It seemed to really start to get out of hand in the early 2000’s. Is it pure greed on the artists part? Does it cost more to book an arena these days? Is it to make up for the fact that album sales are dead?
Of course inflation is a factor. But prices have gone up way more than inflation.
Example: I saw U2 in 1992. They were a huge band at the time and the concert itself was a huge production. (Achtung Baby era). Yet the tickets were only $25.00. That’d be maybe $45.00 today? If they had charged $50.00 or $90.00 in 1992 it still would have been a sell-out show. So maybe the answer is “they finally learned that they could”. So why did it take so long before big name acts decided to squeeze their audience for everything they could?
A lot – A LOT – of tickets get sold on the secondary market which has taught acts and venues that they’re leaving a lot of cash on the table. If 50% of your $25 tickets get bought and resold for $100 each, what good does that do the act or venue? If anything, tickets are underpriced (at least according to the market) which is why they can be resold for so much.
It could be that online ticket brokers have really made this an obvious thing which is why the acts/venues realized “Because we can” relatively recently. It was less obvious when you were buying tickets through the newspaper classifieds or physical broker offices or off a guy in front of the venue. Now you go on Stubhub and see half the venue available for purchase.
If you have some time, ticket pricing strategy is covered from an economics viewpoint the Freakonimics podcast Why Is the Live-Event Ticket Market So Screwed Up? Referenced web site includes a transcript.
Tickets will be priced at what the market will bear. Will you pay $40 to see a show? What about $60? Or $160? Or $260? Or $1000? What is it worth to you?
If no one is buying tickets, then the price is too high (or the show stinks).
If people are routinely paying higher scalper prices, then the original ticket price was set too low.
Ticket prices first starting soaring for the Eagles’ reunion tour in 1995. The Eagles found out what people were willing to pay scalpers, then asked, “If people are willing to pay $100 a ticket, why shouldn’t WE get that money?”
Everybody else started following suit when music downloading and sharing became rampant. Nowadays, people just don’t BUY albums any more. When I was in high school, the whole reason a band went on tour was to promote a new album. They’d make money by charging 15,000 fans $15 a ticket, sure, but also by getting the fans to buy the new LP.
But since your favorite band knows almost nobody will buy their new album, they have to charge top dollar for concert tickets. They’re not making much money any other way.
I think, as in my case, nostalgia may have something to do with it, at least for older acts. Us older folks want to see our favorite bands from our youth before they (and us) are pushing up daisies.
For example, I just paid $100 for a ticket to Journey and Def Leppard this summer.
Associated is the demographic trend in entertainment. At one time, the only people who went to rock concerts were kids and young adults who didn’t have that much money. As the rock generation has aged, people who are 40+ years old with substantial incomes are still going to concerts, so there’s more money to be made.
I think another reason for the price hike is, albums don’t pay the bills anymore.
I could be WAY off, but I was told the old model was, make money on the album, tour to advertise the album, and expand fan base.
Now the industry is saying, there’s no money in albums. Make money on the tour and the album advertises the tour.:dubious:
All I know for sure is, I will spend $300 on a concert for me and Mrs Bitchin’.
$100 tix
$50 gas
$50 food (tailgating,at show, and burgers on the way home)
$100 concert supplies :rolleyes: (milk and cookies):dubious:
Needless to say, I haven’t been to a real concert since 01/02 and that was Ozzfest.
Off Topic: It was a “sanitized Disney experience” compared to the 80’s-90’s.
Parents, little kids, security making sure no one could whip out a tittie.:mad:
I don’t know if concerts(as I know them) actually exist anymore, and I won’t pay top dollar to attend what has replaced them.
Baumol’s cost disease. The price of labor-intensive goods goes up much faster than average. A concert for name-band is about as labor-intensive as it gets: the band members have to be there working every minute of every concert, and the labor is extremely specialized. There are basically only four people in the world who can do the job of “play a U2 concert”.
Concerts used to be subsidized by album sales, effectively as a promotional expense. A band would go tour to promote the new album, and people would buy the album. Now, the model has flipped, and music is almost given away via streaming to promote concerts.
Spending has shifted from durable goods to “experience” goods.
The price of luxury goods goes up much faster than average as people get wealthier. When you get more money than you need for necessities, you don’t buy more necessities, you buy luxuries. Lots of people in the western world have gotten lots richer, and they’re spending their money on luxury experiences.
Taylor Swift right now has no concerts sold out for her upcoming tour. She raised prices to what the scalpers were charging. Her cheap seats are $100 for a stadium show so that’s a long way from the stage. Last time her tour all sold out in 1 day.
