“Community” Is Doing a Lot of Work in Event Marketing

South Africa has become very good at selling experiences. But who is responsible for keeping audiences safe before, during and after them?

We spend weeks debating the line-up, ticket prices, outfits, VIP packages. We watch promotional videos promising community, connection, “the ultimate experience.”

We almost never ask the most basic question in the room: who is responsible for keeping us safe?

Attendees have increasingly been left to ask that themselves, usually somewhere between the third beer and the walk back to the car. Where’s the medical station? How does an ambulance get in? How do we get home once 10,000 other people are trying to get home too? These aren’t paranoid questions. They are supposed to be somebody else’s job.

What makes this even more interesting is that the law in favour of audience safety already exists.

The Safety at Sports and Recreational Events Act, Act 2 of 2010 (SASREA), doesn’t only apply to stadiums and football matches. Its definition of an “event” explicitly includes entertainment, cultural and recreational activities. It places clear obligations on organisers and venue owners around risk categorisation, safety planning, access control and public liability insurance. The regulations get specific, too: enough emergency exits to evacuate within 15 minutes, free water points, visible signage, medical facilities and backup power for higher-risk events.

On paper, South Africa has considered audience safety at length. So here’s the uncomfortable question the law itself raises: if all of these requirements already exist in regulation, why do attendees keep experiencing the same failures?

That’s a far more interesting problem than “the law is outdated.” The gap isn’t in the rules; it is in the distance between the rules and the ground. Municipalities approve safety plans, but the officials doing the approving are stretched across every licensed premises and road closure in the city, not just the one event. A plan gets signed off by someone who never walks the site, and once granted, that compliance is rarely evaluated again in real time. A certificate confirms a plan existed before the gates opened. It says nothing about whether it was still adhered to once the schedule started slipping and 20,000 people were in the premises.

The regulation was built to be satisfied once, at approval. The failures attendees actually experience occur much later, in execution, where almost nobody is still checking plan to practice.

The event does not end at the gate.

One of the clearest contradictions in this industry is the gap between how much effort goes into getting people in, versus getting them out. Ingress is a science: tickets scanned, wristbands issued, queues channelled, turnstiles counted. Someone has clearly modelled this.

Then the headliner finishes, and thousands of people become their own transport department. Cars gridlock. Pedestrians walk through poorly lit streets. The security perimeter seems to end exactly where the venue fence does, as if the event itself ends there too.

But it does not, not for the person experiencing it. If I get robbed walking from the gate to my car, the event wasn’t safe, whether or not it happened three metres outside the fence line. The regulations already require traffic planning for emergency vehicle movement. It’s not a stretch to extend that logic to attendees leaving the venue: controlled transport zones, managed pedestrian routes, lit paths. None of this requires turning a concert into a checkpoint. It requires treating “10,000 people leaving at once” as the logistical event it obviously is.

What does “community” actually mean here?

Every second event now markets itself as a community, which raises the question of what we actually mean by that word. Is it just people who bought tickets to the same event? Or does calling something a community imply an obligation toward the people inside it?

If an organiser tells me I’m part of their community while offering no real system to protect me while I’m in it, I’m entitled to ask what the word was doing there. We’ve become so used to patchy event experiences that we’ve started producing content to help each other survive them: how to avoid getting robbed at a festival, how to spot fake tickets. At what point did consumer self-defence quietly become a substitute for organiser responsibility?

Who exactly are we buying from?

South Africa’s event scene has exploded in recent years. But when you buy a ticket, how often do you know who you’re buying it from? You know the headliner, the venue, the price. Do you know the legal entity actually responsible for delivering the event?

That gap matters. South Africa has already seen a fake Adele concert listing on Computicket, the 2014 collapse of the TribeOne Dinokeng festival amid disputes with the City of Tshwane, widespread complaints over the 2025 Music in the Snow festival, and Hey Neighbour’s cancelled 2025 edition, referred to the National Consumer Commission over unresolved refunds. These cases aren’t equivalent, but together they raise one question: how much can an attendee find out before handing an organiser their money? Right now, almost nothing.

Promoters need something closer to a licence

South Africa should require formal promoter registration and point-of-sale transparency, not because most promoters are irresponsible, but because right now the responsible ones compete on the same trust footing as anyone who opens an Instagram page and starts selling tickets that afternoon.

That’s not a minor unfairness; it’s a market failure. A buyer choosing between two festivals has almost no way to tell which organiser actually paid for insurance and modelled their egress plan. Price and line-up are visible. Competence isn’t. So promoters cutting corners aren’t punished for it at the point of sale; they are rewarded, since the savings go straight into a bigger marketing budget. The market can’t correct a problem it can’t see.

SASREA already builds in organiser accountability and mandatory liability insurance, so the legal foundation exists. What’s missing is disclosing it before money changes hands: the legal entity behind the event, proof of liability cover, the refund policy, who’s handling medical and security. Make that a condition of selling tickets, not a line buried in terms nobody reads afterward.

This won’t be free. It adds friction for honest organisers running small events on tight budgets, and a poorly designed version could favour big promoters who can absorb the cost over smaller ones who can’t. That’s a real design problem. But leaving the current information vacuum in place isn’t neutral either. It’s already deciding the outcome, quietly, in favour of whoever markets best rather than whoever runs the safest event.

The problem with calling this “the new normal”

Maybe the most damaging thing we’ve done collectively is get used to it. We see complaints about exits, hear about phone theft, watch refunds stall for months, and somewhere along the way someone says: that’s just how events are here.

It isn’t. An event is a designed environment. Somebody decided where the stage goes, where the crowd stands, and, this is the part we keep forgetting, how people are meant to leave. Every one of those decisions is also a commercial one. Safety isn’t bolted onto an event afterward. It’s part of the design.

There’s a persistent assumption that the product is the artist. It isn’t. The artist is part of the product. So is the attendee’s entire journey, from leaving home to getting back. Once you accept that, safety stops sitting alongside the experience. It is the experience.

South Africans shouldn’t need to become amateur safety officers just to attend a concert. The fix isn’t complicated: disclose who’s actually responsible before the ticket is sold, and hold them to it after. Until that happens, the question every attendee is quietly asking for themselves, at the gate, at the exit, on the long walk to the car, remains open.

Who answers for it?