Sorry, There’s No Such Thing as a “Fair” Ticket Price in an Age of Income Inequality
The post Sorry, There’s No Such Thing as a “Fair” Ticket Price in an Age of Income Inequality appeared first on Consequence.
Concerts don’t keep us alive, though sometimes it may feel that way. Live entertainment is a luxury, and like so many luxury experiences it’s changed over time. Consider some of the starriest billings of the last 70 years:
1965 was the peak of Beatlemania, and tickets to The Beatles concert in San Diego started at $3.50. Adjusting for inflation, that would come out to about $33 in 2023, which might not get you into the parking lot of a modern Paul McCartney show.
Back in 1977, fans could see Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours Tour” with the Kenny Loggins Band at the Coliseum in Cleveland for $9 — the equivalent of about $45 today. This August, when Stevie Nicks performs at Ohio Stadium with Billy Joel, $45 won’t cover half the sticker price of the cheapest seats.
Minnesota tickets to Prince and the Revolution’s “Purple Rain” trek in 1984 started as low as $10.50, or in the ballpark of $31 today. Now, unless you’re a pin collector, $31 will have you leaving the merch table empty-handed.
The inflation-adjusted price of events has exploded over the last few decades. It’s happening across all types of live entertainment but especially in music and sports. The most expensive ticket ever purchased may have been sold this past January, when a Saudi real estate magnate paid about $2.6 million for a VIP seat at a soccer match. Musharraf bin Ahmed Al-Ghamdi’s wealth has not been widely reported, but he is likely one of the over 2,600 billionaires on the planet, of which more than 700 live in the United States.
Wealth inequality has been rising sharply since the 1980s, and the COVID-19 pandemic may have exacerbated that trend. Promoters have noticed, adding ever-more-gaudy VIP packages with meet-and-greets, photos, food, drinks, valet parking, personal concierges, and, perhaps if you spend enough money, the illusion that the band thinks you’re cool. Artists have caught on, too, and as the bottom has fallen out on physical album sales, they’ve attempted to regain ground on the road. The result is that concerts have entered a totally different tier of luxury, from student entertainment to high-end experience, pizza and some beers to a Gucci clutch.
Shut Up and Take the 1%’s Money
This is hardly the first period of human history with great wealth inequality, but it’s one of the first times that the middle-class and 1% are competing over the same seats. Two hundred years ago, the plebs might spend the night at the music hall, while fancy people put on their opera capes and went peacocking around the opera house. Today, the people who can afford opera capes wear Lululemon or Yankees caps to the Bruce Springsteen concert. There are only so many seats and many more people who wish to sit in them. In this environment, what does a fair ticket price even look like?
Springsteen is one of a number of artists who have publicly wrestled with the question. Last summer, after he announced a 2023 tour with the E Street Band, he become embroiled in a fan uproar over expensive tickets, with reports of some seats costing upwards of $5,000.
Springsteen had opted into Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing program, which is inspired by — and aimed squarely at stopping — scalpers, whose quick fingers and patience on the secondary market showed just how valuable some seats can be.
Scalping has always existed in some form or another, but it entered a new era of professionalism in 2001 around Mel Brooks’ The Producers on Broadway. As seats sold out night after night, scalpers made their surprising livings, which left the backers of The Producers wondering why they didn’t live a little more themselves.
They raised the top ticket price for the best 50 seats from $100 to $480 — a staggering total (over $800 in today’s dollars) that nevertheless failed to dent demand. Scalpers adjusted and took more scalps.
New York is one of the most expensive cities in the world, the kind of place where $480 or $800 can feel like so much change between the couch cushions. To gobsmackingly rich people, what’s a night at The Producers? To multi-millionaire or billionaire Springsteen fans, what is $5,000? A cup of water from an ocean.
In a statement, Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau said, “Regardless of the commentary about a modest number of tickets costing $1,000 or more, our true average ticket price has been in the mid-$200 range. I believe that in today’s environment, that is a fair price to see someone universally regarded as among the very greatest artists of his generation.”
You might agree or not about the “fair price,” but dynamic pricing seems to be literally designed for the 1%, impacting about 1.3% of Springsteen tickets, according to Ticketmaster. At the other end of the spectrum, 18% of tickets reportedly sold for $99 or less. (Mostly, these made up the poorest seats in large houses. Some venues have great sight lines and some do not, but none offer the same experience to everyone.)
$99 is a nice number to look at, though it’ll look quite a bit bigger after taxes and Ticketmaster’s famous transaction fees. Altogether, these prices are still historically high; the final total could easily cover inflation-adjusted tickets to see all three of The Beatles ($33), Fleetwood Mac ($45), and Prince ($31) in their primes.
