Lily Allen’s Sick With Blue Dot Fever For Halloween

Lily Allen is sick. Not literally, but rather with an affliction that’s been going around this year: blue dot fever. For Halloweekend, the West End Girl singer dressed up in a custom catsuit and puffer that poke fun at the music-industry phenomenon and also reclaim it in her own very dry, humorous, and British way.

For those who aren’t in the know, “blue dot fever” is a term that cropped up this year to diagnose artists whose Ticketmaster concert maps are filled with empty seats, aka blue dots, due to struggling ticket sales and lack of interest. Allen faced allegations of blue dot fever earlier this year when several stops on her West End Girl tour were moved to smaller venues, and in some instances concerts were cancelled with illness cited as the reason.

Just like she did with her latest album, Allen is reclaiming the narrative in a designer puffer jacket. Not only is she able to poke fun at herself, but point out a larger issue impacting the music industry. This year, several artist have had to scale back or entirely cancel tours due to low demand, and screenshots of artists’ seating charts are passed around gossip websites to incite further online chatter about the success or lack thereof of a particular artist. A deeper conversation, however, must be had about the astronomically high prices of tickets for artists’ concerts, the sheer quantity of concerts happening in any given month, and the rise of bots invading digital waiting rooms to scoop up tickets and resell them at exponentially higher prices than face value.

Touring is also, increasingly, a less profitable business for artists, so the sword is double-edged here. Bringing a live show to life takes incredible amounts of effort, and sometimes the payoff isn’t worth the travel and yes, catching the blue dot fever. Many artists might need to reckon with how big of rooms they can fill, others might need to think about what the literal and metaphorical costs of touring are, and hopefully all of them will carry themselves with the same sense of humor Allen does.