I’ve had more than one manager tell me the real money in touring is in the sales of shirts and other memorabilia – artists make as much or more revenue from these sales than from tickets. But I’m also not surprised at the mechanism where artists and promoters and venues withhold tickets from the public and sell them on the secondary market. Similar to how movie theaters make more money from popcorn than from ticket sales, which is why a popcorn and a coke can cost you $15-20.
I wanted to go see Leonard Cohen, he had a similar sort of thing going on. The tickets started at like $250 a seat, that sort of thing, but you could buy upselling VIP experiences that were much much higher. No Ticketmaster; they sold tickets from Cohen’s website for all venues. So they got all the butter out of that duck. No doubt they also sold to the secondary market, but at prices they set, so they really collected the lion’s share instead of the brokers. (I didn’t go; for that kind of money I want more than a seat and a chance to buy a $10 beer and a $50 shirt.)
I just checked U2 tickets on ticketmaster, they are starting at $50-60. At least in the cities I checked (I only checked 2)
Of course after all the fees and taxes, it’ll probably be closer to $70-80. But still, that isn’t horrible. Not great either though.
As was mentioned above, I hadn’t thought about the fact that scalpers are making musicians realizing they are underpricing tickets.
But nowadays with websites like stubhub or craigslist, the market for resold tickets is flooded and prices are about the same as what you’d find on ticketmaster. If anything they are probably lower since the sellers are motivated.
Maybe once you’re close to the concert date and people are trying to make sure they’re not taking much of a loss on unsold tickets. Otherwise it makes little sense to buy a ticket to resell for less than you paid.
Not long ago, my mom wanted me to buy her two tickets to see Pink in Chicago. After buying her tickets, I figured what the hell and bought two more (which was the max) at about $350 a pair after all the Ticketmaster fees. Took the second pair, put them on a resale site for around $475 and they sold within a day. Easy $100ish after the site fees for almost zero effort.
Looking at the resellers now, tickets for the same section are still selling for a minimum of $250 each and Ticketmaster is all sold out aside from a handful of single seats or “Reserved Platinum Package” seats.
Looking at Swift’s show at Soldier Field, yeah there’s practically entire sections of “cheap” ($100) seats left. There’s also a ton of people trying to resell tickets which is sort of funny when they’re adjacent to available ticket on Ticketmaster. Granted, the show is still five months away but maybe someone can get some “motivated sellers” on that one and get in under the ticket price close to the show date.
Roger Waters very long world tour had it priced at £110 (about $150 at current going) for the cheapest right at the back seat. Seemed to be all across the venues and he’s playing a lot of places for a long long time.
Good luck to him. He failed to fill halls in the late 80’s when he first went solo, and I wish I had been able to go, so he’s taken a bath on such things before.
But I won’t be going to see him, and I like his new album a LOT.
I realise that I’ll very likely never have the chance again, him being in his 70s now. I’m fine with that. I might consider sitting at the back of a massive arena watching a screen because the stage is so far away, with a cricked neck from looking sideways and paying massively over the odds for crap beer, if it was $50. It isn’t. I’ll not be paying that for the shitty experience of a stadium tour.
This is right on the money. If enough people are willing to pay top dollar, then that’s what they will get charged. It’s amazing…once people start refusing to pay the high prices, then things change. The seller adapts. People have all of the power…I think sometimes they just aren’t aware of it.
The big thing outlets like Ticketmaster and StubHub have going for them is that there’s a much lower chance that your ticket will be counterfeit. I would never buy a ticket off Craigslist for precisely that reason.
And yes, it’s customer demand that sets the price here, like so much in life. I hope everyone that goes has a good time … most likely I will not be there. Maybe in another thread I’ll vent about why, which is mostly because people who pay big bux for arena shows and then TALK THE ENTIRE FREAKING NIGHT. But that’s another topic for another thread.
I realise the market argument. I guess my question is why did it seem they were artificially low for so long? To use my example of the 25.00 ticket in 1992… that show I remember sold out in minutes, with many unable to get a ticket. So it seems the market would have supported charging $40 or $50 or $60 even back then.
Or to go back further, look at old ticket stubs for Led Zeppelin in 1975 or 1977. One of the top concert draws around at that time and tickets are $6-$10. A teenager could have afforded to see the biggest band around by mowing a few lawns. I find it hard to believe that after seeing Zeppelin sell out stadiums in minutes, Peter Grant didn’t say, “hey i know we can get at least $20, maybe $30 next tour.” But it appears no one really did that for years and years. Then it seems like in a relatively short time, they all did.
StubHub, Ticketmaster resellers, Craigslist, etc. Sure scalpers could have bought up all the tickets at cheap prices earlier but then where do you sell them? All in person at the event?