My favorite rock band of all time, Rush, will be playing two dates within an hour's drive in June.

The cheapest seat is $265 and way off to the side.

More focused seats are more than $400.

There's no way I can go to this.

... a ticket to top tier rock act cost, at most, about ten bucks. Of course, you had to take a trip to the Orange Julius to buy it - nothing was on line.

In todays dollar's, that would be about $80. Ticket Master (according to trial testimony) is getting about 5% of the ticket prices, so even if the ticket service was free, you would be paying $250 to $380 bucks. That's $170 to $300 bucks over the 1970 pricing.

I wonder what's going on? Has Rock-n-Roll gotten THAT much better???

Purchasing a tape or CD back in the day gave a lot to the artists and wore out and lost quality over time so you would repeat a purchase of your favorite later. Now...not so much in the download age and keeping backups from hard drives to the cloud. So, the artists started touring a lot more and demanding higher ticket prices. Irony, many of them don't want to tour that much, but are sandwiched between times of excess spending when physical media gave them better royalties which have dwindled to a trickle to finishing a tour and start planning the next one.

Live Nation and scalpers have also taken an advantage of this by adding fee's that make Las Vegas strip casino's blush. And did nothing to fix it.

Newer artists are better prepared and don't have to adjust, however, that is the business model now and only a few make the major bucks. Either lots of tours or expensive "residency" contracts. If you ask me, that's why we have a drought on creativity, they simply don't have the time to invest in it as it once was. The industry is basically killing itself and losing on this monopoly challenge will probably a good thing for them. They will finally have to address the challenges.

Ticketmaster and Live Nation allow 'brokers" (i.e. scalpers) to purchase large amounts of tickets and then turn around and sell them for huge markups, while the ticket companies earn commissions and fees twice.


https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/ftc-sues-live-nation-ticketmaster-scalpers-1235430610/

and didn't result in lower prices as was promised???

Who could have seen that coming?

For NFL games, single and season ticket buyers are now forced through Ticketmaster (an NFL official partner) where buyers cannot even print out barcoded entry documents anymore. It reached all the way to the high school level here in Pennsylvania until a law was passed mandating schools offer cash ticket sales for game entry. Haven't seen any fans use online tickets at all this year, saving themselves a couple bucks in the process.