In an infamous 1993 interview, Kurt Cobain was asked about concert ticket prices. He was incredulous when told that Madonna was charging up to $50. Fast forward to 2024: A ticket to Madonna’s “Celebration Tour” averaged $208, according to Variety. As a diehard Madonna fan, I went twice — and it felt like a bargain.
The concert run everyone’s still talking about, of course, is Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour.” Spanning five continents and 149 shows from 2023 to 2024, it was the first concert tour to gross more than $2 billion.
“The Eras Tour” also broke a lot of wallets. From the outset, ticket sales were mired in controversy. In November 2022, tickets went on presale, made available to Verified Fans — people who had registered with Ticketmaster to confirm they were real buyers, not bots or scalpers — who had received a code granting them access. As soon as the sale opened, however, the Ticketmaster site crashed. The Verified Fan system, designed to protect individual buyers, failed spectacularly: There were far more registered fans than the company had anticipated, and, at the same time they were being shunted to the waitlist, scalper bots broke through and scooped up tickets, reselling them on sites like StubHub for up to $21,000 (yes, you read that correctly), according to CNN. The planned general sale, meant to open to the public shortly after, was canceled. There were simply no tickets left.
Taylor Swift performing on tour
Swift, who has 273 million Instagram followers, took to the platform to express her outrage at Ticketmaster, which she said had worked closely with her team and assured her that protections were in place.
“I’ve done this SPECIFICALLY to improve the quality of my fans’ experience by doing it myself with my team who care as much about my fans as I do,” she wrote. “It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.”
Further blasting Ticketmaster, she also wrote: “We asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could.”
Even worse, there were numerous reported incidents in which fans — including one young girl with cancer — had not only purchased astronomically priced tickets through scalper websites but also learned that their tickets were fake upon arriving at the arena. In a few instances, sympathetic parties, such as local news stations, stepped in to gift them authentic tickets.
So, how did we get here? How did concert culture and the experience of coming together for live music get hijacked and turned into something that’s stressful, overly expensive and unfair to fans?
It begins with Ticketmaster. Founded in 1976, the company once had a simple, straightforward business model: license new technology to sell tickets and receive a small percentage from the sale. By the 1980s, however, Ticketmaster’s approach had shifted. It began striking deals directly with concert venues that guaranteed the company would be the sole official ticketing service — a strategy that eventually squeezed out competitors like Ticketron and allowed Ticketmaster to set prices. Ticketmaster later purchased Ticketron, effectively giving itself a monopoly on all ticket sales.
Certain artists were outraged, the most prominent being Pearl Jam, who sued Ticketmaster in 1994 for exploiting fans by taking advantage of its monopoly to charge exorbitant service fees. The move received notable attention but resulted in no legal consequences. In fact, in the years that followed, billionaire Paul Allen acquired a significant stake in the company, and a 1998 merger paved the way for an IPO that sent its valuation soaring. What was once a straightforward ticketing service had become a high-stakes, profit-driven marketplace.
If anything, Ticketmaster became even more of a monopoly in 2010, following a merger with Live Nation, the biggest concert promoter company and venue operator in the country. Ironically, Live Nation had originally been founded as a counterweight to Ticketmaster’s growing influence. Together, they formed an integrated powerhouse, Live Nation Entertainment, that essentially controlled every financial step of the ticket-buying process — owning venues, promoting shows and setting ticket prices.
Then came the secondary-market sites, like StubHub, which arrived in the early 2000s and further muddied the waters. One arm of their business allows individual ticketholders to resell their seats to other would-be concertgoers — often at an inflated price. In return for providing the platform, the site takes a cut of the sale.
The resale sites, however, have been accused of using bots to buy up as many tickets as possible at retail value before inflating the prices.
In 2016, Congress passed the Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act, banning the use of software to circumvent ticket purchase limits, but the resale sites appear to have ignored the law, with few repercussions.
It wasn’t until the “Eras” fiasco that pressure mounted on the government to examine the process once more. A bipartisan congressional hearing grilled Ticketmaster, Live Nation and resale site representatives, and in 2024, the Department of Justice launched an antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment. This April, a federal jury in New York found that the company held a monopoly that violated federal and state laws. The corporation, however, has not yet been broken up.
It’s worth noting that, in some instances, artists may share a bit of the blame by agreeing to dynamic pricing, a process through which ticket costs are adjusted in real time, based on current demand and remaining inventory. If demand is high and tickets are selling quickly, Ticketmaster has the right to raise prices on the remaining ones. There are two ways to look at the practice: At best, it ensures that the extra money goes to the performers rather than the reseller sites; at worst, it drives prices so high that would-be concertgoers simply can’t afford them.
Here’s the key thing to know about dynamic pricing: The musicians have to approve it. Before tickets go on sale, the artist can opt in or out. (Swift, for example, disabled it for “The Eras Tour.”) Artists can also request a more tailored arrangement, specifying how many tickets will be sold at face value before dynamic pricing kicks in, and whether there’s a ceiling on how high prices can go. All of that is determined by the artists, their management and Ticketmaster.
Ticketmaster has been quick to point this out. Following backlash over increased prices for Bruce Springsteen’s 2023 tour — floor seats were selling for thousands of dollars — the company placed the blame on Springsteen, who admitted it was his call. As he told Rolling Stone, “For the past 49 years or however long we’ve been playing, we’ve pretty much been out there under market value. I’ve enjoyed that. It’s been great for the fans. This time I told them, ‘Hey, we’re 73 years old. … I want to do what everybody else is doing, my peers.’ So that’s what happened.”
While various organizations battle all of this out in court, fans can still buy reasonably priced tickets; they just have to be strategic or, in some cases, lucky.
Personally, I have two Swiftie friends who verified themselves, had their hand on the computer mouse the minute the presale opened, successfully made the queue and purchased tickets at face value.
Some fans, however, will be left to weigh just how much they’re willing to invest in a concert experience. I’ve flown to Las Vegas with friends, paid for a hotel and splurged on great seats at the Sphere twice, to see U2 and the Backstreet Boys. Each trip set me back about $2,000, but the combination of great company, fantastic music and the photos and memories we took home made it money well spent. I can’t say that every music fan will say the same.