Ticketmaster and Live Nation have destroyed the concert experience. But it didn’t use to be this way. Today, Oasis and Taylor Swift tickets might go for thousands of dollars, but back in 1955, you could see Elvis Presley in concert for less than the modern-day equivalent of $20.
I just go support smaller artists that have below $50 shows
While they most certainly suck, so do most other people. As long as there will be a secondary market online someone will scalp tickets. Whether that’s some random asshole or these organized assholes hardly matters in most cases.
Of course with random assholes doing the scalping there is still a chance to get a cheap one by being faster, albeit a very slim one.
Make tickets non-transferable, boom no more scalpers.
They need to stop bots and stop people buying over a certain amount of tickets each (I’m sure they do already usually limit tickets per person but people are obviously getting around it somehow). Because if you were only up against other fans who had a genuine interest in actually going to the gig themselves, not selling the tickets on, then you would be up against much much less people and you would get lucky a lot more often. Right now (or at least the last time I tried to buy tickets for something a few years ago) there was just no chance and the tickets were being resold in abundance within minutes, meaning it wasn’t genuine fans getting lucky over me.
The LiveNation app has tickets being resold right in it.
From what I understand though, this is actually more about people not purchasing albums anymore, so now artists have to basically make the bulk of their money from concerts.
Ticketmaster doesn’t force dynamic pricing for instance; that’s a choice the artist has made in order to maximise their profit from the ticket sales.
I don’t know if the tickets need to be quite as expensive as they are, for artists to make a profit - likely not. But they certainly are making a lot less money from the likes of Spotify than they used to make from albums sales, so it has to be a big part of the problem.
People like Oasis take the piss to be honest, because I doubt they’ve actually run out of money (according to this YouTube channel that was talking about them, they seem to think the brothers both still have plenty of 90s money, I dunno how you check this stuff… but yeah. Makes sense that they shouldn’t have spent it all unless they were really fucking stupid with their investments or lack thereof). So they really don’t need to be making this much money from the ticket sales, but for newer bands the Spotify thing should apply.
They charge as much as they can and have for a long time. They would still do it if they made lots of money from albums and streams.
What’s changed is the secondary market is controlled by the primary ticket sellers and they have better awareness of how much they can charge. People expectation of ticket prices has slowly changed and the prices always push at that.
Dynamic pricing exists now because it’s easier to implement. Not because the artists don’t have enough money.
I mean I’ve seen more than a couple of shows at my local waterhole, and the price has been between free and $20. The $20 one was Moonhooch and absolutely worth it!
If you like listening to live music, it’s there, but it’s not T-Swizzle.
I know it’s a relatively niche genre but I almost exclusively go to folk punk shows. They’re usually $15-20 or “meh, pay what you can just have fun”
Folk punk sounds like a really interesting genre. Do you have any recommendations?
Pigeon Pit, Left at London, Sister Wife Sex Strike, She/Her/Hers, Apes of the State. You may notice a theme with those ones… There’s also classics like AJJ, Jeffery Lewis, Pat the Bunny, and Against Me. Of the ones I listed Pigeon Pit, Sister Wife, and Apes are my favorites which is pretty convenient because all three of them are playing in a concert tonight near me for like $20
Feel sorry for y’all missing out. I’ve gone to so many concerts for headliner bands, for $50-$100. Not in decades, though.
The only time I paid hundreds to see a band was y2k new years party at Paradise Island …. And that was three bands and a full day
Just off the top of my head, some of the bands I’ve seen live before moving to the US: Iron Maiden, Manowar, Megadeth, Anthrax, Metallica, Slayer, Rammstein, Uriah Heep, Volbeat, Mastodon, Alice in Chains.
All the bands I’ve seen live after moving to the US: Laibach, Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Both were a decade ago.
Rush, blue oyster cult, queen, Billy Joel, bob dylan, Tom petty, Grateful Dead, Hootie and the Blowfish, Black Eyed Peas, huey Lewis, Foreigner
… and The Wiggles
Capitalism is doing capitalism things, weird
Albums and singles make next to no money for the majority of musicians.
The only way to make money through music nowadays is touring and merchandise.
Yeah, poor Taylor swift :'(
I don’t think it’s the normal artist we are taking about here. We are talking about concerts going for a thousand bucks.
It’s a feature not a bug
I saw Van Halen with David Lee Roth on their first time touring in like 20 years or something. I paid $25 and this was I wanna say '07 ish?
Seriously? Those of us who grew up with that music would have paid top dollar for that, even if their voices were shot
I saw Dave Matthews in Austin for 20 bucks fifteen ish years ago. Great show. Tickets can still be affordable if you don’t go to arena shows.
I saw Metaliica for around $24 in 2004. From then on, I was on every gig of theirs in my country, until this year. This year I couldn’t afford to see them. It was fucking ~$320 (without the road to the venue, hotels, food and stuff)! It’s depressing.
They weren’t exactly new at the time, but I still paid less than $20 to see both P. Funk and They Might Be Giants in the 90s.
I saw King Missile for free because they said anyone who brought a vegetarian potluck dish could come to the show for free.
My favorite band of all time is ELO. I found out the other day that they are still active. I saw some video and they still sound pretty good. So I looked for a venue nearby. Tickets were $280 +fees. But it’s also an hour flight and a hotel plus incidentals. Technically I CAN afford this. I just don’t want to. Guess I’ll just watch the videos. I can’t imagine paying $3000 to see Taylor Swift. I feel sorry for all the lower income Swifties out there. But I guess this won’t change since these concerts are still selling out.
Well not worth thousands of dollars Taylor Swift is a objectively different show than Elvis Presley was.
