This chapter examines Jeremy Corbyn's supporters and detractors in the context of fandom. I use the concepts of politics fandom and anti-fandom, common in fan studies, as a framework for understanding how Corbyn interacted with his base and how the public interacted with him and others connected to his politics. There are three parts to the Corbyn fandom: emotional and defensive attachments to the man, the project and the Left itself. These elements are also those that are rejected by the anti-fandom, who similarly gained identity, community and a sense of purpose through their activities attacking Corbyn and anyone who expressed support for him. This chapter will conclude that Corbyn himself and his key critics have a limited understanding of fandom logics, but some of the younger employees of Momentum and his “outriders” in the media and online enabled Corbynism to harness the positive aspects of fandom and fannish behaviour while struggling to curb its worst tendencies. Broadsheet columnists inflamed the anti-fandom and encouraged their behaviour by contrasting the “cult” of Corbynism with the “sensible” politics of the technocratic era it replaced and to which Keir Starmer has returned.

A fandom is a community of enthusiasts or supporters formed around a cultural property, such as a sports team, a music group or an actor. Joining a fandom, an intentional act, gives the fan an identity, community and direction that is weak or missing when they enjoy the property alone as an individual fan. They are able to find people who understand and will discuss their interest, a social network and a sense of being part of something bigger than themselves. Anti-fans (“antis”) get a similar sense of purpose, identity and even joy to that experienced by fans from despising a cultural property (Alters 2007; Gray & Murray 2016; Hill 2015). It is emotionally intense. When they join with others, they experience the power of community as an anti-fandom. Fandoms and antifandoms pit themselves in battles against each other, not merely for or against the object of their passions. In politics, fans and fandoms can be attached to politics as a whole, political parties, campaigns and individual politicians or activists (Andrews 2019; 2017).

The rationale for this chapter stems from the fact that Jeremy Corbyn is the latest leader in a growing line of leaders of the opposition in recent decades who failed to secure their objective of getting out of opposition and back into government. Since the general election of May 1979, in which the Labour Party, led by Prime Minister James Callaghan, lost to the opposition Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher, there have been only two governing transitions: at the general election of May 1997 when the John Major-led Conservatives were defeated by New Labour and Tony Blair; and at the general election of May 2010 when the Gordon Brown-led Labour administration was replaced by the Conservative-led coalition with the Liberal Democrats under new Prime Minister David Cameron (and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg) (Butler & Kavanagh 1980, 1997; Kavanagh & Cowley 2010).

Between October 1980 – when Michael Foot replaced Callaghan as leader of the Labour Party and leader of the opposition – and the general election of December 2019 – when Corbyn failed to move from leader of the opposition to prime minister – there have been a total of ten leaders of the opposition. As mentioned above, only Blair and Cameron have been successful in terms of recovering power and making that transition. Electoral defeats have been the experience of the following: Foot for Labour at the general election of 1983; Neil Kinnock for Labour at the general elections of 1987 and 1992; William Hague and Michael Howard for the Conservatives at the general elections of 2001 and 2005 respectively; Ed Miliband led Labour to defeat at the general election of 2015; and Corbyn did likewise at the general elections of 2017 and 2019. Alongside these six leaders of the opposition who failed to become prime minister were two others who did not contest general elections – John Smith led the Labour Party for two years between 1992 and 1994 (until his death); while Iain Duncan Smith led the Conservatives for two years between 2001 and 2003 before his removal via a confidence motion (for discussions on opposition politics and the role of leader of the opposition; see Punnett 1973; Johnson 1997; Ball 2005; Norton 2008; Fletcher 2011; Heppell 2012; Bale 2015; Heppell, Theakston & Seawright 2015).

When Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader, his party faced a public sector that had endured two particular problems, one relatively recent, the other longerterm and thus deeper-rooted. The more recent problem had been the decade of stringent financial constraints imposed as part of the austerity programme implemented by the Conservatives since 2010, to tackle the economic problems accruing from the 2008 financial crash. As the public sector consumed the vast majority of government expenditure, it naturally bore the brunt of cuts intended to reduce the fiscal deficit and borrowing. Of course, the Conservatives could have raised taxes in order to pay off some of the deficit and/ or sustain public services, but this option – apart from increasing VAT (a regressive tax) from 18 to 20 per cent – was largely rejected on ideological grounds. Indeed, the post-2010 Conservative governments actually cut the top rate of income tax from 50 to 45 per cent and reduced corporation tax, suggesting by their actions, rather than their words, that “we were most certainly not all in it together”.

