Concerts are becoming more and more inaccessible: here’s why

Photo of band set up (Lauren Chavez / The Puma Prensa)

By Lauren Chavez, Features Editor

I am of the firm belief that live music should be accessible to everyone; there’s a sort of transformative power that comes along with it. It’s more than just seeing your favorite artists and hearing your favorite songs live. Live music provides a unique level of connection with humanity that is difficult to find elsewhere.

In what other setting are you able to make new friends without even learning each other’s names, where you don’t even have to have a conversation in order to connect with each other? The interactions I’ve had with the people around me at concerts are some of the most special moments to me, and I hold the friends I’ve made at live shows especially close to my heart. There’s a degree of non-explanation, because for most people, the music they listen to is a direct reflection of the type of person they are and the way they view themselves and the world. When people have the same connection to an artist or an album or song, it’s an unspoken dialogue in which they simply understand that they’ve experienced the same emotions. Even if the experience that caused those emotions is different, what’s shared is the feelings that resulted and the mutual understanding of lyrics or whatever else makes the song or piece of music special. 

As the live music industry continues to evolve, it’s understandable that there will be changes made to ticket prices, means of getting tickets, and concert experiences in general. Life only continues to grow more expensive, and artists are still humans who need to make a living, after all. Most artists rely solely on revenue from ticket sales now, instead of relying on record sales, and now use tour sales as nothing more than a booster. 

Because our world is so heavily dependent on online streaming, it’s more difficult to make a living by simply releasing music and having people stream it instead of going out to physically buy a copy of the album. However, in recent years, the level of accessibility that regular people have to concerts has completely tanked, and for a lot of concertgoers who are used to going to multiple shows a year, the hobby is beginning to look less and less feasible.

There are a multitude of reasons why it has become so difficult to attain concert tickets. The world's leading ticket sales and distribution company that supplies over 500 million event tickets a year, Ticketmaster, has increasingly found itself under fire in recent years for its methods of getting tickets into the hands of fans. As scalpers (people who buy face-value tickets and resell them for much higher prices) and bots grow more and more common, it’s become a real struggle for genuine fans of an artist to obtain fairly priced tickets without feeling like they went through war. 

In an attempt to combat this, Ticketmaster uses a presale system that allows fans to sign up through a certain date to be sent a code or a link that leads to the queue of the show they signed up for. Following this sale is a general sale a few days later, which is accessible to everyone else, and the company states that they keep a selection of tickets aside for the general sale. However, most fans have found that most of, if not all of the tickets, are sold during the presale, and there are little to none available during the general sale. It’s been pointed out that it’s not really a “pre” sale, or exclusive in any way, if everyone can sign up and have access to the sale. It becomes a game of luck, as fans are forced to sign up with multiple accounts and pray for a good spot in the queue, which is the only way that there’s even a chance to be let into the sale and get tickets.

Alongside this major problem, there’s also the issue of ticket prices in general. Setting aside the issues with getting into a sale, there’s an increasing problem where most regular, everyday people trying to attend a concert cannot afford even the nosebleeds. Floor seats, which typically ranged from $20-$50 in the 1990s, are now priced as high as $1,100 for some artists (Harry Styles, BTS), and nosebleeds, which, in the 90s, were around $15, are difficult to find below $150-$200 nowadays. These prices simply aren’t reasonable for the average person who simply wants to see their favorite artist live, and although it becomes easier when you’re a regular concert attendee who budgets for concerts and spends a lot of their money on live shows, this isn’t feasible for most people and shouldn’t be necessary. Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation in 2010, which has been incredibly controversial as this seems to be the reason why ticket prices have risen so much. 

Artists also have a choice to either turn on dynamic pricing (automatically adjusted prices during a sale due to factors like levels of demand, making ticket prices even more unreasonably expensive) or keep it off, and many have opted to keep it on or include “platinum” seats sprinkled among regular ones that have no difference from normal tickets aside from being incredibly overpriced. Because artists–and scalpers–know that there is such high demand for shows and that people will continue to pay these prices, they continue to increase them. The issue isn’t that people aren’t going to shows anymore, it’s that the people behind the shows have become smarter and more knowledgeable about supply and demand, and have utilized this to make as much money as possible now that physical music isn’t selling nearly as much as it was 30 years ago. 

Something that many fans have noticed are the subtle tactics that artists or their teams will use in order to glean more ticket sales, such as announcing a tour only a few days before tickets go on sale and usually months before the album being toured even comes out. This forces people to panic-buy expensive tickets before they even know if the album is something they want to hear live or not. Sales also take place at the same time, placing massive amounts of people in the queue at the same time and causing website glitches, crashes, and unnecessary frustration.

While it’s difficult to completely solve this problem, as a major factor in it is the natural evolution of the music industry and the way the world’s economy and entertainment industry works, there are some ways to help tickets get into the hands of fans more easily. Dynamic pricing should be turned off for every artist, no matter their level of fame, which would very quickly solve the problem of high prices in normal ticket sales. Aside from this, instead of a system in which anyone can sign up for presales, a system such as Verified Fan (which used to be very common but is now being phased out by Ticketmaster) should be put in place more often, so only a select number of fans are chosen to access the queues. Many artists are beginning to implement services where tickets can’t be sold for higher prices than face value on Ticketmaster, but there should be something like that in place on third-party platforms such as Stubhub and Seatgeek as well. These things may seem small, but they could make a tremendous impact on concert accessibility.

Live music shouldn’t be a privilege, and it is something that I believe is essential for everyone to enjoy, no matter what their financial situation is or no matter what unlucky place they get in a queue. As the music industry continues to evolve, I hope a world emerges in which anyone who wants to experience the magic of live music can.