Concert ticket buying in 2024 comes with a side-portion of stress, frustration and financial pain…as Coldplay‘s latest outing proved for fans this very morning.
Tickets for six UK dates on the band’s Music Of The Spheres World Tour next summer were released at 9am and by 10am, tales of online queue access problems had already surfaced, with the cheapest tickets on sale – at £53 – apparently long gone moments after the clock struck 9am.
One person fumed at Ticketmaster, the band’s chosen distribution outlet, saying: ‘I had 900 people ahead of me in the queue, and when I finally got through, the only ticket available was £192. What a joke! What happened to the £53 tickets?’
There were some winners though, with touts who had managed to bag those cheaper early tickets quickly listing them for resale at eye-watering prices of more than £1000 each.
Coldplay fans slammed Ticketmaster once again after a glitch left them in a desperate last minute struggle to get tour tickets on Friday – and when they did get in, tickets had already shot up in price thanks to Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing, which increases prices with demand
Paying £50 for an A-list artist – Coldplay, Beyonce, Taylor Swift and the Gallagher brothers – is a pipe dream for most fans.
According to research by trade publication Pollstar, there’s been a £21 increase in the average ticket price, rising from £82 in 2022, to £101 in 2023, based on the top 100 tours.
Meanwhile in the theatre, tickets are still competitively priced; seats to see British acting stars Daisy Edgar Jones and Kingsley Ben-Adir in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof went on sale this afternoon – with stalls tickets starting from £20 a seat.
So, who are the biggest angels and demons of concert ticketflation?
Madonna asked for £1,300.75 for VIP tickets to her Celebration tour, while a ‘stage seat’ at one of Beyonce‘s Renaissance dates cost £2,400.
Meanwhile, Bruce Springsteen, known for his epic three-hour sets, has been matter-of-fact about the most expensive tickets sold for his tour, around £3,500 thanks to Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing, with The Boss maintaining that if he doesn’t sell them at that price, someone else, ie a tout, will.
Other artists have nobly tried to cap prices – Gen Z punk favourite YungBlud, Paul Heaton and rising star Caity Baser are all keeping tickets affordable but, in fairness, they don’t quite require the moveable town of crew that a Taylor Swift or Beyonce gig requires.
While it’d be easy to surmise that megastars such as Springsteen simply know their worth, in truth, many of the reasons behind the recent concert price hikes have little to do with the actual artist themselves.
It’s thought that more than half of the price of a ticket sold now funds production costs, with a smaller portion swelling the profit coffers.
For fans hoping to see their favourite artists in 2024, it’s been a perfect storm of contributing factors, from food to travel and hotels…here, MailOnline outlines them below:
GASOLINE: HOW FUEL COSTS PLAYED A PART
Getting Beyonce on stage requires a small town of crew, with private jets, juggernauts and tour buses all needing fuel – a cost that is often soaked into the ticket price fans pay (Pictured: Beyonce at Murrayfield Stadium in Edinburgh in 2023)
There was good news on this front this week; petrol prices have reached a three-year low due to a fall in oil prices and the strength of the pound.
However, gig goers wanting to see their favourite artists in the last two years have definitely been impacted by prices on the forecourt.
Petrol prices reached a record high of 191.5p per litre in the summer of 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the previous February.
And while they’re now back down to 135.7p, according to the RAC, the cost of getting an artist to a gig – with fleets of juggernauts filled with everything from clothes to catering to staging equipment, has helped spiral up ticket costs.
BILLS, BILLS, BILLS: SOARING FOOD AND DRINK PRICES
This month Which? found food and drink prices were 16.6 per cent higher in the three months to the end of August 2024 compared with the same period two years earlier – and those increased costs are woven into ticket prices.
How? Take Beyonce’s hugely successful Renaissance tour, which played in six cities in Britain…alongside Queen Bey were a small army of travelling crew, from her creative directors to dancers, audio technicians, security and carpenters – all of whom were catered for.
Providing a travelling restaurant is one of the most expensive parts of a tour’s costs; add in food and drink inflation to boot, and it’s the fan who pays via ticket prices.
