Chapter 1: Why are concert ticket prices skyrocketing?
What's the most you've ever paid for a live concert? I'll start. Floor seats at Beyonce's Renaissance tour cost me $450, which seemed crazy at the time. But these days, that could be considered a steal.
Oh my God, the most expensive tickets are $1,100? And I think we need to call it what it is. It's greed.
It's gotten so bad, Kid Rock just went to the U.S. Senate to complain.
That this industry is full of greedy snakes and scoundrels. Too many suits lining their pockets off talent they never had and fans they mislead.
You've got Ticketmaster in its dynamic pricing. And then there's the whole secondary market, with resellers jumping the line and scooping up all the cheap seats. The result? Some artists ditching the tour bus completely and higher prices for everyone.
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Chapter 2: What factors contribute to high ticket prices for artists like Harry Styles?
So where does that leave us fans? That's coming up on Today Explained from Box. Thank you. Rock on.
Yeah!
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I got in the water in the very early morning before the sun had risen and the water was pitch black. I started swimming and I felt the water hollowing out around me and felt like something really big was swimming below. I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is Love, a show about the surprising things that love can make us do.
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Chapter 3: How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected concert ticket pricing?
More than 100 episodes, available now on This Is Love. Today is gonna be explained to you.
My name is Taylor Mims. I'm a senior editor at Billboard, and I cover live entertainment and touring.
Okay, so you are the right person to talk to because it feels like live entertainment and touring has changed a lot in recent years. I recently read that Harry Styles was charging $1,000 for a concert ticket, and, you know, no beef with Harry Styles. But that seems like a shocking price. Can you just tell me what's going on here?
$1,000 is a lot of money for a ticket.
If Harry Styles thinks that his fans should pay that amount of money to go see him on stage for an hour and a half, hard pass, ick. I don't even know what the price is. $7,000? How many dollars is that? What do you mean? $900?
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Chapter 4: What role do ticket resellers play in the pricing issue?
I don't want those tickets.
But if we're being completely honest, it's fairly typical for these big tours at this point to find tickets in the 1000s, 2000s, et cetera, especially for those really valuable seats. It's been slowly going up over the years, but it really became the normal, I would say, following the COVID-19 pandemic. Concerts were so in demand, still are so in demand.
And people really want to be there and they will pay good money to have a good seat at a good concert.
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?
Well, it can be really rough. You're going to try and get codes to be in the pre-sale. If you don't get pre-sale, then you're going to try to go to the general on sale, which should be a couple of days later. And you should be signed in, ready to go. As soon as you hit the queue, you're going to see a number that you do not want to see.
18,500 people. So feeling a little hopeless. I started at 175,000 on the queue.
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Chapter 5: Who is responsible for setting the initial ticket prices?
And as you can see, I'm going down to 82,000 now. This account has all of them between 160 to 180,000 in the queue, okay?
The demand is really high and the supply is limited.
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?
Yeah, you're absolutely right. There's always been a supply and demand issue, but people have figured out that there's a way to get in, to get in that queue, to jump that queue and make a bunch of money off of these tickets. It's become its own marketplace.
So this is something that people do and make a ton of money because ticket resellers get in there, buy those tickets at a low price and then market up as much as they possibly can. for the secondary market, resell that ticket, and that's their whole profit right there. It's not that difficult to make a bunch of money off of these concerts.
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?
That's going to be between the artist and the agent or the promoter.
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Chapter 6: How are artists adapting to the changing concert landscape?
So they're the ones that are going to set the ticket price. To be honest, one of the big things that happened over the course of the pandemic is that we lost a lot of good staff, a lot of good crew, because they couldn't make money when concerts were shut down. And the price of everything has gone up. So the price of touring, so that could be crew, that could be the price of supplies.
Literally everything, travel, has gone up. And so that makes the price of the ticket go up as well, because these artists have to recoup costs at some point. And when you're telling a fan it's going to cost you this much to get into the door, they expect a show.
Welcome to the Heiress Tour!
So on top of that, that means more rehearsal time. That costs a lot of money. It costs a lot of money for these giant productions. I mean, loading in and out of a stadium show is incredibly expensive. And so is hauling all that stuff across country, across oceans, etc. So there's a lot of costs that have made it more expensive just to be a touring artist.
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?
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of residency tours for artists and fans?
Like, I mean, could this just be a case of artists prioritizing bottom line over fan accessibility?
Yes, but also it's not necessarily that they're prioritizing the bottom line over the fan. It's that they know the fan's going to pay that price either way, so that money might as well go to them, right?
So if you're selling a ticket for $200, but you know it's going to go for $1,000 on a secondary market, if you raise that ticket price to $500, it's a lot less profitable for the ticket reseller, and that fan was going to pay that price anyway, if not more.
But I've also seen some artists pushing back, like Olivia Deen.
I think concert tickets are overpriced. I think that people should be able to come to the show. And it shouldn't cost an arm and a leg. Do you know what I mean?
So, yeah. She called on Ticketmaster to cap what people can resell their tickets for on their own platform.
To support Olivia Deen's commitment to fair ticket pricing, Ticketmaster is capping all future ticket resale prices for the Art of Loving Live tour on its platform and refunding fans for any markup they already paid to resellers on Ticketmaster.
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.
Yeah, that's because these resale markets are entirely legal.
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Chapter 8: Will concert pricing trends continue, and what can fans do?
Nobody's doing anything illegal, so what are you going to do? They're allowed to do this. But the more people who make their complaints heard, I think the better it is because people understand that that part's out of their control. There's nothing you can do about the secondary market.
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?
Sorry to bum you out, but there's absolutely no reason to be this dismayed. There are things that can change. So one of the things that's happening across the country right now is that a bunch of different states are trying to implement regulations on this because it has gotten really out of hand. And so you'll see recently in California, in New York, what they've introduced are resale caps.
A new bill called the California Fans First Act is taking aim at ticket price gouging.
My bill, the Affordable Concert Act, caps all resale concert tickets at face value, among many other much-needed reforms. It's time for state government to step up and protect fans.
So when somebody buys a face value ticket, if for whatever reason they can't go, they can resell that ticket for no more than 10% above face value. And what that does is take the wind completely out of the resale market. Because if I buy a ticket as a ticket reseller and think I'm going to make a bunch of money off of this, but all I can make is 10%,
That makes it so much less lucrative to be in this job, to be doing this for a career. So it's very possible. It's very possible. But only one state so far has passed the ticket resale cap, which is Maine.
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?
Yeah, I definitely think if we're not there yet, we're getting very close because I think people are really tired of it because it keeps happening. It's not slowing down. It's only getting worse. And so I do think that this legislation is really going to tell us where we're at because we've had almost 10 states introduce this, these resale caps.
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