I am in my 20s and started going to concerts regularly 10-12 or so years ago.
I have always gone to a mixture of club (pay at door - cheap) shows and larger club (1k-2k people plus) up to arena shows.
In my experience, it does feel like the prices have gone up quite a bit, overall. Tickets for Tool in 2002 were like $35-40 bucks, a couple years ago I think we paid about $60. They’ve had a big fan base since the mid 90s and I don’t think it’s changed much.
Nowadays it seems like I can’t get ANY concert ticket for less than $35. Plus bullshit fees. Except tiny club shows, and those are all $12+ when they used to be $5-10 or so.
I still pay for the ones I really want to see, but I do skip out on bands I am more “eh” on because it’s not worth $40 bucks for me to see a band I’m not in love with. So I don’t anymore go to concerts where I don’t know the bands yet, which is a bummer. Can’t afford to. There’s usually enough stuff I WANT to see rolling through town that I spend a couple hundred a year on shows, and we’re not even in a top tier market, just a secondary, so we miss out on some people that just don’t stop here.
Re: scalpers - if scalpers could somehow be barred from buying up all the tickets, I think more people would buy in at the lower prices we see now. People buy from scalpers because all the goddamn tickets are GONE because the scalpers bought all the good ones and they are just desperate to go. Not EVERYONE is willing to pay those inflated prices. Some are insane. The market price might settle a bit higher than what they currently go for if no scalping was happening, but I don’t think 2x or whatever the current price would sell out every concert - some are already really expensive. And then the beers at the arena are $8!
Precisely. Scalpers buy up massive amounts of tickets, forcing people who really wanted to go but couldn’t get tickets to pay inflated prices. I don’t see how the situation has anything to do with regular-price tickets being too low.
The other thing about scalpers is that they often only sell pairs of tickets. That puts people looking for a single seat in a tough spot. I’ve had some luck on last-minute buys on eBay and Craigslist, but since I only want the first 10 rows I still end up paying quite a premium over face value. Most of the time it’s worth it to me.
A lot of big-name artists have another ultra-priced block of tickets, the fan club “VIP” and “Meet and greet” packages. Those things go for some really, really big bucks.
I rarely go to concerts anymore because of the ticket prices. I used to go to see lots of bands in the mid-late 80s thru the mid-90s. Most of these were smaller venues (Ramones, The Cramps, The Replacements, Camper Van Beethoven, Hoodoo Gurus, The Smithereens, etc.) Ticket prices were usually $15-$20, sometimes less. I think the ticket price the first time I saw REM in 1985 was $15. I saw U2 with Big Audio Dynamite and Public Enemy in 1992 in a football stadium. I think the ticket was $35. There are very few acts I would pay to see with today’s ticket prices.
As Snowboarder Bo noted, there are great ticket bargains to be had if you are willing to see acts whose biggest popularity was decades in the past.
Our local classic rock station in conjunction with our local casinos has run or will run the following concerts this month and next.
Sept. 1 - Foghat, Slaughter, the Lynch Mob and Great White with tickets starting at $10.
Sept. 28 - War and the Average White Band with tickets starting at $15.
Oct. 7 - George Thorogood and the Destroyers and Molly Hatchet with tickets starting at $10.
Those are the cheapest tickets available, but even the prices for the better seats are still pretty inexpensive. I’d even pay $40-$45 to see multiple bands.
I love seeing live music, but I avoid going to any show that would be scalped. There are too many talented performers that I can see for less than $25 a ticket to spend four times as much to see a single show. Some of the best shows I’ve seen cost me the least. And of course, when you discover artists when they are struggling, they tend to remember you when they are successful.
The only performer I pay more than $25 a ticket to see is Todd Rundgren, but given that the last time I saw him featured a full symphony orchestra, I’m willing to give him a pass.
I’ve been seeing around 3-5 live shows a year since 2002, both in southern CA and in the Pacific Northwest, and i’d say prices have been pretty much stagnant in my experience. The most expensive seats are always arena shows by ‘70s rockers (Eric Clapton and the Who were both about $130 each for fair-to-middlin’ seats at Key Arena), but i’ve also paid considerably less than that with the same kind of artists - Roger Waters and Taylor Swift, both at the Tacoma Dome, were about $80 each (and I got a free upgrade to a seventh row seat at Taylor’s concert, which normally would have cost hundreds). Blue Oyster Cult, who i’ve caught seven times at various nightclubs, state fairs, and casinos, is usually pretty steady in the $30-$40 range, and the least i’ve ever paid for a concert is for an indie band called the Protomen, who come up here once a year for PAX and play a few dives on the side at $12 a pop.
