The fans are once again venting frustration over escalating concert ticket prices. Followers of artists like Harry Styles and BTS reported seeing ticket prices well over $1,000 for seats — and that’s when buying tickets directly, not only resale sites. The cost of attending a concert has surged in recent years, making it closer to a luxury purchase than a hobby. We can partially blame the pandemic for jacking up the cost of running a big production. And, as always, we can blame resellers for buying up cheap tickets and selling them back to us for substantially more.
But the base price of a ticket now looks oddly similar to that inflated resale price. Why? And is there any amount we won’t pay as avid concertgoers to see our favorite artist perform live? Is a breaking point on the horizon?
I recently read that Harry Styles was charging $1,000 for a concert ticket. $1,000 is an extortionate price for a ticket. But if we’re being completely honest, it’s fairly typical for these big tours at this point to find tickets in the $1,000s, $2,000, etc., especially for those really valuable seats. It’s been slowly going up over the years, but it really became normal following the Covid-19 pandemic. Concerts were so in demand, still are in demand, and people really want to be there. They will pay good money to have a good seat at a highly anticipated and hyped concert.
People have figured out that there’s a way to get in that queue and make a bunch of money off of these tickets. It’s become its own marketplace. Ticket resellers get in there, buy those tickets at a low price, and then subsequently mark it up as much as they possibly can for the secondary market. Resell that ticket, and that’s their whole profit right there. It’s a straightforward operation to make a bunch of money from these concerts.
But now we’re seeing huge ticket prices from the original sellers like Ticketmaster. The fault lies somewhere between the artist and the agent or the promoter. One of the big things that happened over the course of the pandemic is that we lost a lot of good staff, a lot of good crew, because they were unable to sustain themselves when concerts were shut down and the price of everything has skyrocketed. So the price of touring — that could be a crew, supplies, travel — has risen considerably, and so that makes the price of the ticket go up as well. These artists have to recoup costs at some point.
And when you’re telling a fan it’s going to cost you this much to get into the door, they expect a show. So on top of that, that means more rehearsal time. It costs a lot of money for these giant productions. Loading in and out of a stadium show is incredibly expensive, and so is hauling all that stuff across the country, across oceans. So there’s a lot of costs that have made it more expensive just to be a touring artist.
It could just be a case of artists prioritizing the bottom line over fan accessibility, but also not necessarily. They know the fan’s going to pay that price either way, so that money might as well go to them. If you’re selling a ticket for $200, but it’s going to go for $1,000 on a secondary market, if you raise that ticket price to $500, it’s a lot less profitable for the ticket reseller, and that fan was going to pay that price anyway, if not more.
Is there any recourse for fans who feel ripped off? One of the things that’s happening across the country right now is that a bunch of different states are trying to implement regulations on this because it has gotten really out of hand. And so you’ll see recently in California, in New York, what they’ve introduced are resale caps. When somebody buys a face-value ticket, if, for whatever reason, they can’t go, they can resell that ticket for no more than 10 percent above face value. And what that does is take the wind completely out of the resale market, because that makes it so much less lucrative to be in this job, to be doing this for a career.
It’s very possible. But only one state so far has passed the ticket resale cap, which is Maine.
I definitely think that if we’re not yet at the tipping point where fans have had enough and this road we’re on reverses course, then we’re close. But for now it’s not slowing down — it’s only getting worse. And I do think that this legislation is really going to tell us where we’re at because we’ve had almost 10 states introduce these resale caps. Even just a couple of years ago, you couldn’t even get those bills discussed because there’s so much lobbying money against it. So, if we see this gain more momentum, that should tell you right there that the tide is turning.