The Sickness and The Cure
Since the 2010 merger with Live Nation, Ticketmaster looms large over every question in live entertainment. The resulting behemoth owns more than 200 venues and an iron grip on the concert industry. But following its handling of Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour,” they found themselves targeted by one of the most dangerous groups in modern society: Swifties.
Hating Ticketmaster quickly became a bipartisan issue, to the point where breaking up the company was debated before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “This is the definition of monopoly,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D), reporting that Live Nation owns about 80% of market share. She also cited a study which found that Ticketmaster service fees “for some tickets [are] as high as 75% of face value.”
Artists have tried different tacts to get around Ticketmaster’s service charges. Robert Smith opted for shame. “I AM AS SICKENED AS YOU ALL ARE BY TODAY’S TICKETMASTER ‘FEES’ DEBACLE,” The Cure legend recently tweeted.
The public shaming worked, and Ticketmaster refunded Cure concert-goers $5-10. “TICKETMASTER HAVE AGREED WITH US THAT MANY OF THE FEES BEING CHARGED ARE UNDULY HIGH,” Smith wrote, celebrating a victory that felt at best symbolic and at worst pyrrhic.
Turn that $5 into $20 and we still won’t get back the prices we lost; it’s a band-aid over an amputation. And for any tour without a pissed-off Rock Hall of Famer, you can probably expect back $0.
Consolidation of wealth is a problem among businesses as much as individuals, and the solutions seem just as distant. The Senate Judiciary Committee got what they wanted — clips for social media and a plea for Swiftie votes — and the hearings ended with no further fuss. Neither President Biden nor any of his likely 2024 adversaries have showed any appetite for stopping this game of monopoly. In lieu of government, we can only hope the Swifties will return to finish the job.
Opera Capes of the Future
Artists who follow The Cure’s example and opt out of dynamic pricing will still chafe at supply and demand. “THE REALITY IS THAT IF THERE AREN’T ENOUGH TICKETS ONSALE, A NUMBER OF FANS ARE GOING TO MISS OUT WHATEVER SYSTEM WE USE,” Smith explained.
These problems persist even if you avoid Ticketmaster entirely. Zach Bryan, the country-adjacent superstar who last year released the live album All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster, plotted out his headlining tour with Live Nation competitor AXS. The decision was initially met with applause, though in recent weeks some of that acclaim has curdled.
“Going to war with Ticketmaster only keeps fans from being able to see you,” tweeted one person who presumably failed to get tickets. “No sir, high demand keeps fans from seeing me,” Bryan responded. Others suggested he should have booked sports stadiums, as if that were as painless as checking out a library book.
The financial risk of going big is real. Few artists have been as forthcoming as Rihanna in discussing a tour that left her in debt, but it probably happens more than we know. Besides, the number of massive venues is limited to municipalities brave enough — or foolish enough — to help foot the bill. There just aren’t that many places that can host tens of thousands of fans.
There’s another solution, of course, which is that performers could play more shows. But they are people, no matter how aggressively they are marketed as products. Each concert is bespoke, each live experience one-of-a-kind. There’s no way to ramp up production, no way achieve scale. As Bryan explained, “I don’t want to play 100-300 shows a year and for my life to be chaos all the time for the sake of other people.”
And so the Zach Bryan tour, like tours for so many other artists, turned into a lottery. Tickets sold out almost immediately and not everyone was happy, but hey, that’s life. Rich people could still afford to attend and poor people were still largely locked out, but at least there were opportunities for the ever-shrinking middle.
Is that, ultimately, “fair?” It’s certainly closer, though caveats remain. Tickets go on sale at a certain time, often 10:00 a.m. local. Affluent ticket buyers are more likely to be ready at the screen, while many working-class people have to actually, you know, work. Besides that, if seats sell out in Los Angeles but remain available in Atlanta, some people can hop on a four-hour plane ride while others have only four-letter words. Hell, Beyoncé fans are flying all the way to Europe. In an age where thousands of dollars can be nothing or everything, a cheap evening out or months of work, “fair” will always be at least somewhat theoretical.
“Yo I believe in the world’s greatest economy, believe me,” Bryan added, “but like, you think seeing someone play 18-25 songs is worth 500 bucks? When some of the best bands of all time played for $20 a ticket?? Feel how you want to feel man just seems shady to me.”
It’s hard to disagree, though “some of the best bands of all time” played in a totally different era. The period from the end of World War II to the 1980s was a prosperous blip, remembered all the more fondly because it seems so distant. We’re going in the other direction.
Forty years from now, will we laugh in disbelief at how high concert ticket prices used to be? Or will we wonder that so many people used to be able to afford shows, as artists perform for smaller crowds in a new kind of opera cape?
Sorry, There’s No Such Thing as a “Fair” Ticket Price in an Age of Income Inequality
Wren Graves
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