The longer-term and deeper-rooted problem endured by the public sector since the late 1980s has been the dual processes of “marketization” and “managerialism” introduced by the Thatcher and Major governments, but zealously continued and extended by the Blair and Brown governments, and then consolidated, under the auspices of austerity, by the post-2010 Conservative-led governments. Marketization compelled public services either to incorporate private sector principles and practices – through the adoption of “business models”, “internal markets” and enforced competition, both within and between, public sector institutions, with funding often linked to success in competing against “rival” institutions (and thus imitating the profit motive) – or to “contract-out” some of their activities to the private sector. The latter reflected the neoliberal– Thatcherite premise that the private sector was inherently superior to the public sector because of competition driving up standards, and the need to make a profit in order to survive, which could only be achieved by attracting and retaining enough customers, rather than relying on guaranteed annual taxpayers’ subsidies to monopolistic services which were deemed to lack incentives to improve their performance.

Populism is a difficult concept to pin down. This chapter follows the well-trodden path of opening with a statement highlighting that populism is an essentially contested concept, and that it has been conceptualized in a number of different – and often competing – ways.

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the nascent scholarship on Corbyn and Corbynism within the frameworks of four different understandings of populism. The first two notions – populism as an ideology and populism as a discourse – focus on populism as a substantive way of understanding the world. The third and fourth approaches focus on populism as a style, namely populism as a political strategy and populism as a socio-cultural approach to politics.

Naturally, the approach taken for this chapter involves covering a large theoretical landscape in a short space. Given the relative lack of academic attention given to the five years of Corbynism, this analysis only claims to be a starting point for a further unpacking of the relationship between Corbyn, the Corbynite movement, the Labour Party and populism.

This chapter argues that while Corbynism should not be labelled populist in a substantive understanding of the concept, elements of populism can be found in Corbyn's political style, with his emphasis on direct communication with supporters via rallies, his use of Momentum to reshape the Labour Party and to challenge the centrality of the PLP, and the importance of the moral and the authentic to Corbyn's own personal image, which holds the whole Corbynite experiment together. All of these contribute to a more populist style of politics, especially when considered within the context of the institutionalized British party-political system.

What is Corbynism?

Before an analysis of whether Corbyn, or the broader Corbyn project, was indeed populist, we should briefly examine the core components of Corbynism (for more detail, see Chapter 3). Ideologically, Corbynism represents a marriage between traditional Bennite economics and a newer, more radical “ ‘postcapitalist’ techno-utopian wing”, a worldview that sees technological advances, including automation and artificial intelligence, as providing an alternative to the current structure of work within a capitalist society (Bolton & Pitts 2018). The Corbynite project is based on a strong sense of economic nationalism, emerging from the Bennite legacy.

The position of leader of the Labour Party was formally established in 1922 and Jeremy Corbyn became the fourteenth individual, excluding temporary acting leaders, to hold that office when he won the leadership election of 2015. Of the previous 13 holders, six – Ramsay MacDonald (1922– 31) Clement Attlee (1935– 55), Harold Wilson (1963– 76), James Callaghan (1976– 80), Tony Blair (1994– 2007) and Gordon Brown (2007– 10) – would also serve as Labour prime ministers. Of the seven who led the Labour Party but failed to serve as prime minister, two – Hugh Gaitskell (1955– 63) and John Smith (1992– 94) – were Labour leaders of the opposition who held a lead in the opinion polls and seemed on course to become prime minister, only to pass away suddenly. The remaining five who failed to serve as prime minister were Arthur Henderson (1931– 32), George Lansbury (1932– 35), Michael Foot (1980– 83), Neil Kinnock (1983– 92) and Ed Miliband (2010– 15).

