What Ticketmaster Doesn't Want You To Know: Concerts Were Cheap For Decades

cpw , 45 minutes ago

I paid £22.50 for my Knebworth ticket to see Oasis in 1996. Beer was expensive but the lines were so long that two or three was all that was feasible. Instead I got stoned off my face and zoned out on a little hill behind the vip area. It was amazing but I was so smashed that my memory is fuzzy. Ah well. My sister just paid over £1000 for four tickets to oasis. I think I got a rather better deal than her.

AA5B , 1 hour ago

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

greedytacothief , 3 hours ago

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.

ArmoredThirteen , 1 hour ago

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”

greedytacothief , 6 minutes ago

Folk punk sounds like a really interesting genre. Do you have any recommendations?

Oxymoron , 4 hours ago

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.

czech , 2 hours ago

I thought that most artists never made much from record sales, it was always live performances. The label gets record sales.

ForgotAboutDre , 2 hours ago

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.

scrubbles , 4 hours ago

I just saw an article about how ticket sales are slumping, and that people aren’t willing to spend 600 per ticket anymore. The poor Ticketmaster CEO said that people just don’t want to.

Yep my dude, can’t be that you’ve changed concerts from “we should go see _______!” To “I guess it’s the one time in my life I’ll ever see them, I’ll go one time and then never again” level of special occasion. Seriously 600 dollars per person is nearing Disney level vacation money.

So yeah, of course money isn’t infinite. You hit the ceiling. Taylor and oasis may gather that much, but your other artists are going to suffer. I’ll be honest I paid 600 for Taylor. It was a once in a lifetime experience. But now they want me to pay something like 400 for any random music act that comes to town. No, Ticketmaster, she was my favorite, that was a one time thing. I’m not paying 400 to see like, Weezer.

swab148 , 4 hours ago

Say it ain’t so!

Oxymoron , 4 hours ago

Yeah to be fair if I were a big Taylor Swift fan and knew that she was actually going to be decent live, like could actually sing well and put on a good show, then this latest “Eras” tour does sound like a pretty good experience, since you’re getting music from her whole career which I’m assuming you wouldn’t get from her other standard gigs for like individual album releases (I guess you would to an extent but probably not to the same extent as this eras tour?)

However I actually still wouldn’t be able to go see her in that situation, cos I literally don’t have enough money for it, but I get the appeal. But it is insane that it has to cost so much for everyone.

I saw Eminem at Reading Festival a few years ago and because it was a festival, I suppose that makes up for it as I saw some other alright bands on the same day, but it was actually a shit performance from him. Well not him, but the sound was fucked up the entire time. The music was basically too loud so you could barely hear him rapping over the top. That would have been a truly shocking fucking experience if I had been paying £600 for a ticket though! I actually think you should be able to get a refund in cases like that. When there are clear technical faults going on. You hear it happen shockingly often, like you’d think they’d be able to work out how to at least get the sound sorted out for a gig!? That’s surely the equivalent of a faulty product where you would be able to take it back to shop for a full refund.

Yet I’ve never heard of anyone getting refunds for stuff like that, even when sound issues have been widely reported so were clearly a problem, not just someone’s individual opinion.

Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent but yeah…haha.

scrubbles , 3 hours ago

But that’s basically my point, is that they changed concerts from a casual affair to a once in a lifetime experience, where we have to choose our favorites we actually want to see, and can’t go see people we only casually like.

And yeah I totally get the risk aspect, because at that cost in the back of my head was “is this worth it? Was it worth the price?”

curbstickle , 3 hours ago

I spent $10 at the door to see Deftones (mid 90s or so?), a friends band was opening for them.

I want to point out, this was after adrenaline, so they weren’t an unknown here - they were headlining. Now its about $200 for the same venue (just checked).

$10 in 1995 is $20 today for inflation. That $200 ticket would be $100 in 1995. There is no way I would have paid $100 in 1995 to see my friends OK band, even opening for the Deftones.

I think you’re absolutely right. I don’t know that I will ever even be in a realistic position to take my daughter to go see Taylor Swift without it being a huge birthday present or something.

idiomaddict , 2 hours ago

I went to see Green Day in 2010 because I guess the tickets didn’t sell well and my friends and I got them for like $10 each the day of. I’m not a super fan or anything, but I was young when they were big and probably really enjoy ~10-15 Green Day songs, so I totally thought it would be worth $10.

