Going Chrome: Tyler, the Creator’s listening event in Los Angeles

In the last week, 2024′s music scene shifted from a lime green “BRAT” summer to a kelly green “CHROMAKOPIA” fall. With this autumn’s turning leaves comes Tyler, the Creator’s eighth studio album that he announced on Instagram on October 16 with the caption “1. st chroma.”

The post’s likes, shares and comments immediately exploded. Tyler’s new masked character was spread all over within a few hours, every social media app buzzing about his first new music since the 2021 expanded “CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST” album. On Instagram, Tyler announced the album — written, produced and arranged by Tyler himself — would drop on October 28. His next few Instagram posts included music video sneak peeks, snippets of unreleased songs and 2025 world tour dates.

Then, on October 24, he announced a special Los Angeles event on his Instagram story and Twitter:

Followers flocked to the website chromakopia.com to see if the $5 offer was real, and as promised, the Los Angeles Intuit Dome tickets were set to drop on October 27. The impromptu listening event would offer die-hard fans a chance to experience the new album in person with the Creator himself.

“It was literally five dollars per ticket. It was awesome because I am probably the biggest Tyler fan on this campus,” said Gaby Medina, a USC senior majoring in journalism. “I probably didn’t have to do this, but [I went] to bed at midnight and set an alarm for every hour after that and woke up to refresh the page every sixty minutes. It was a crazy night of sleep but I ended up being only 3,000 in the queue while like everyone else who didn’t do that ended up in the 30,000′s or 20,000′s.”

Medina first discovered Tyler’s “Flower Boy” album in 2017 and she’s been a loyal fan ever since; her favorite album is tied between “CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST” and “IGOR.”

“It felt very official like a real concert. Even before we got to our seats, everything was green,” Medina said. “His face was everywhere, there was a statue of him that said ‘Chromakopia.’”

The Intuit Dome’s layout for the concert consisted of a cross-shaped stage and flashing green lights. According to Billboard’s interview with Tyler’s long-time creative director Alex Reardon, the static scenic design elevated the auditory experience.

“You walk in, you see the thing that looks cool, you take a picture of it and it anchors the experience,” Reardon said. “But after that, it doesn’t start with massive color change and scenic changes and costume changes and frama and pyros and all the stuff that we would add to his performance because there is no performance underpinning that. And therefore to do that will be visually distracting and therefore detract from the audio or the auditory sense.”

Medina praised the auditory experience and emphasized “Because the tickets were so scarce, you could tell that every single person that was there was like the biggest Tyler fan you could possibly meet. It was cool to be surrounded by those people and we honestly made a couple friends in the stands. We were dancing and vibing together,” Medina said. “My favorite part was when the entire stadium heard that first ‘it’s Sexxy’ ad-lib during ‘Sticky’ and we all realized that [Sexyy Red] was on the album and got a feature and I’ve never seen a crowd blow up like that in my life. It was like all 17,000 of us collectively lost our minds, it was wild.”

A few other USC students were able to snag a ticket to the coveted event, including Nizhoni McDonough, a USC senior majoring in law, history and culture. She first became a Tyler fan in 2015 when she heard his “Cherry Bomb” album and her favorite song now is “RUNNING OUT OF TIME” from “IGOR.”

“I think it was amazing and fair of Tyler to make the tickets $5 since it was a listening event and not a whole concert,” said McDonough. “I think it was really nice not to worry about how expensive the tickets were and focus on how exciting the event was.” [...] “The anticipation of waiting to hear the album for the first time and experiencing it for the first time with everyone else. It was a really cool and different experience from a typical concert that I really appreciated and will never forget.”

The album explores the entire emotional spectrum, personal growth, parenthood, isolation, paranoia and identity. Features from Daniel Caesar, Teezo Touchdown, Childish Gambino, Schoolboy Q, Doechii, Lil Wayne, Sexyy Red and GloRilla are stylishly woven throughout the songs. According to Rolling Stone, “As Tyler explained to the crowd after the album finally concluded, most of this record was inspired by the things his mother would tell him in his youth that he was too young to understand. Only in adulthood are those lessons truly clicking.”

Rolling Stone also quoted Tyler as he provided a bit of context to the Intuit Dome crowd Sunday night. “Now that I’m 33, all the stuff is like ‘oh thats what the f**k she was talking about. Oh I’m not the guy I was at 20. Oh s**t, people are getting older, folks having kids and families.’ All I’ve got is a new Ferrari, that does feel kind of weird. I’ve got a grey hair on my chest. Life is life. I just wanted to write about stuff I think about when I’m dolo’ing.”

Tyler, the Creator continues to set a high bar in a range of areas: aesthetics, emotional depth, inventive marketing, blending music genres and more. Now, he’s set a revolutionary precedent of music accessibility by offering his fans a chance to see him live without dropping hundreds and hundreds of dollars.

Because after all, isn’t the experience what it’s all for?

You can now stream the album on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and Soundcloud.