Miliband joined the list of Labour Party leaders who failed to become prime minister because of the poor performance of the party in the general election of 2015, which prompted his resignation. When Miliband acquired the leadership in September 2010, the Labour Party had recently lost the general election of May 2010 on the back of securing 8,606,518 votes and a 29.0 per cent vote share, which resulted in them securing 258 parliamentary seats, leaving them in opposition to a Conservative– Liberal Democrat coalition (Kavanagh & Cowley 2010: 350– 51). The failure of the Miliband opposition era was confirmed at the general election of 2015, when their parliamentary representation went down from 258 to 232 seats (-26), even if in terms of votes cast and vote share there was evidence of a limited recovery – they secured 9,347,273 votes on a 30.4 per cent vote share (Cowley & Kavanagh 2015: 433; on the Miliband opposition era, see Bale 2015, Goes 2016).

Miliband had won the leadership of the Labour Party via the Electoral College system of leadership selection. The Electoral College was a one-member-one-vote system, but it had a tripartite structure with one-third weight given to each of the following: (a) the PLP plus Labour members of the European Parliament; (b) individual Labour Party members from constituency associations; and (c) members of trade unions and affiliated societies.

It would be very easy to caricature the new members Labour has gathered up since 2015. Many traditional commentators – such as writers for The Economist – have continuously portrayed the surge of enthusiasm for Jeremy Corbyn among Labour members as something from beyond politics’ normal bounds, contrasting “energized” young Corbynites with the “dark” and depressed mood of MPs (The Economist 2016). Part fringe pressure group, part student activism and part political suicide mission, the fervour and emotional commitment of many of Corbyn's supporters has been displayed in so many unflattering ways that it is hard to winnow the reality from the fantasy. Labour's deputy leader, Tom Watson, talked of the left-wing pressure group Momentum as if it was formed of far-left infiltrators leading on young people who lacked the experience to see what was really happening (Stewart 2016). Momentum's own internal battles, fought out between insurgents stressing their participatory politics and more established leftists, have helped to reinforce the impression of forces entering Labour from “outside” in an attempt to take it over, while the angry and often unpleasant rhetoric deployed by a small number of Corbynites on social media has also poisoned the atmosphere (Murray 2016). All in all, the general public has been treated to analysis that characterizes the average Corbyn supporter in three ways: young, very left-wing and extremely angry.

But is this picture the right one? It seems, from what evidence we have, that it is somewhat wide of the mark. Although students, young people and (now ex-) members of small parties such as the Socialist Party have all indeed helped shape the story, the reality of Labour's new membership is somewhat more prosaic. Older, better educated and more politically experienced than they have been painted, Corbynites are just as likely to be Labour returnees who left during the years since Neil Kinnock became leader and the party made its move towards the political centre; Peter Mandelson rather derisively termed them “retreaded Old Labourites” in a memorandum circulated to Labour centrists soon after Corbyn's leadership victory in 2015 (Mandelson 2015).

Jeremy Corbyn is likely to remain an important figure in Labour Party politics, even after his tenure as its leader. Partly because as a backbencher, he is still able to inform debates not just within the Labour Party but in British politics more broadly. He still attracts (virtual and live) audiences and media attention, for good or ill, not least as the ex-party leader, but also as a controversial figure within the labour movement. Moreover, Corbyn's time in office exposed the schisms within the party, provoking a debate at the heart of social democracy over its future and relevance in the twenty-first century. This volume presents a timely collection of essays on a range of issues relevant to understanding Corbyn as a politician and as a leader and Corbynism as a project and as a progressive alternative.

Following a damaging defeat in the general election under Ed Miliband, Labour's search for a new leader culminated in the surprise election of Jeremy Corbyn after an energetic, lively and optimistic leadership campaign in 2015. During the leadership election he:

This was a thoroughly left-leaning agenda, which chimed with some audiences across the country as authentic. At the start of the campaign, few expected Corbyn to win; by the end, many were surprised, especially those Labour MPs who had nominated Corbyn simply to expand the debate within the leadership election (Denham, Roe-Crines & Dorey 2020). As leader, he would have to defend his position from continual critique from his own backbenchers, including a formal leadership challenge by Owen Smith in 2016.

Paul Krugman, an economist with a career at the best universities, Nobel prize-winner, and one of the world's most famous and respected economists, has been one of President Trump's leading critics. Via Twitter (and his column in The New York Times) Krugman has not pulled his punches, taking on the president for his economic policy choices. Moreover, as an expert on international trade, Krugman has targeted Trump's protectionist proposals and measures. He has not been alone in his criticism, as most economists believe that the main measures adopted and proposed by the Trump administration have been wrong.

