If y'all keep paying them, they'll assume you can pay more. Every big business takes a such as possible from you.
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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I go to a lot of live music shows but I haven’t purchased a TicketMaster or Live Nation ticket in forever. I don’t see huge bands because they are prohibitively expensive but I get to see a lot of really fun shows and experience a far more engaged crowd.
You're doing it right. The way to deal with overpriced concerts and scalpers is to vote with your wallet. Don't buy overpriced tickets. Don't buy from scalpers. Nobody needs to go see a particular artist at a particular concert, I don't care how much you "love" them, or that you might never see them on tour again, you don't NEED that. Let it go. Let go of the FOMO. Step one of defeating scalpers is to remove their market. If they cannot make money, they will not exist.
We tried something similar with convincing people not to preorder games. There's a proven method to make things better but everyone loves to shit in their pants.
I understand your frustration, but I think you also have to keep in mind that it's not a binary true/false success condition. Plenty of partial success can still be had in the gray area in between, and partial success has its own proportional rewards. Realistically we're never going to solve 100% of the problem this way (or probably any way). But what we can do is shrink the proportions of the problem. Yes, there are always going to be people paying many thousands of dollars for Taylor Swift tickets and people preordering the next Assassin's Creed game or whatever. But by shifting your own purchasing decisions away from such things, and hopefully with the cooperation of many other people also making the same shift, you start to funnel more money into the artists and games that don't do that. You make that area of the creative space richer with your money, and then those creatives make their art richer with the money you're supplying. As a result, we earn better future rewards for ourselves without having to participate in the behaviors we find objectionable. We are all working together, this is a collective effort, and even partial success is a perfectly appealing goal on its own. The more success the better, but I'll take any success we can get, because every little bit counts and every little bit makes the situation a little bit better.
Very solid points. Well said. I was only thinking of the condition of stops or doesn't stop rising prices and that needs x amount of the market to do so. The other half I didn't consider. Thank you for taking the time
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Honestly smaller local shows are so much better anyway. I’d go see some local band at the dive down the street over a stadium show any day.
My friend sometimes gets free tickets to bigger concerts and invites me. I saw ELO (or whatever the name is now) and Incubus recently and both were great in a different way. They're too different to compare IMO, even though I do prefer smaller shows because that's what the bands I like play
Ah, yes, the ole "it's the customers fault they're getting screwed."
Why do I have to think about market forces and corporate politics just to buy a fucking concert ticket? Can't we just have a well regulated market that doesn't constantly treat customers like a resource to be mined?
No, we can't. Both are captured by cruel and selfish people who will keep taking until something breaks and they got to where they are because people kept voting for them on the ballot and in the store instead of supporting the people who aren't trying to economically rape us into the grave.
Can’t we just have a well regulated market that doesn’t constantly treat customers like a resource to be mined?
Of course we can in theory, but the capitalists will call it socialism. And then people will say we don't want that. So we go right back to free market capitalism.
I get this argument for something people actually need but going to a Taylor Swift concert is the very definition of a luxury.
Not with Democrats or Republicans in power
So, I think we, as a seaciety, need to start waluigiing ceos.
If to Luigi someone is to kill them, then to waluigi someone must mean that we create someone. As life is the opposite of death, so too is waluigi the opposite of Luigi.
Therefore, it is time we start impregnating the wives of CEOs.
This timeline is weird
Thieves are just there out on the open bragging how they steal, and then just taunt people with saying that they'll come back and steal some more
Yet he doesn't get jailed?
I appreciate what you're saying, but nobody is forcing anyone to buy tickets.
Stop going to arena shows! That's it! It's not even that hard, support small(er) local venues. If you have to miss massive band/artist, que sera. If the band doesn't give a shit, then it's not worth it anyway.
Do you live outside of the United States or something? Or just not go to concerts? Live Nation owns almost all of the small venues too. They've bought nearly everything out, and the few remaining independent venues are on life support. And if you're a local band, good luck. 20 years ago, venues would pay you to play. But now you have to pay them like $200 just for the privilege of playing at a small venue with a 350 person capacity. In my city less than 20 years ago, I remember being able to walk downtown in the music district on any day of the week, and there would be over a dozen venues right next to each other all playing something different. It could be a Tuesday night. Music was everywhere, and tickets were $6-20. But there was also tons of free stuff. But after the venues all got bought out, that all stopped. There's not enough big money in music 7 days every week. A lot of venues now only have shows as little as twice a month. And then they'll want to charge $70+.
Why shouldn't we be outraged? Music culture is being destroyed. Your "stop going to shows" solution isn't a solution. Nobody is going to concerts several times in a week anymore. What there once was has been destroyed. Live Nation needs to die.
I was just in a hotel last night and a local band was performing for free.
Can you believe that? I didn't have to pay anything, I wasn't even a guest!