It was fucking awful. The music was rough, Billie Joe told the arena full of twelve year old girls about how he was so wasted that morning he pissed in his own luggage, and it was just a bad vibe.

bizarroland , 1 hour ago

It actually sounds to me like Ticketmaster found out that people were scalping tickets and decided to get in on the action.

I hope they get sued out of existence and then their executives beaten, tarred and feathered, and exiled from the music industry.

I want successful musicians to receive the accolades of their work but I also want their work to be financially accessible.

realcaseyrollins , 2 hours ago

I follow CHH, and some of the bigger Christian rappers and their labels run the entire tours themselves. Indie Tribe’s Holy Smoke Festival, which is pretty big, sells some tickets for like ~$100. Still a lot, but considering their popularity it’s not bad, and way more attainable than those Taylor Swift tickets lol

idiomaddict , 2 hours ago

That’s a great festival name for the genre

Crackhappy , 2 hours ago

The one concert that is on my life long bucket list, for over 40 years, is to see Billy Joel live. He came to my local venue but I did not buy tickets because nose bleeds were over $400 and because I will not do business with Live Nation, period. It makes me sad but resolute.

Edit: For more context, I grew up hearing his music and I remember distinctly driving west on Java from Jakarta to the West coast in 1984 in a little piece of shit Daihatsu van my parents owned (that consistently burnt the bottoms of my feet because the exhaust was so close to the floor) and listening to Billy Joel on an eight track while bouncing and banging around on the awful roads on the way to the beach.

2pt_perversion , 2 hours ago

Yup, I don’t go to any price gouged concerts period. I can afford it but I refuse on principle because more than $50 just isn’t worth it for me to see any artist so I mostly just see moderately big names when they play open stages at festivals. On the other hand traditionally “high class” music like symphony orchestras still have tickets in the $20 dollar range.

De_Narm , 4 hours ago

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.

Zachariah , 4 hours ago

The LiveNation app has tickets being resold right in it.

Oxymoron , 4 hours ago

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.

HakFoo , 3 hours ago

The experience could be somewhat tamed by a lottery process.

Accept a token deposit for a week or two, and then draw from people contending for a given seat, then give them another week to pay the balance. Any unclaimed seats are put up at will call night-of-the-show. Limit the number of deposits taken from any given card to prevent “I’ll claim 30 seats and only buy 1” gaming of the lottery.

There’s probably some more complexity about it (if you want N seats together), but I think that would dramatically cut back on the frustration for “the tickets were only available for 14 seconds and the server was being DDOSed by scalper bots.”

Having to put down a deposit with no guarantee of a ticket also makes “buy All The Seats” scalping theoretically impossible and economically riskier. If there’s 5/1 contention for a ticket, you’d have to find a way to get 3 lottery slots for a better than even chance of getting it. If the deposit was $10, you’re spending $30 for the chance to buy a $50 ticket-- so if you can’t resell the ticket for at least $80, you lose. Under current policies, if you can sell that $50 ticket for $51, you’re ahead.

FourPacketsOfPeanuts , 4 hours ago

Do you think if they’d charged ten times more that people would have still gone? Something has changed about there being enough people who’ll pay $200 (equivalent)

Oxymoron , 3 hours ago

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.

FourPacketsOfPeanuts , 3 hours ago

Which came first though? Either people stopped going (and they charged more to compensate) or demand increased (so they found they’d still fill the room at a higher price)?

Serinus , 2 hours ago

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.)

sunzu2 , 2 hours ago

Yes income and wealth inequality. Elites v peasants and boomers v everybody else.

small44 , 5 hours ago

I just go support smaller artists that have below $50 shows

Milk_Sheikh , 50 minutes ago

The joy of niche music taste: cheap live tickets to small venues, and cool merch. Multiple times I could have touched their instruments from the floor section.

The pain of niche music taste: Depending upon their genre and your city’s size, they may never come nearby you. New York and LA get everything, Kansas City folk better like country and speed-rap.