In fact, the Trump administration seems to have ignored all of the economists’ suggestions. In 2018, it initiated a broad fiscal stimulus including tax cuts and spending increases, which made the US debt dynamic even more unsustainable than it was already. Trump launched a series of bilateral trade negotiations, threatening and implementing tariffs and other protectionist measures, when economic theory argues that what matters is the overall trade deficit (not the bilateral deficits) and that there are benefits from free trade. The insight that countries are better off exporting the products they are relatively good at producing while importing the others, dates back to the ideas of the British political economist David Ricardo (1772–1823).

Observing such a divergence between economists and politicians in the United States, one of the most developed countries in the world, makes one think. Is it possible that the president of the most powerful economy in the world would ground his policies in erroneous reasoning or data that do not exist? Or is it that economists are losing touch with reality and do not understand that their theories no longer work? Indeed, economists are not infallible. They were widely criticized for not having foreseen the financial crisis of 2008, epitomized by Queen Elizabeth's now infamous question, “Why did no one see it coming?” during a visit to the London School of Economics in 2008. They also failed to understand and anticipate the dissatisfaction of the American middle class that led to the election of Donald Trump. So, who has got it right?

No account of Jeremy Corbyn's political career could be complete without an assessment of his approach to foreign policy. His professed mission to create a fairer and more equal Britain has been matched by a desire to transform the country's international relations. Prior to becoming Labour's leader, Corbyn's public profile chiefly arose from his stance on a foreign policy issue: his opposition to the Iraq War. Indeed, according to one well-placed source, he would have preferred to serve as foreign secretary rather than as prime minister (Bush 2018). The Orwell Prize-winning journalist Steven Bloomfield summarized, “Foreign policy is Corbyn's passion. While the ins and outs of NHS reform don't tend to interest him, a conversation about healthcare in Latin America can last for hours” (Bloomfield 2018).

While foreign policy brought Corbyn to public notice, his views on controversial international issues provided considerable ammunition for critics at home and abroad. To his opponents, his “terrorist” groups, such as the IRA and Hamas, made him an enemy to his country, and a security risk even as leader of the opposition. Our present purpose is to offer a more general overview and evaluation of Corbyn's foreign policy, in the light of the most cogent criticisms of his detractors. In recent years, a failed leader of the opposition (William Hague) has ended up serving as foreign secretary. It is unlikely (not least on grounds of age) that Jeremy Corbyn's career will follow the same course. But it is permissible to pose the hypothetical question of whether or not Corbyn was really equipped to realize his ambition of serving in this senior ministerial role, not least because in his relatively brief spell as a major political player he had the chance to inspire others who might seek to shape British foreign policy along “Corbynista” lines.

The case against Corbyn

In September 2019, the Washington-based think tank the Hudson Institute published The Prospective Foreign Policy of a Corbyn Government and its US National Security Implications. Since the Institute has strong “conservative” affiliations it was most unlikely to commission a sympathetic study of Corbyn's views.

The relationship between politics and gender has been extensively studied in the UK context but, for obvious historical reasons, tends to focus primarily on how political institutions and processes work to exclude or marginalize women as well as on proposing mechanisms to correct these forms of discrimination. In this chapter, we take a broader view of the gendered nature of politics in order to discuss Jeremy Corbyn and his leadership via a gendered lens. Therefore, as well as assessing the extent to which Corbyn and his politics are compatible with increased gender equality, we will also consider Corbyn as a gendered figure. We will furthermore discuss how his supporters and detractors recognized and made use of his gendered performances to both champion and vilify his leadership.

Factors that impact on women's recruitment into politics include systematic factors (such as the legal, electoral and party systems and structures that set the broad context for women's representation), how parties are organized (their rules and ideological positions) and individual factors, such as the resources and motivations of aspiring candidates and the attitudes of party selectors (Norris & Lovenduski 1995). Women have also been found to suffer from direct discrimination from party selectors where negative judgements are made based on perceived characteristics of their group, or indirect discrimination that occurs when ideas of what constitutes a “good” representative count against women (Childs 2008). Since the 1980s, the Labour Party has led other mainstream political parties in recruiting and promoting women politicians. The introduction of all-women shortlists in the 1997 election resulted in a record number of women MPs being elected to parliament (Childs 2008). Since then, they have consistently returned more women candidates than other parties at all subsequent general elections. The Labour Party, however, has (at the time of writing) failed to elect a female leader, which is a matter of concern for many within the party.

Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of performing masculinity for effective political leadership (Conroy 2015; Katz 2016; Harmer, Savigny & Ward 2017). Conroy (2015: 75) argues that the perception of manliness is important when voting for a politician.

Live music market functions

Apart from the artists, the main players in the live music business are (1) music promoters and festival organizers; (2) concert venue operators; (3) music agents and bookers; (4) support service providers; and (5) ticketing companies. Thus, the live music business is based on a division of labour with many different occupational roles.

Music promoters and festival organizers

Promoters

Music promoters organize concerts, tours and festivals at their own risk and expense by selling tickets. The promoter conceptualizes a musical event or a concert tour and, to this end, contracts the artists. A tour manager and crew attend to and support the artists while travelling and performing. Before staging the music event, the promoter is in charge of event publicity and public relations and seeks to support the sales of tickets in order to cover the costs already incurred. The promoter will inform the public about the event with an advertising campaign comprising posters, flyers, mailings, radio and television ads, social media networking, as well as arranging interviews of the artists with journalists and even with press conferences. However, if the presales of tickets indicate an insufficient demand for the event, the promoter will cancel it and has to bear the costs already incurred.

We can roughly distinguish between (1) small local promoters who organize concerts in small venues such as bars and music clubs; (2) regional promoters organizing concerts in medium-sized venues; and (3) national promoters who collect several concert dates to put together national and international tours. Concert promotion involves a high level of risk. The promoters have to spend money upfront and cannot guarantee that a sufficient number of tickets will be sold to cover the costs. The larger the capacity of venue and the higher the number of shows, the higher the risk for the promoter. Therefore, national promoters spread the risk by coupling concert dates of an artist for a tour to cross-collateralize possible losses from one concert by possible gains from others (for the history of the new live music business model see Chapter 1).

The invention of the phonograph by Thomas Alva Edison (1847– 1931) in 1877 marked the outset of the modern music industry with mass production of phonograms and the emergence of a global distribution network for music cylinders and records. Music, however, was an economic good before the advent of the recorded music industry. Antique sources prove that musical products were already traded in the centuries BCE. It is reported that the Greek poet Pindar sent 470 lyrics from his hometown Theben to tyrant Hieron in Sicily in the fifth century BCE (Baierle 2009: 51). Pindar himself was not just a writer but also a kind of early music entrepreneur. Since lyric verses were usually accompanied by music performances and dance, Pindar also choreographed the dances for his odes. He was commissioned to stage performances in all parts of ancient Greece and was an ancient “impresario” in high demand (Carey 2007: 199– 210). Pindar was an early example of an artist who was commissioned by wealthy and powerful patrons.

We can usefully divide the economic history of music into five periods:

• 1. The era of music patronage from the ancient times until the late-eighteenth century;

• 2. The era of music publishing from the late eighteenth century until the 1920s;

• 3. The era of broadcasting from the 1920s to the 1950s;

• 4. The era of the recorded music industry from the 1950s until c.2000;

• 5. The era of the digital music economy since 2000.

The era of music patronage

From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance

The era of early music patronage covers the ancient period until the medieval age when the Catholic Church became the main patron for the arts, especially for music. Music was an integral part of liturgy and the term cappella still refers to practising music in chapels and churches. Music schools in monasteries (e.g. the Abbey in St. Gall, Switzerland) and at the medieval cathedrals (e.g. Notre Dame in Paris) were centres of music education and almost all famous medieval composers of sacred music received their musical training there.

Digitization has revolutionized the music business since the millennium as radio did in the 1930s. The change, however, is not just technologically driven, but is embedded in a socio-cultural paradigm shift that alters the relation of music business actors, their business practices as well as aesthetic concepts. The 360-degree management model of artists has replaced the record centred value-added network, which emerged in the rock ‘n’ roll revolution of the 1950s. The artist is now in the centre of the value-added network and has the power to decide on partners to collaborate. Nowadays, there is no need for artists to give away all the copyrights and to enter in exclusive contracts. However, digitization has also lowered the market entrance barrier to the business. Anyone who makes music can put her/his music videos on YouTube, launch a crowdfunding campaign and use social media sites for self-promotion.