There was some decoration on stage Presley came out he was the bee’s knees everyone wanted to see him, but you were paying to see him and for his roadies toship, roll out and hook up his gear.
It probably cost $100,000 in labor just to haul Swift’s stage out and build it an arena. They probably need the arena for a week before the concert starts.
I’m not saying her stuff is worth $1,000 a ticket we should get economy at scale for that number of people. But it’s probably worth 300-500.
Unless you’re doing the insane level of football field sized stages with embedded screens and catapults, your average couple hour show at your average decent size venue really should realistic beatly be in the $100 to $200 range, You’ve got to pay the artist You’ve got to pay their crew and while the ticketing system does deserve to make some money on it, they shouldn’t be getting absolutely still filthy stinking lobbying rich off of it.
Obligatory FUCK TICKETMASTER!
As people have already noted, the $20-$25 shows were different than a modern arena show, I saw Soundgarden with Voivod for $25ish at a local outdoor small venue in the 1990s, and have seen other acts there recently for between $50-$75 (the Alabama Shakes, Cimafunk), that seems like normal inflation.
Arena shows I honestly don’t remember what we paid for tickets to see big bands, but I sure remember general admission, running to get to the front, not being able to move once there, and the random groping that always happened. I don’t go much to big shows now (or even back then) and have never been to a stadium show.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for artists to make money on performance, rather than on sales of recorded music. Not sure what the value of a show like that is, but probably more than it was back when tours were done to promote album sales.
Source/disclaimer: I work for an LN-partnered independently owned venue, so I’m likely to be very biased.
Live Nation/Ticketmaster is definitely a monopoly AND ticket prices are definitely gouged.
However, from what I’ve heard with many people in the industry, the current antitrust suit isn’t likely to change anything. Partnered/independently owned venues will still use Ticketmaster. Live Nation venues will still use Ticketmaster (unless they’re forced not to).
Additionally, most people that are complaining about prices don’t know that Live Nation typically has little say in the set ticket prices. The artist and/or their tour management sets them. And if people buy them, the prices stay the same (or go up, with the recent dynamic pricing fiasco). If not, the price is discounted.
Tickets aren’t even LN’s primary source of revenue. It’s food and beverage sales, which are also gouged. (Profit margins of 80-90% per item)
LN will continue to blame scalpers (or brokers, the politically correct industry term), which is partially the truth. While this is something I’m not fully aware of, LN has done some things to bring the prices down brought on by brokers. One of them is platinum seating. The most expensive tickets that get resold on ticketmaster are typically purchased by LN and then resold at the “normal” price. Yes, LN is losing money doing this, but it’s something they can use to cover their ass in the DOJ suit.
Another thing that several people have already mentioned is the cost of production is MUCH higher than it used to be, especially for stadium shows.
I don’t even go to shows myself anymore because of how ridiculous the prices are. We can only hope the DOJ suit does something.
The most expensive tickets that get resold on ticketmaster are typically purchased by LN and then resold at the “normal” price. Yes, LN is losing money doing this.
I don’t think LN are losing money doing this. They are artificially rasing prices for the real people buying platinum tickets without any additional costs.
If this is true, they’re effectively creating demand by removing a large set of seats from the initial offering pool. This means they can say “tickets are selling fast”, without lying if you include that they’re just referring to the set on sale right now, not the total number of tickets.
This does smell like false advertising though, but I wouldn’t put it past the cracked US legal system for this to be totally legal.
Even in the ‘80s you could see big-time bands for less than $20.
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I suspect people now just go to see their, one, most favourite artist, maybe once every 5 years or something. As opposed to going to see one or two artists per year before. Or for people who want to be able to continue to go once or more a year, they just see newer artists who have reasonable prices.
I mean any real music fan these days, who doesn’t have a massive budget, should be going to festivals instead of individual gigs as these are massively better value for money.
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Why do you assume this has anything to do with a supply/demand curve? Because that’s the first thing you were taught in Econ 101 and it stuck?
In reality, most people aren’t that sensitive to small changes in price. And the demand drop is not instant. It might take months or years. Execs make the decision to raise the price, they don’t see the demand drop off immediately, and they instantly absolve themselves of any responsibility for the effects of their price increase. After all, there was hardly any demand drop in the quarter in which they made the change.
Look at say, Coca-Cola. You could easily double the price in five years and the price is negligible enough that most people won’t even notice. (Oh wait, they did this.)
You question if supply and demand has anything to do with it then point out coke doubled their price in 5 years and people kept buying it? Confusing
Music venue ticket increases isn’t a short term thing, were talking about how it’s comparatively risen over 60 years from Elvis to Taylor Swift
It is a supply and demand curve.
The supply is incredibly small for a world-famous artist compared to their demand. If the reason some people can’t buy a ticket because there are no tickets left, there’s room to increase the price of the ticket and sell the exact same amount of tickets. If resellers can just buy all your tickets and sell them for 10x the price, then you can 10x the price of tickets and sell the same amount.
The problem is that you can’t just use the profits from selling Taylor swift tickets to make another Taylor swift so you can increase the supply of Taylor swift.
There are only 3 ways they can increase their Taylor swift profits: 1. Make concerts in bigger venues so they can sell more tickets. 2. Increase the ticket prices. 3. Increase the amount of Taylor swift concerts.
- And 3. Have upper bound limits. Specially 3. Because what incentive do multi-millionaire artists to work more? If I were so wealthy, I’d strive to work less, not more.
The easiest option is 2. why wouldn’t they do it?
Sure, if I was a music fan it’d suck, but the truth is that they are corporations, and they are legally required to increase the shareholders’ value.
