In 2023, the price of concert tickets has skyrocketed to the equivalent of a month’s rent to as much as a mortgage payment. But that still hasn’t deterred music fans from trying to snag seats to see their favorite artists on tour. In fact, there’s been a post-pandemic surge to see live music.
Face-value tickets may have started out in semi-affordable territory, but as resellers have acquired them, their cost has reached beyond four digits.
So, how did seeing your favorite musician become a Sophie’s choice between paying bills or a once-in-a-lifetime experience?
Why Are Concert Tickets So Pricey?
According to the Los Angeles Times, “five major players” are responsible for the fluctuation of ticket costs: artists, promoters, the venues that host concerts, the ticketing companies selling tickets, and ticket resellers.
While promoters “officially set the ticket prices,” they can lose money should the show not sell enough tickets. And the biggest artists in music are usually in control of pricing, while smaller artists are usually beholden to the venues.
Venues earn money from promoters to put on the concerts while promoters are paid through ticket sales. Additional fees may pile on, as well, including service fees, processing fees, delivery fees, and facility charges which can show up when you’re set to purchase your tickets, per the Los Angeles Times.
An average of 27% was added to the cost of initial ticket sales because of fees, according to a 2018 report by the Government Accountability Office. According to the American Economic Liberties Project, a subset of an activist group calling itself the Break Up Ticketmaster Coalition, this year’s fees “added an average of 32 percent,” per The New York Times. And if the ticket prices are lower, the fees can be more exorbitant.
Here’s where it can get trickier. There are certain venues who have “exclusive deals with promoters such as Live Nation Entertainment (which also owns Ticketmaster),” while other spaces can be secured by any promoter. But as music-industry analyst and former label executive Bob Lefsetz told the outlet, “Ticketmaster is the only company that has the technology to sell tickets for high-demand events because it has cornered the market and has the money.”
Why Is Ticketmaster a Huge Part of the Problem?
When Taylor Swift fans tried to purchase tickets to the singer’s Eras Tour in November 2022, via the Ticketmaster website chaos ensued. Some potential ticket buyers were locked out of the sale when their Verified Fan codes failed to work, while others were initially able to secure tickets, only to lose them and get kicked out of the process once they tried to check out.
Not only did two dozen Swifties file a lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment, Ticketmaster’s parent company, they took their complaints against Ticketmaster all the way to D.C. The U.S. Justice Department launched an antitrust investigation into Ticketmaster’s parent company Live Nation Entertainment, according to The New York Times.
Shortly afterward, Ticketmaster issued an apology. The company explained its Verified Fan registration process, which is intended to help manage high-demand sales and weed out bots, and noted that more than 3.5 million people pre-registered for the TaylorSwiftTix Presale powered by Verified Fan, which was its largest registration in history.
The company chalked the disaster up to “historically unprecedented demand,” though Swift had some choice words for the company in her response, noting that she and her team had “asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could.” The Midnights musician also wrote that the situation “really pisses me off” and that she was actively working on a solution for her fans.
How Is Ticketmaster Planning to Fix Its Ticket-Buying Process?
Starting later this year, there will be more clarity when it comes to buying concert tickets through Ticketmaster and Live Nation.
In June, after President Joe Biden called out “junk fees” and hidden fees on concert tickets throughout the past year, several ticketing companies including Live Nation Entertainment, which owns Ticketmaster, vowed to start displaying all fees to customers upfront.
Live Nation said the new policy will roll out in September, according to a White House press release.
Rather than fans choosing a price point for tickets and being hit with several fees at checkout, Live Nation will offer “one clear, total price” for all shows at venues and festivals owned by the corporation. Additionally, Ticketmaster will offer the option for customers to see all fees upfront at all other shows.
How Are Resellers Affecting Ticket Sales?
There has always been a secondary market for tickets on platforms like StubHub and SeatGeek. During on-sales, “brokers compete with fans for seats” with employees or bots, which creates less supply for concert fans.
The aforementioned GAO report also revealed that promoters sometimes will feed tickets to brokers “to capture a share of higher secondary market prices without the reputation risk of raising an event’s ticket prices directly.”
The seller generally sets the price of resale tickets, but some sites suggest those costs. That’s where the prices can surge, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“This is a truly market-driven platform,” StubHub spokesperson Jessica Finn told the outlet. “So this is really about what sellers think that the price, the value of the ticket is, and what buyers think the value of the ticket is, and they effectively agree on it with a purchase…. It’s very much a dynamic marketplace, prices go up and down and we don’t meddle with that.”
SeatGeek confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that that the average price of a concert ticket has doubled in the past five years, increasing from $125 in 2019 to $252 in 2023.
Which Artists Have the Most Expensive Ticket Prices?
The biggest artists in music are those who have the most competitive ticket prices: Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé and Adele.
According to Seat Geek per the WSJ, the average price of a resold Taylor Swift ticket is $1,311. Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen tickets have soared to $480 and $469, according to the company.
Some Swift tickets for the Eras Tour, however, reached nearly $13,000 on Stubhub, according to Insider. Last year, tickets for Adele’s Las Vegas residency were being sold by resellers for upwards of $40,000, according to Bloomberg.
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