Dave Miller is a Pitchfork Music Festival loyalist. Every year he raced to purchase tickets for the popular indie music festival during the presale. When the July weekend finally arrived, he rode the Green Line from Oak Park each morning to enjoy every note played.

But this year he is leery. What festivalgoers will experience at Pitchfork this summer will look and feel much different than the previous decade-plus. There’s a new “elevated” tier that adds a “double-decker” private viewing platform near the soundboard, side stage bleachers and a VIP-only pit for the two main stages.

To fans like Miller who prefer the more egalitarian general admission, the multi-tiered VIP packages feel excessive, especially the new double-decker platform, which he pretty much hates. “It’ll block a wide swath of people in the field behind it from seeing the stage,” Miller says. He’s not the only one. When Pitchfork tickets went on sale last week, the Internet lit up with comments from fans criticizing the new VIP tiers.

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“Two story? So basically no one behind the vip can see?” wrote one Instagram user. Another commented: “RIP to the people who are gonna stand in that chokepoint between the two two-story viewing areas if there’s any emergency.”

Some blamed Pitchfork’s new management structure. The 2024 festival is the first since parent company Condé Nast merged Pitchfork Media, the long-time online music criticism website that lent its name to the festival, with the men’s magazine GQ, resulting in layoffs. Condé Nast owns the magazine and the festival.

Pitchfork organizers say the fears are unwarranted. In an email statement, a spokesperson said the festival’s “priority is to maintain a culture of inclusivity and community so all new amenities were designed to elevate the experience of VIP ticket buyers without detracting from the general admission experience attendees have come to know and love.”

“We’ve intentionally positioned VIP areas where they will not obstruct sight lines or create barriers for fans. The elevated viewing platforms will be situated over the sound booths, which have historically been elevated, so this obstruction will not be new,” the email to WBEZ said.

Still, when it comes to VIP tiers, fans should probably get used to it. The detailed VIP menu for this summer’s festival, set for July 19-21 in Union Park, represents a wider trend in the concert industry. Want shorter bathroom lines, more food options, the best sightlines and access to the stage? They’re yours — for a higher price.

Pitchfork will charge $379 for single-day VIP access, nearly four times the $109 general admission ticket. Some multiday extravaganzas — such as Tortuga in Fort Lauderdale, Coachella in Indio, Calif., and Outside Lands in San Francisco — ask fans to pay much more, from $779 to thousands of dollars for multiday VIP passes. (When Lollapalooza tickets go on sale Thursday, the four-day tickets will start at $385, but VIP and “Platinum” passes are $1,565 and $4,500, respectively.)

Tatiana Cirisano, a senior music industry analyst and consultant for market research firm MIDiA Research, said festival promoters are relying more on VIP experiences to offset the escalating costs — from artist guarantees to food to fuel. “Some of those costs are getting passed onto the fans,” she said.

Beyond that, the surge in ticket sales since COVID-19 signaled to the industry that fans may be willing to absorb those costs due to pent-up demand. Promoters are eager to jump on the post-pandemic need to get out of the house.

“Over the past few years, the live industry has had the attitude of ‘Let’s raise prices because we can.’ Because rabid fandom has shown concertgoers will go anywhere and spend anything,” Cirisano said.

Data from a new report on post-pandemic concert behavior by MIDiA Research and the live music website Bandsintown show concertgoers driven by their enthusiasm for a single artist or genre are the ones most willing to pay for a premium VIP experience, particularly at festivals. However, because these fans are spending more, they’re also attending fewer live music events — and maybe, the thinking goes, more prone to splurge on a single experience.

A shift in attitude among younger concertgoers may be stoking the demand for VIP pricing. Tim Epstein, a sports and entertainment attorney at Chicago’s Duggan Bertsch who represents independent festivals such as Pitchfork and Riot Fest, observes that these fans “would rather go to a festival one day as a VIP than three days on a general admission ticket.”

“There’s more demand certainly nationally from a younger dynamic for the VIP experience than there ever was before. It’s where we are culturally,” Epstein said.

Enthusiasts for the Pitchfork festival, which started in 2006, worry that it is shifting from the looser spirit of its earlier incarnation where there were fewer barriers to access between the musicians and the fans.

“The great thing about a music fest is that it brings people together, but all of these different price structures separate people,” said Miller, the Oak Park fan. “It reduces what can be a magical music experience into crass commerce. Fest organizers deserve to make a lot of money for their efforts, but do they need to milk art for every last dollar to the point where it alters it?”

Chris Kaskie, who sold the Chicago-based website to New York-based Condé Nast in 2015 but stayed on as president until 2017, said Pitchfork had “felt pressure” to introduce more pricing tiers to the festival by its new owners. “Pitchfork Plus,” a new tier that offered enhanced food options and lounge access but no viewing platforms, arrived in 2017.

But unless the increased revenue from VIP amenities goes directly to the artists or enhances the music for the audience, Pitchfork risks alienating a core fanbase that has become conditioned to a more “communal environment” around the music, Kaskie said. “I would hate for fans to feel, ‘Oh man, this feels totally different now.’ That’s what will happen if that moral compass starts to feel off.”

This year’s line-up is topped with headliners including Black Pumas and Alanis Morrissette, but many bands are those still in the early stages of their career, which means they could more readily be found at smaller venues like the Empty Bottle or Metro for a cheaper ticket. Epstein said Pitchfork is evolving in the direction of multigenre festivals such as Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo and Outside Lands which are “more about the experience and the brand” than the artists on the bill.

“The multigenre format brings a lot of people out who want to explore, but generally they’re coming to your festival because of your brand; they’re not coming to your festival to see all the music that they like,” he said.

Soon, though, the multigenre festival could soon become an outlier. Epstein said the future of U.S. festivals is the single-genre line-up, which reflects the current streaming era. In Chicago and elsewhere there are now festivals devoted to electronic dance music (ARC in late August at Union Park), country (Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival in the south suburbs in September), hip-hop (Summer Smash in June in Bridgeview) and heavy metal (Heavy Chicago’s debut in 2023).

“New festivals will be genre-specific, it’s a reflection of society. We have all the offerings, but we go into our corners,” Epstein said. “It’s great when you have festivals like Pitchfork where you can make musical discoveries but they are becoming few and far between.”

Mark Guarino is a journalist based in Chicago.