You’re surrounded by a sea of faces, all lit up with excitement. The lights dim, the roar of the crowd intensifies, and then, they appear – your favorite band, launching into the song you’ve waited years to hear live. It’s an unforgettable, almost spiritual experience.
But the path to this euphoria has become increasingly fraught with frustration, largely due to the soaring costs of concert tickets. Securing tickets to see a popular artist today feels less like a simple purchase and more like navigating a complex obstacle course designed to drain your bank account. The moment tickets for a highly anticipated show go on sale, chaos erupts. You might be met with frustrating website errors, endless virtual queues, and the sinking feeling that bots are snatching up tickets faster than real fans can click. Sometimes, the entire ticketing platform buckles under the pressure, seemingly overwhelmed by automated programs attempting to infiltrate the system.
Then, you turn to resale websites, only to find tickets marked up to astronomical prices, far beyond your initial budget. The desire to witness your favorite artist live, a dream years in the making, can tempt you to pay these inflated costs. In 2024, this could mean shelling out hundreds, even thousands, of dollars for decent seats. For Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, the most coveted tickets on resale platforms reached an astonishing $200,000 last year – enough to cover four years at a private university without any financial aid.
It’s no surprise that music lovers are feeling disillusioned and angry. The dominance of a single, massive corporation in both music promotion and ticketing – Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster – certainly exacerbates the situation. The Department of Justice is even preparing an antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation, accusing them of monopolistic practices through exclusive ticketing contracts. However, while it’s easy to point the finger at one entity, the reality is that the high cost and chaotic ticket-buying experience are results of a complex mix of factors. The sheer demand to see artists like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, or Harry Styles live far outstrips the supply of shows and seats available. The fundamental question then becomes: in a world of limited concert availability, who gets to go?
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The Steady Climb of Concert Ticket Prices
Concert ticket prices have been steadily increasing, even on primary markets like Ticketmaster, long before any reseller markups. Pollstar, a leading trade publication for the live music industry, reported that the average ticket price for the top 100 tours in 2023 was $122.84. This represents a significant jump from $91.86 in 2019, a rate of increase that surpasses general inflation. Looking further back to 2000, the average price was just $40.74. For the top 10 highest-grossing tours of 2023, the average ticket price climbed even higher to $152.97.
While various factors contribute to this price escalation, including substantial service fees (a 2018 Government Accountability Office report indicated fees average 27% of the total ticket cost), the core issue boils down to simple economics: overwhelming demand. Globally, millions of fans are eager to attend concerts by a select group of top-tier artists. Live Nation reported a staggering 145 million attendees at their shows in 2023, compared to 98 million in 2019. This upward trend continues, with ticket sales in the first quarter of 2024 exceeding those of the same period last year.
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Limited Tickets for General Sale: Presales and Industry Insiders
One significant factor contributing to ticket scarcity is the practice of withholding a large portion of tickets from general public sales. A substantial number of seats in a venue are often allocated for presales, accessible only to select groups: VIPs, music industry professionals, corporate sponsors, and media outlets. The 2018 Government Accountability Office report revealed that 10% to 30% of tickets for major concerts are sold through presales, not general sales. For top artists in large venues, this figure can reach as high as 65%. In 2009, an investigation by Nashville’s NewsChannel 5 uncovered that for a Taylor Swift concert at a venue with a 13,330 capacity, only 1,591 tickets were actually available to the general public after presales and other holds. In 2019, Live Nation even admitted to diverting tens of thousands of tickets for a Metallica tour directly to resale sites, preventing them from being sold at face value initially.
Pascal Courty, an economist at the University of Victoria, emphasizes the lack of transparency surrounding ticket availability. “It’s very rare that the public knows how many tickets are actually sold,” he notes. While the immense demand for superstar artists is undeniable, the practice of restricting public access to tickets, often requiring specific credit cards or memberships for presale access, undoubtedly exacerbates the problem.
Elizabeth Alume, a 27-year-old fan, exemplifies the lengths fans go to see their favorite artists. She spent thousands of dollars traveling from Seattle to Las Vegas and Los Angeles to see the K-pop group BTS, driven by the urgency of the band’s impending military service. While flights and hotels were costly, the biggest expense was resale tickets, totaling $2,200 in Las Vegas and $1,600 in Los Angeles.
The ticket resale market, a space where limited supply collides with overwhelming demand, has become a major pain point for concertgoers.
Resellers vs. Fans: The Battle for Tickets
Purchasing tickets for a major concert today requires strategic planning. At the very least, you need to set calendar reminders and have the ticketing website ready on multiple devices. For the most sought-after shows, registration for presales, like Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan system, is often necessary. This system requires pre-registration with a phone number and email, after which Ticketmaster uses “algorithms and unique data analysis” to distinguish between bots and genuine fans. However, proving your humanity is no guarantee of securing tickets. For the hottest events, Verified Fans are entered into a lottery, and only a select few receive access codes for the sale, while others are placed on a waitlist.
