A backstage pass is an employee pass which allows its bearer access to employees-only areas at a performance venue. They are most commonly associated with rock music groups.
Such passes are usually a laminated paper worn on a lanyard, or on chain link or key chain holder at the belt, or a simpler "stick-on" applied to one's clothing. Plastic or paper wristbands may also be used. However, some elaborately designed backstage passes have been used by Bill Graham Productions/Winterland, Beaver Productions and many other regional and local promoters. To deter counterfeiting, passes often include holograms or color-shifting properties.
Some venues (including the House of Blues venues and Irving Plaza in New York) require their own passes to be worn, even by laminate holders for the tour. Large music festivals, such as Ozzfest and the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival also usually issue their own passes.
Backstage passes sometimes become memorabilia sold to die-hard fans, especially when the pass is signed by a performer.
In media, the term "Backstage Pass" may be used to signify the presence of expanded coverage of certain musical groups.
Read more about Backstage Pass: Types of Passes
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“It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)