$11,000 to see Taylor Swift? How concert tickets got so expensive
LOS ANGELES — Today is the day. You called in sick to work. You've been looking forward to the chance to buy seats since the show was announced. The webpage loads on your laptop, and you're met with triple-digit prices for a ticket to see your favorite musician. In the seconds you spend hesitating, the entire concert is sold out. You quickly pull up a reseller site, and the prices are now four digits and climbing.
Taylor Swift fans saw a similar scene this year, as have masses of other aspiring concertgoers. For Swift's sold-out shows at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood next month, face-value tickets sold for $49 to $449 if you could get them. Now, first-night tickets will set you back around $800 to $11,000 each on StubHub.
How did we end up spending more than your average mortgage payment for a seat at a concert? The answer is ... complicated.
Why are concert tickets so expensive?
There are five major players influencing ticket prices for that concert you've been waiting to see: the artists, the promoters who put on the shows, the venues that host them, the ticketing companies that make the initial ticket sales, and the resellers that sell seats no longer available from the box office.
Each link in the chain is responsible for some portion of the cost of your concert-night experience, because each link is a business trying to make a profit.
Promoters are the connection between the act and the venue. They officially set the ticket prices, and they take on the loss if the concert doesn't generate enough ticket sales to cover what the artist has been guaranteed. They organize and publicize the shows, and those costs go into the price of the ticket.
like Swift at the top of the industry can tell the promoter where to set ticket prices and also pick, a music-industry analyst and former label executive, said the acts also have power over ticketing fees and resale policies if the primary ticket seller has its own resale platform, although they pay the ticket seller to take the heat for those decisions.
