People had been lined up for hours, sure they were about to see Miley Cyrus live. Some had dropped $500, $800, even $1,200, convinced they were holding golden tickets to a special stop on her 2025 Endless Summer Vacation Tour.
When the doors opened, what awaited wasn’t a stage, but a movie screen. The words Tribeca Film Festival Presents: Something Beautiful flashed up. That’s when reality started sinking in. The tickets—snagged through resale sites like VividSeats and StubHub—had been sold with vague, murky language. Miley’s name was front and center, with plenty of talk about “a live experience,” but no clear disclosure that this was a film screening, not a concert. Some in the crowd didn’t even know what the Tribeca Film Festival was.
When Miley eventually walked onstage for a Q&A, flanked by directors Jacob Bixenman and Brendan Walter, and producer Panos Cosmatos, the audience was already splitting in two. Applause—yes—but also shouts, questions, frustration. “Sing something!” ; “We thought this was a concert!”; “We paid 800 dollars!” And then one voice, cutting through the room like a ripple: “Sing The Climb!”.
Miley looked out at the crowd. “You have to start it,” she told the fan in the front row. That was the shift. Someone started singing—hesitantly. She joined in. No mic, no track. Just her voice. There’s always gonna be another mountain… Suddenly, the tension melted into harmony.
What happened that night opened up a bigger conversation—about how events are promoted, about transparency on resale platforms, about the difference between a promise made and a promise implied.
Kevin Erickson of the Future of Music Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for independent musicians, put it plainly: “When tickets go through unofficial channels, you lose control of the message. Nights like this are the result”.
Unlike Europe, the U.S. doesn’t allow non-transferable tickets. That makes it even harder for artists and organizers to prevent misunderstandings or inflated resale prices. And yet—Miley stayed. She answered questions, explained, sang.
On Instagram, a fan wrote: “If you really follow Miley, you knew what this was. It was Tribeca. It was never billed as a tour.” And they had a point. In a previous interview with Zane Lowe, Miley had said: “Something Beautiful is my way of sharing music without going on tour. I thought about doing performances in forests or deserts, but Harrison Ford looked at me and said, ‘You really want to sing in the woods? For what?’”
The film—named after the album—is part music video, part diary, part cinematic experiment. A visual journey designed to bypass the traditional pop concert and offer something more intimate, more constructed, more strange. It hits U.S. theaters June 12, in Italy, June 27.