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Underpriced for who? 😑
Personally I rarely go to concerts any more, part of that is life circumstances part of it is I just can't justify the prices.
The thing is he's probably right, people are buying the tickets, people are scalping tickets and making a profit, therefore there are people willing to pay more than face for the tickets, on that basis he's right.
Doesn't make it fair, doesn't make it morally right, doesn't make it healthy for the industry.
Millionaire willing to pay higher prices for luxuries because they aren’t worried about money. How shocking.
I mean from an economics standpoint if people are willing to pay higher prices on tickets being resold then they are underpriced. The price people are willing to pay is the "true" value of the thing. Personally I think concerts are too expensive even at list prices but artists are consistently selling out venues at these prices and even higher because people are paying more for tickets on secondary markets. Obviously there are people for whom seeing Taylor Swift is actually worth over a thousand dollars, and to be honest, if that's how much it is worth to them there's not much you can do to stop them from going, and I'm not sure I even want to. I might go see Taylor Swift for $40 a ticket just for the experience but is that really worth denying it to some super fan willing to pay 10x that? I won't get nearly as much from the experience as they will, and it's obviously not worth it to me.
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The CEOs pay requires that belief of them, and so they are not free. They are in fact, yet another entrapped enemy of humanity, enmeshed as gears in a system.
Ffs man, the prices are out of control for concerts. Live Nation needs to have their monopoly broken up.
This for sure. Once they consolidated everything, they raised the ticket fees and the venue fees for artists. They charge more and most artists makes less. Live Nation is a textbook example of a monopoly fucking over the consumer.
It's 2025 and people can't boycott a company that over sells tickets, saying "I can't miss Taylor Swift".
Too many concerts are not about the music anymore, too many events are becoming overinflated. And thus overpriced.
I watched parts of a Katy Perry show on TV lately: with every song came different costumes, lights, fire and explosion effects, acrobats, lasers, smoke, vehicles, waterfalls, bubbles, confetti, inflatables, whatnot onto the stage... It was a total mess and utterly exaggerated.
Are people really all so numb that they need these extreme overstimulations to feel something?
Depends on the band. Popular trendy groups are going to have a lot of gee-whiz effects. I’ve probably been to a dozen shows over the last few years and seen zero fireworks, and the only costume change was a singer taking off a jacket after getting too hot on stage.
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Well I think he's stealing too much of our oxygen & should be stopped.
I'm so glad I feel no need to actually go to concerts.
Me too. I haven't been to a show in 10-ish years. Don't miss it at all.
This, of course, does not factor in the problem of scalpers and the hugely increased fees charged on the secondary market.
Well, if tickets for a given band are being scalped, then it's a good sign that they're probably initially selling below market rate.
No, it's a sign of an improperly regulated market.
tbh how do you regulate the ticket market to demotivate scalpers?
The same way everyone else who regulates it does it - require the ID of the purchaser to be presented upon entry. Ticketmaster/LiveNation are simply not interested in curbing scalping as they make directly money off of it. Small independent vendors have employed ID verification for a long time to stop scalping along with explicit obvious messaging that tickets cannot be resold prior to purchase.
Also add reasonable limits for the number of tickets someone can buy at a time. Being able to buy 8 tickets in one go is absolutely ridiculous.
Absolutely. And if it's a large group of people, it's not difficult to have several people buy a few tickets each.
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I think that would depend on how you define both the words market and rate.
Simply because some people are buying tickets that were scalped and sold at higher prices, doesn't mean that the scalp price is the true rate.
When you raise prices you actually change your market demographic. The more affluent you require your demographic to be, the less available customers you will have.
If tickets are bought even entirely by scalpers, then live nation is still selling every ticket they have and should therefore be able to profit. If they raise prices, there will still be scalpers but now they have more risk that there's less buyers.
Honestly though, everyone is probably better off saving money and watching local performances and giving money directly to the venue and bands.
The last time I went to a large event that was well priced, it was an insane amount of sweaty people rubbing against me for about 6 hours, most of that was spent waiting, and I got the flu afterwards. It really turned me off to large venues.
Always have been. We had a system where bands didn't make as much as they humanly could because it was generally accepted that the art of live music wasn't made just for the enjoyment of the highest bidders in society. And this is still largely true from most artists' perspective. But they aren't the one setting the prices anymore and profit maximizing, when playing in most medium-to-large venues in NA.
When they stop making bread and games available, the jig is almost up.
Aren’t Live Nation the Astroworld guys? Yeaaahh not gonna give those guys any credence whatsoever
From a purely economics standpoint, when scalpers are able to sell at a higher price, yes they are underpriced.
But doing so limits access to cultural events to only those that can afford them.
"Cultural" like the bacterial culture between my toes, maybe.
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I agree.
Charge concertgoers as much as they're willing to pay.
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