If anything, parking at arena lots is a bigger ripoff than the ticket prices themselves, as some venues charge up to $25 to park. (Imagine my elation when I found out I could park in downtown Tacoma for $5 and take the tram to the Tacoma Dome for free.)
A obscure musician with no name recognition by the general public came out of retirement and reassembled the band they played in and had a short run of shows, they were charing the equivalent of 90 USD a ticket. Yes ticket prices are crazy!
There’s no doubt in my mind that ticket prices have gone up far faster than inflation. When I was growing up, you could go into Manhatten and catch a Broadway show matinee for less than $30 – andI’m not talking about the TKTS price or special deals. When I got SRO tickets for the Royal Shakespeare company performing Sherlock Holmes on Broadway in 1975 I paid
$3.50 !!! No joke. No typo. Less than $5
I agree those prices look absurdly low, especially with the inflation of the last 40 years, but there’s no way you could get something for the inflation-adjusted price today. A quick survey of Broadway ticket prices shows that they’re definitely in excess of the inflation-adjusted prices I paid back then.
The shit seats to see Cohen at Madison Square Garden in NYC in Decenber (for example) are $43. The expensive seats are $152 and $282. MSG is pretty big, though, and your shit seats may be less shitty…
In the 70’s tickets for a major band in a 15000 seat arena usually went for 2 to 5 times the price of an LP album. My first concert was YES with Poco as an opening act in 1973. Tickets sold for $7.50, $8.50, $9.50. The production included some elaborate moving stage props.
That formula pretty much held together up through the mid 80’s and then the spread between album prices and live performance tickets began to grow rapidly.
I think you are missing the point. Whatever people are willing to pay for, what is in nearly every respect, a luxury good, is the “correct” price as far as sellers are concerned. This isn’t a necessity like gas, or even like increasing the price on staples during a storm. Nobody NEEDS to see the Rolling Stones, on a certain date and time.
The original sellers are leaving money on the table by allowing a middle man (the scalper) to extract more money from the buyer. There is nothing a scalper can do that the original seller can’t. Even though you are correct that scalper can, in some instances, create an artificial scarcity, the original seller could do the same if they wanted. Or they could make it even easier on themselves by auctioning off desirable tickets. Either way, ticket bastard could likely charge even more if they wanted to. In fact, they are trying out variable pricing to increase revenue.
The only reason they haven’t done this is because it offends most people’s basic sense of fairness, and they have a reputation to uphold.
I agree with your first paragraph but the reason you state in the second paragraph is wrong. Promoters don’t charge the true market rate for tickets because it would make the band look worse than they already do. It’s bad enough that some acts charge over $100 for a seat, but the reality is that many acts could sell out shows at $300 or more per seat. Springsteen could do it. He could fill Madison Square Garden (or wherever he likes to play) at $300+ per seat, but he would get a ton of bad press.
Instead, they set face value lower and then sell very few tickets in the general sale (the one where people with no connections try to get through on Ticketmaster’s website the second tickets go on sale). Most of the tickets are withheld from the general sale and are sold on “secondary market” sites like StubHub and TicketsNow (which, look at that, is owned by Ticketmaster). Now the tickets are in a real marketplace and you find out what they’re really worth, which is usually a lot more than face value. The tickets are being scalped by the act and/or promoter themselves.
It’s a horrible game for consumers but nobody has come up with a way to maximize ticket prices while not making buyers feel like they’re getting screwed. Only the most noble of acts, like Louis CK, have been willing to do anything about this mess, but he did it by screwing himself instead of screwing his fans. He sold tickets for his current tour at a flat $45, giving up a ton of money. Most acts care about money more than he does so they pretend to have reasonably priced tickets but scalp the majority of them to make more money. They blame the whole sad state of affairs on Ticketmaster even as they are benefiting from it.
This isn’t limited to music acts. Sports teams do it, too. If you buy a Red Sox ticket on StubHub and it is delivered via instant download, you are buying that ticket directly from the Red Sox.
People complain that scalpers are the problem, but the scalpers are the music acts, the sports teams, the event promoters. The problem is that there is way more demand than supply but nobody is willing to price tickets (face value) at a level where supply and demand meet. Ironically, it’s too unseemly.
Great post, but I have to question whether CK personally left that much money on the table given that he cut out several middlemen. He is not a big enough act to get a favorable deal from ticket master and the like. Even though the ticker prices are lower, he probably gets a greater cut. You may be right that the math works out worse for him, but it would seem that doesn’t have to be the case.
Good point. I was only looking at it from the point of view of him selling the tickets for a flat price and not taking advantage of the reseller sites to jack up the prices.