Ticketmaster implements these hurdles to deter professional resellers – scalpers who acquire tickets specifically to resell them at inflated prices. The exact criteria Ticketmaster uses to identify resellers remain undisclosed, but some patterns are apparent. Jason Koebler, co-founder of 404 Media and an expert reporter on ticket scalping, suggests, “It seems like if you’ve seen the artists in the past, you have a better chance of being selected. If your credit card and registered address with Ticketmaster is near the concert city, you have a better chance. Older Ticketmaster accounts might also have an advantage.”
Despite these measures, determined professional resellers find ways to circumvent the system.
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According to Koebler, a thriving black market exists for Ticketmaster accounts, including “aged” accounts designed to appear legitimate. Ticket brokering, often called “scalping” by frustrated fans, is a well-established, professional industry with a long history. (Even in Ancient Rome, scalpers traded prime Colosseum seats for gladiator fights.) These brokers have conventions and actively lobby for favorable legislation. While individual fans may lack the resources to acquire numerous Ticketmaster accounts, “industrial-scale” resellers certainly do.
Koebler illustrates the disparity: “If I want to see Taylor Swift in LA as a regular fan, I enter the Verified Fan lottery once with my single Ticketmaster account. A ticket broker, however, might enter 20,000 times with 20,000 different accounts.”
This imbalance of resources and dedication applies to almost every method of securing sought-after concert tickets. Credit card reward program presales? Professional brokers possess multiple cards with such perks, unlike typical fans. Artist fan club presales? Scalpers readily pay membership fees for access. Online platforms even exist where scalpers can purchase presale access codes directly. While Ticketmaster has attempted to combat bots, reseller software continues to evolve. Scalpers invest heavily in sophisticated tools that provide speed and volume advantages over individual buyers, such as subscription-based web browsers where each tab functions as a new user in the virtual queue. They maintain stockpiles of burner phones and credit cards. Stopping these resellers is a constant arms race. While ticket resale itself is generally legal, bot usage is illegal under the Bots Act, though enforcement has been weak.
Consequently, anti-scalping measures often make the ticket-buying process more challenging for everyone, including genuine fans. The disastrous rollout of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour tickets left many fans unable to purchase tickets at all. Competing against professional scalpers is often a losing battle. “You’re competing against people whose livelihoods depend on being able to buy and sell these tickets,” Koebler points out.
Flipping concert tickets has become incredibly lucrative for skilled resellers, fueling the scalping industry. Non-VIP tickets for Swift’s North American tour originally ranged from $49 to $449, while resale prices averaged $3,801, according to a Pitchfork analysis. The value of these tickets was so high that even ordinary individuals joined the resale market. StubHub reported that most Eras Tour tickets on their platform last year originated from new accounts, suggesting fans were choosing profit over attendance. Scalpers are a significant problem, but the root of the issue is the overwhelming, almost unmanageable demand that has distorted what people are willing to pay for live music experiences.
Can Higher Initial Ticket Prices Solve the Resale Problem?
To manage intense demand, artists can schedule more shows in larger venues. If demand persists, artists and Ticketmaster often implement lotteries to offer a fairer chance of attendance.
However, “fair” lotteries for highly popular tickets often falter due to the powerful profit incentive. Economist Courty calls this the “fair price ticketing curse.” Preventing scalpers from exploiting lotteries requires rigorous enforcement to stop them from acquiring large numbers of tickets. Courty admits this is complex: “You have to start to audit all the sales accounts, you have to look at who the buyers were, who the resellers were – and they could often be out of jurisdiction.”
A less popular but straightforward solution to curb excessive demand is to increase ticket prices on the primary market.
Artists are understandably hesitant to set initial prices at resale market levels, fearing fan backlash and wanting to offer accessibility. However, raising prices could effectively deter scalpers by reducing their potential profit margin. There’s a theoretical price ceiling beyond which demand would decrease. Koebler notes the artist’s perspective: if a ticket resells for $100 compared to a $50 primary market price, “the scalper’s making more than you are from your art and your labor.”
A Counterintuitive Solution
Economists propose that one way to stabilize inflated resale prices for popular concert tickets is to actually increase the original sale price. The supply-demand imbalance can be addressed by increasing supply (more shows in larger venues) or decreasing demand (higher prices to deter some buyers).
Courty suggests a fairer lottery system resembling flight booking: tickets tied to names, with cancellations returned to the issuer for resale to the next in line. However, resellers would likely resist such measures, and ticket providers and venues would face increased operational costs for identity verification.
Until legislation effectively eliminates scalping and the gap between primary and resale prices remains large, resellers will continue to disrupt the concert ticket-buying experience.
The fierce competition for tickets has led some fans to advocate for a merit-based system, prioritizing devoted fans who have streamed music, purchased albums and merchandise. However, this raises fairness questions: time and financial resources for merchandise are also privileges. The debate highlights the resentment fueled by supply-demand imbalances: who truly deserves front-row seats? Those with more money, more time, or those free when sales begin?
Major pop stars are already maximizing venue sizes and adding shows to meet demand. But for artists like Taylor Swift, fan desire remains immense, exceeding the physical limits of performance schedules.
“What we’re talking about is access to a human being, more or less,” Koebler concludes. “The space is limited. The time is limited.”
