Buying concert tickets has become a mess of high prices and surcharges, anxiety-inducing registrations and pervasive scalping as some of pop’s biggest acts hit the road again.
Ellen Rothman still speaks with awe about the first time she saw Bruce Springsteen perform, at “a sleazy little blues bar” in Cambridge, Mass., in 1974.
“It was like the roof was going to blow off the venue,” she recalled recently. “I have never experienced anything else like that in my life.”
Now 75, Rothman said she had been to around 180 Springsteen concerts, but was skipping his latest tour. For decades, Springsteen had kept his tickets at bargain rates, buttressing his reputation as a man of the people. But for his current outing with the E Street Band, a chunk of the seats for each venue were sold through “dynamic pricing,” which allows their cost to rise and fall with demand; some went for up to $5,000.
“We feel betrayed on some level,” Rothman said. “I have no problem with an artist making a good living. But at what point do you feel taken advantage of?”
This year should be a gigantic one for the concert business, with major tours by Springsteen, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Ed Sheeran, Drake, Madonna, Morgan Wallen, Metallica and others filling stadiums and arenas. The music industry, now largely free of the restrictions that hampered touring during the Covid-19 pandemic, is already buzzing about whether box-office records will be broken.
But for the average music fan, the once simple act of buying a ticket is now often a frustrating mess of high prices and surcharges, anxiety-inducing presale registrations, pervasive scalping and crushing competition for the most in-demand shows.
“Nowadays it just feels so daunting,” said Evan Howard, 24, a musician and Pilates instructor in New York. “It’s this whole task you need to set aside an entire day for.”
Swift’s botched presale in November, when Ticketmaster’s systems were overwhelmed by demand from both fans and bots, was the most high-profile problem. It led to a vituperative Senate Judiciary hearing at which senators from both parties called Ticketmaster and its corporate parent, Live Nation Entertainment, a monopoly.
Since then, ticketing has only heated up as a political issue. In his State of the Union address, President Biden said “we can stop service fees on tickets to concerts and sporting events,” and called for the disclosure of all fees upfront. (The Justice Department is also conducting an antitrust investigation of Live Nation.)
But higher prices may simply be here to stay, at least for the biggest events. That, industry insiders say, is a function of increased costs all around, as well as a recognition by artists that resale platforms like StubHub have revealed the true market value of a top-notch concert ticket.
In an interview last year with Rolling Stone, Springsteen endorsed that view. “The ticket broker or someone is going to be taking that money,” he said. “I’m going, ‘Hey, why shouldn’t that money go to the guys that are going to be up there sweating three hours a night for it?’”
For the first leg of Springsteen’s tour, which went on sale in July, around 11 percent of seats were designated “Official Platinum,” which are priced dynamically, according to Ticketmaster. The average price for all tickets at that time was $262. Ticketmaster and Springsteen’s camp declined to release any more recent data; representatives for Springsteen also declined to comment for this article.
The cost of tickets for the tour has led to a roiling debate about whether the bond between artist and audience has been broken. Backstreets, the leading Springsteen fan publication since 1980, ran a fiery editorial last year saying that the new pricing “violates an implicit contract between Bruce Springsteen and his fans.” In February, Christopher Phillips, Backstreets’ editor and publisher, said he was shutting down the publication in protest.
For concertgoers across the board, it has been a season of sticker shock. Beyoncé, who had a far smoother sale than Swift, was selling dynamically priced seats off the floor at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey for about $1,000 apiece, according to one attendee’s receipts. At Madison Square Garden, you could get a pair of Madonna tickets for $1,300; “platinum” seats in the same section are now nearly $1,000 each.
When Drake’s three shows at Barclays Center in Brooklyn went on sale last month, “standard” tickets, listed at $69.50 to $329.50, were snapped up almost immediately, leaving fans to contend with dynamic prices as high as $1,182.
Some Springsteen devotees said these price escalations happened en route to checkout. “It’s like going to Walmart and putting a TV in your cart for $399, and you go to the register and they say, ‘Sorry, that’s now $1,000,’” said Roberta Facinelli, a fan in New Orleans.