NO CIGARETTES AND ALCOHOL: SOBER GEN-Z HIT VENUES
Gen Z concert-goers don’t have the same appetite for booze as previous generations, meaning venues can take a hit on alcohol sales
Around 90,000 fans packed into see each of Taylor Swift’s UK dates in June and August this summer, but a generational shift in alcohol consumption means that concerts are drier than ever – as fans stick to cheaper soft drinks or water in venues.
In general, rising numbers of Brits are turning their backs on booze with more than a quarter of the nation now teetotal.
According to a survey in June this year, around 27 per cent of UK adults are now non-drinkers and that figure jumps to 36 per cent for under 25s, aka Generation Z.
It’s a double whammy of pain for venues, who’ve faced soaring food and drink costs…and less people drinking the most expensive drinks.
GREED: SUPPLY AND DEMAND MANIFESTS AS DYNAMIC PRICING
Put simply, if fans are prepared to pay – and judging by how quickly the likes of Oasis, Coldplay, Taylor Swift and their megastar peers sell out, they are, then tickets will soar accordingly.
Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing monitors and inflates prices when demand is high, a selling technique that has been heavily criticised.
Fans of Oasis were left frustrated on Saturday as they logged onto to computers for the desperate scramble to see the reunion of the Gallagher brothers (pictured) next summer
Dynamic pricing sees an undisclosed number of tickets go on sale at face value, and once they have sold out, more tickets are released at a higher price agreed in advance by an artist’s management and promoters.
The model is similar to that used by airlines and hotels which increase prices when there is greater demand but fans have complained about a lack of transparency over ticket sales – and that they end up being railroaded into paying ‘extortionate’ prices.
As Bruce Springsteen argued when asked by Rolling Stone magazine last year whether paying nearly £4,000 to see one of his shows was fair, he argued: ‘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?”‘
Rapino (pictured left with Rihanna in 2015) is president and chief executive of Live Nation which owns Ticketmaster. The company has seen a 36 per cent rise in revenues to £17.3billion
And dynamic pricing doesn’t look like going anywhere soon. In February Michael Rapino – who is president and chief executive of Live Nation which owns Ticketmaster – insisted music fans across the globe should expect the future to be shaped by dynamic pricing.
Unveiling a 36 per cent increase in annual revenues to £17.3 billion he said: ‘We’re just rolling this out around the world.
‘So that’s the great growth opportunity. We’ve had it in Europe but still in infancy stages. We’re going to expand it down to South America, Australia.’
He added: ‘Promoters are anxious for it. Artists are anxious for it.’
Rapino, 59, has insisted that ‘concerts are a very special moment’ in fans’ lives adding ‘and they will pay for it’.
CHELSEA HOTEL? HARD-HIT ACCOMMODATION PROVIDERS PUSH THE BUTTON ON INCREASED COSTS
And dynamic prices certainly impacts accommodation prices too…when a huge artist is announced to play at a venue, hotels nearby send their prices soaring to make a profit.
Oasis fans, for example, faced sky-high prices for hotel rooms after the band announced extra dates on their reunion tour – with the price of a basic double room soaring to almost £1,000, on top of the high ticket prices.
Oasis have announced a series of dates in London, Manchester, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Dublin
EDINBURGH: Prior to rooms selling out, one fan shared a screenshot purportedly showing rooms in a hotel selling for £1299 for two nights
An 8.8 per cent leap in hotel prices while Taylor Swift was touring her Eras tour in the UK is no coincidence, say economists
In July, the Office for National Statistics released data on the dramatic leaps seen in prices this year, with June 8.8 per cent more expensive than May.
And you don’t have to look very hard to see why such a big rise in accommodation prices might have happened.
Economists have suggested that the increase might be down to the ‘Taylor Swift effect’ at work, because the first of her UK Eras tour dates came in June.
And even if canny hotel providers didn’t hike up prices, the hospitality industry has taken such as battering thanks to inflation in recent years that prices are still invariably higher than they were two years ago.