Astead Herndon

Can you just tell me what's going on here?

You know, I love a good stadium tour, but give me the experience kind of step by step.

If you're a stan of Taylor Swift or someone who is playing these kind of big stadium tours and you're fighting with your fellow fans for tickets, what's that process like?

I hear what you're saying, but supply and demand was true before the pandemic, too.

Is it just that more people want to go to the concerts now?

What exactly has changed to make this process so much more sticky?

So we know that people have been scalping tickets online for years, but now we're seeing huge ticket prices from the jump, from the original seller, places like Ticketmaster.

Who sets that initial price for a ticket, and who should I be blaming here?

Is it also that artists are seeing these high resale prices and think, hey, you know, if people are going to pay it, might as well?

Like, I mean, could this just be a case of artists prioritizing bottom line over fan accessibility?

But I've also seen some artists pushing back, like Olivia Deen.

So, yeah.

She called on Ticketmaster to cap what people can resell their tickets for on their own platform.

So Olivia Deen was successful, but obviously a lot of ticket prices are still sky high and a lot of other resellers are out there.

It seems like these artists, using their public platform, their bully pulpit, haven't really moved the needle when it comes to these resale markets.

You know, Taylor, you're kind of bumming me out because it sounds like there's really nothing we can do and that this kind of high ticket price extortion is just here to stay.

Like, what is the recourse for fans who feel like maybe, I don't know, that $1,000 for a live concert might be too much?

A new bill called the California Fans First Act is taking aim at ticket price gouging.

So I guess my question is, do you think there will be a tipping point where fans may say, hey, we had enough and this kind of road we're on for live music as luxury only reverses course or at least slows down?

Taylor Mims is an editor at Billboard.