Concerts need to start being affordable again.
In recent years, it seems that concert ticket prices have skyrocketed and have become less and less affordable. For many students, high school is a time to have fun, and one of the activities many take part in is concerts. Many high school students attend concerts each year, and with the prices as high as they are, that can be extremely costly.
After a drop in concert sales during Covid due to the lack of touring, prices have been on a steep incline ever since. Now more than ever, artists are back on the road, touring the globe to put on shows for their fans, Digital Music News reports that, on average, a singular ticket cost $135 in 2024, which is up 34.3% since 2019 when the average price was $91.86, and is an all-time high.
From experience, I saw Taylor Swift in 2023. Swift is someone who is arguably at the top of the music industry and my ticket cost around $200. While we were in the lower bowl, they were still some of the cheaper tickets on the market, outrageous for most but worth it to me. A year and a half later I went to buy tickets to Gracie Abrams, who was one of Taylor Swift’s openers, and the tickets cost around $150. While it is less than the Taylor swift ticket, I still feel that those tickets are obnoxiously priced. I am trying to go see an artist who opened for someone at the top of the music industry and is still pretty new and the difference is only $50.
Since I saw Abrams that first time, she has gained quite a lot of fame, but not anywhere near Taylor Swift and, in my opinion, not enough fame to charge $150 for a single ticket.
An additional example is Noah Kahan, an artist I saw when attending his “We’ll All Be Here Forever” tour. My ticket cost $35, a price that was pretty cheap considering how much fame he has gained due to his social media presence, which grew astronomically, mainly because of the lack of fear he had regarding talking about mental health struggles and incorporating that into his music and social media. I personally believe that the newer to the music industry one is, the cheaper their tickets should be.
There is absolutely no reason that artists like Alex Warren or Miles Smith, who are new artists to the industry and have only been performing live for about a year, should be charging concerts goers more than $50 to see their show. Currently, to buy a ticket to see Warren in concert in Kansas City, it is around $180 for general admission.
It is hard to justify astronomical pricing when most of the time the artist is on stage for maybe an hour to an hour and a half. I would be more willing to pay the steeper price if the artist was on stage for a longer period of time, as concertgoers get more of an experience out of it that way.
I understand that sometimes the cost of tickets is not entirely up to the artist, and that other outside forces add to the price – venue fees, employee wages, and the cost of the venue. At the same time, they cannot be completely in the dark about their pricing and should have some sort of intervention when prices get to be out of hand.
There have been attempts to lower the costs of concerts and other events. In 2023 the Federal Trade Commission proposed the Junk Fee Rule that would implement a system that would force “Junk Fees” to be displayed to the customer earlier in the process of buying tickets, along with a breakdown to the customers what the fees are for. The intent was to address these practices, which are used by many companies like Ticketmaster which tack on over 27% in fees for only two tickets per CNN, which would allow customers to know exactly what they are paying for when buying tickets.
In the United States it is estimated to cost buyers more than $64 billion each year in fees, most of which the buyer does not know what that money is going towards.
Since the Biden administration did implement the ban on “Junk Fees,” companies like Seat Geek have made it easier for customers to shop on the basis of all-in pricing, per the White House.
It does not make it easier when you have resale sites that manage to get a vast majority of tickets in a venue and subsequently sell them for double if not triple the original price. Not only are people not going to want to break the bank and buy those resale tickets, it’s inconvenient and unfair to those who manage to get presale and find that most of the tickets are taken by bots or resell sites.
Essentially, artists cannot expect a large percentage of their audience to be spending a large amount of money on tickets and resale sites should have restrictions set in place to ensure that they’re not being sold for far beyond the tickets’ face value.