Extreme pricing is a phenomenon largely confined to a limited number of superstar tours. The average ticket price paid for one of the top 100 tours in North America last year was $111, while the average ticket on Broadway last season was $126. Try telling that to a Depeche Mode follower whose only options for a Madison Square Garden show this month are scalped seats ranging from $302 to $1,220.
Even bargain hunters have felt the sting. Alexus Bomar, a 27-year-old in Detroit, found two Beyoncé stadium tickets for $330, and used a payment plan to cover the cost. But she was dismayed to see that Drake was charging about $500 a pair in the upper decks.
“I saw a tweet that said they’d never spend more than what they spent for Beyoncé for anyone else,” Bomar said. “That’s kind of how I feel.”
And then there are the fees, which have been creeping up for years. In 2018, the Government Accountability Office found that these charges added an average of 27 percent to a ticket order. This year, the American Economic Liberties Project, as part of an activist group calling itself the Break Up Ticketmaster Coalition, said its research showed that fees added an average of 32 percent.
These charges frustrate artists as well as fans, as demonstrated by Robert Smith of the Cure, who for the past several weeks has been tweeting his way through one ticketing snag after another for his band’s North American tour.
The group took pains to keep prices low — they were just $20 for some venues — and worked to thwart scalpers by making seats nontransferable outside of an online “face value ticket exchange” operated by Ticketmaster. Yet when tickets went on sale last month, fans found that for some of the cheapest seats, added fees exceeded the listed face value, more than doubling their ultimate cost.
On Twitter, Smith amplified fan complaints, pressuring Ticketmaster to solve egregious problems like seats on the face-value exchange that were nonetheless advertised for prices many times higher. In response, Ticketmaster agreed to refund some of the fees — a rare concession that raised eyebrows throughout the industry.
“We don’t want to price anybody out of the show,” Smith tweeted this week. “Any major artist can do the same. But we can not control the fees that are added.”
A spokeswoman for Ticketmaster noted that artists set the face value of their tickets, and usually keep most of that money, while “most fees are set and kept by venues.”
Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program, a screening system meant to identify the buyers most likely to use their tickets, rather than scalp them, has been a double-edged sword. Some fans, like Bomar, credit it with giving them a fair shot. “That is the only good thing I could give to Ticketmaster,” she said.
But the system has also baffled customers, with decades-long followers of acts like Springsteen and the Cure saying they were locked out. Arusha Baker, who has seen the Cure 120 times since 1986, said she had gotten the credential but was then “permanently wait-listed.”
Scalpers have found some ingenious ways to resell Cure tickets — one method, documented on the tech site Motherboard, involved the transfer of entire Ticketmaster accounts — as Ticketmaster has struggled to police these problems.
To nonfans, Smith may be best known for his unruly mop of hair. But his crusade for fairer and more affordable tickets has made him something of a folk hero, even as Springsteen has risked some of that reputation through his latest tour.
“Every step of the way, this man’s sole intent is to combat scalpers and keep tickets in the hands of the fans,” said Baker, who has spent more than 20 years making a documentary about Cure fans.
Other musicians, frustrated with the ticketing status quo, have experimented. Zach Bryan booked a tour avoiding venues affiliated with Ticketmaster, using a rival ticket vendor, AXS, and taking steps to rein in fees and block scalpers. On Thursday, Maggie Rogers announced she would be selling tickets in person for an upcoming show, “like it’s 1965.”
Still, the industry shows no signs of lowering prices. The shock that fans are experiencing, many executives and talent agents say, may be a necessary adjustment to a world where the most popular events just cost more — especially if those high-priced shows keep selling out.
Jed Weitzman, the head of music at Logitix, who uses data from the secondary market to advise artists on how to set prices for their tickets, says the business is “in a moment of transition.”
“The reality of a market economy is that things cost more,” Weitzman added. “Artists want to make money and deliver a great product, and I’m all for that. It’s not 1975 and tickets aren’t $8 anymore.”
That may be cold comfort for fans like Ellen Rothman who built their connection to Springsteen show by show, at prices that for years remained at around $100 but now are often many times higher.
“It’s not worth it,” she said. “Even for Bruce.”