Thus, the prophecy of a disintermediation in the music business has not come true. Although “old” intermediaries such as recorded music companies and music publishers have lost some of the control in producing and distributing music, they established new business models to exploit their massive back catalogs to digital music service providers. Thanks to copyright and related rights, they are gatekeeping the access to music by controlling and even owning music streaming services. Recorded music companies have outsourced former key functions such as A&R, record manufacturing and distribution to focus on exploiting master rights. Music publishers have enlarged their repertoire base by acquiring copyrights and entire music catalogs and they have also entered the recording business and provide management services. The live music business has become dominated by a few concert promoters such as Live Nation owning concert sites, ticketing services and artist agencies. Thus, we can observe a convergence of the three music subsectors – publishing, recording and live business – to a single music industry support network for artists.

Along with this change, new market entrants such as Apple, Google, Amazon as well as telecoms and internet service providers indicate an innovative disruption (Christensen 1997) in the music business.

Radio broadcasting

As highlighted in Chapter 1, radio played the major role in music distribution from the 1930s to the mid-1950s. At the time, the music industry was primarily a broadcasting industry that considered record selling merely as a side business. In the US, the business model was based on advertising income that financed live radio music shows with popular dance music orchestras – think of the infamous Camel Caravan Show with Benny Goodman and His Orchestra sponsored by the tobacco giant Reynolds from 1936‒39 (Tschmuck 2012: 93‒4).

However, radio broadcasting lost its influence on the music industry with the advent of commercial television in the 1950s and 1960s, as a result of which advertising revenue was reallocated from radio to television. Nevertheless, radio became an important platform for record labels to promote their new releases. Indeed, even today radio airplay is still the most important tool to sell music in physical and digital formats.

The introduction in 1953 of the top-40 radio format by radio stations owner Todd Storz inaugurated a new era (see Shaw 1974: 66). Until the early 1950s, AM radio programmes consisted of pre-scheduled and ad-sponsored blocks including radio dramas, shows and music. Storz and his program director Bill Stewart observed that the more people heard a song from the jukebox, the more likely they would buy a record. Thus, Storz programmed his radio stations like jukeboxes, playing all day long the 40 most popular songs of the hit parade, which provided a conducive environment for advertising. The top-40 format was a considerable economic success and became a blueprint for other radio stations within and outside the US. The top-40 format later changed to contemporary hit radio (CHR) and other radio formats such as album oriented radio (AOR), middle-of-the-road radio (MOR), adult contemporary (AC) and eventually format radio emerged even for classical music and oldies.

With the invention of format radio, the decision-making process of music programming shifted from radio DJs to program committees and program directors. Record labels again tried to influence the programming of radio stations by employing independent music promoters.

The fundamentals of the music market economy

Music as an economic good is traded on different markets – for example the market for recorded music and the market for concerts. Before analysing music as an economic good, we have to understand how music markets work. The father of modern economics, Adam Smith (1723– 90), explained that the market allocates scarce resources like an “invisible hand”. In the first book of The Wealth of Nations, Smith (1811 [1776] I: 21) states: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”. Thus, if individuals are driven by their self-interest the result is a free market economy that efficiently allocates scarce resources. The market, therefore, is a metaphorical place where demand meets supply (Figure 2.1).

Demand and supply are represented by curves. The demand curve (D) describes the consumers’ willingness to purchase a quantity of a good at a given price, whereas the supply curve (S) represents the producers’ willingness to sell a unit of a good at a given price. The market price of a good is represented by the point where the demand curve crosses the supply curve. At the market price, the supplied quantity of a good is entirely taken up by the buyers demanding the good. The market price remains in an equilibrium as long as all external factors are stable. Such a situation is called Pareto efficient. According to the Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, efficiency (or optimality) is a state of allocation of goods in which one individual cannot be made better off without making another individual worse off. Thus, the market provides Pareto efficient results (see Varian 2010: 15– 16).

In our model, a new price and new Pareto optimal state emerges if external factors change. Consider a concert of a famous band, for example. If rumour spreads that the concert could be the last one before the band dissolves, more fans might be inclined to buy a ticket than would otherwise be the case. Since the number of tickets is limited by the capacity of the concert venue, such additional demand would cause a rise in ticket prices.