WTF is going on with concert ticket prices?
A look at Taylor, Beyoncé, and Bruce
Taylor, Beyoncé, and even Bruce. All mega stars, all mega rich (Springsteen recently sold his catalog to Sony for over $500 million), and all raising hackles with the price and effort required to see them in concert.
After the great state of Massachusetts welcomed Taylor Swift to Gillette Stadium a few weeks ago, state legislators said they’d had enough and introduced the “Taylor Swift Bill,” an effort to require ticket vendors to declare the total cost upfront and prohibit real-time changes.
“Real-time changes?” you may be asking. Yes, your ticket price is now likely to be more than the ticket buyers in line ahead of you. It’s due to a system called dynamic pricing (not unlike Uber’s surge pricing) that increases prices as more people join the queue to buy tickets. So while the cheapest tickets to see Beyoncé in London may have started at £56, at one point similar tickets shot up to £410.
And that’s assuming all the good seats haven’t been snatched up in the VIP presale, Ticketmaster works as it should, and you outlast thousands of others in the online queue.
While Taylor and Beyoncé are still in their prime touring and earning years, Springsteen, long a working class hero, had this to say about his ticket prices:
“For the past 49 years or however long we’ve been playing, we’ve pretty much been out there under market value. I’ve enjoyed that. It’s been great for the fans. This time I told them, ‘Hey, we’re 73 years old. The guys are there. I want to do what everybody else is doing.’
But ticket buying has gotten very confusing, not just for the fans, but for the artists also. And the bottom line is that most of our tickets are totally affordable...We have those tickets that are going to go for that [higher] price somewhere anyway…I’m going, ‘Hey, why shouldn’t that money go to the guys that are going to be up there sweating three hours a night for it?’”
As Bruce and Ticketmaster tell it, dynamic pricing allows the artists to recoup some of the margin that would happen anyway on resellers like StubHub. And if people are willing to pay these prices, well, then capitalism is gonna capitalize.
But it does feel like this is becoming another front where some can keep up with rising costs and others have to add this to the list of things they can’t afford anymore. I don’t fault any of these artists for getting paid for their craft, but I do wonder where the ceiling is. Will concertgoing eventually become a status symbol? Has it already?
For some, 60 bucks will always be a splurge. For most, 400 is out of the question. And yet, millions of fans will pony up to be in the crowd at these tours. For the artists’ part, they take pride in living up to the price of admission. As Bruce said in the same interview, “If there’s any complaints on the way out, you can have your money back.”