letting queues spiral out of control whilst assuring those at the front that they’re the last to go in. 

https://www.pressreader.com/uk/western-daily-press/20260901/281560887657087