this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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Man I miss when concerts and events weren't just for rich kids and people with disposable incomes. I remember going to see Metallica, $40 mid tier tickets. I saw AC DC for about the same. Rob zombie with Ozzy Osbourne. I even saw a WrestleMania for like $80 and that was a lot then for great seats.
Now concert tickets for Metallica are running $400-500 mid tier each. Even smaller bands and events are more than what a premium event used to cost. The development League hockey games cost more than the NHL games used to. Working class people have been priced out.
One of my family members paid something like 60 € to see Michael Jackson in the 90s. I still remember how back then, I thought "what an outrageous price tag."
I paid $25 to listen to Power Trip inside of someone's house.
It was one of the best and insane concerts I ever went to.
Metallica? I dunno, man. Maybe? Thing is, they, like Pink Floyd, have bucket-list status.
If you're gonna see them before you die, you're gonna pay for it. They know they're established, influential, and huge, and they can basically charge whatever they want.
Still, tho. I'd rather pay $30 to go see The Melvins and get my face melted off by Buzz and his two drummers.
I get 15-20 dollar tickets to concerts by bands I love fairly often, personally. It definitely depends a bit what kind of music you're in to, and probably what part of the country you live in, but cheap concerts are still out there.
Did you notice they mentioned pretty huge bands that bring in tens of thousands of people? Yeah, these groups don't do shows where the tickets are 15-20$, but what's fucked up is that they did back in the 90s when they pulled in even bigger crowds. So what has changed for their tickets to be 10x (or more) as expensive as 30 years ago? Ticketmaster.
15-20$ in my area might get you symphony type concerts, but not one of their good ones. I could also pay the cover at a bar that has a live band. The smallest venues near me are still 50+ per ticket.
I think the disconnect here is to me and the guy you're replying to, that's still a show/concert/whatever you wanna call it, but since a band like Julie isn't as big as Metallica, they play the venues metallica used to play in '84, while Metallica is an arena act now. A concert doesn't have to be in a theater or arena, that "cover" is the ticket price. Like see this show here at The Middle East downstairs in Cambridge MA, https://www.mideastoffers.com/tm-event/czarface-ocelot/ you're not just paying $30 to get in, you're paying $30 for an advanced ticked to see Czarface (who fucking rules btw), $35 day of show.
Unless you mean some shitty cover band nobody knows the name of in a bar nobody wants them in, in that case my mistake, bars around here don't charge a cover for that they basically use it to beg for customers. I hate it, I wanted to drink with my friends and talk not "SURPRISE! Bad Barenaked ladies and Eve6 covers for 4 hours!"
You know what, you have a good point, all the bars around me I looked at don't charge a cover. Theres probably some decent bands in the downtown area near me that are up and coming but my city is no Nashville.
You might be surprised! There's really good local bands in just about every city (even small ones) depending on your music tastes and even the small bands tour! Sometimes I'll just go to the venue's site (like The Middle East) and look at their calendar, and if they have a band that sparks my interest I've never heard of I'll listen to a song, if I like it I'll go (if I can).
While Nashville was at it's peak you also had Knoxville for the outlaw stuff and Buck Owens was pioneering the Bakersfield sound in CA, and that's just country, Nashville ain't the only town that knows how to strum a guitar! Lol
😲
And here I thought 80 EUR for GNR was too much.
Let's be real, GNR aren't really in their prime....
Neither is Metallica. That's not how this works, isn't it? People come because they know the band name, remember good old songs, and so on.
GNR doesn't have any concerts right now, so I can only use this data: https://www.rateyourseats.com/tickets/guns-n-roses
That's still much more expensive than 80 EUR (which includes taxes).
I suppose you have a point. ACDC just finished a tour and it was also sold out. I just didn't think GNR were ever that big in the first place but I'm not the target market
Pro Tip: A vacation + going to a concert there may be cheaper depending on the band.
Just basic supply/demand... plus a little bit of elasticity and profit max.
Or Ticketmaster monopoly.
Yeah, im the only supplier.
Supply and demand.
I think revenues also shifted from selling music to using cheap music to sell concerts.
You mean pretty much free music.
Actually a good point.
I saw AC/DC twice for about 60 bucks each and though it was craaaazy expensive, because most shows i went to were like 5-10 bucks. I'm not even a big AC fan, i just thought back then that it's probably the last opportunity to see them. They played with the offspring which i'm also not crazy about, but now that would ve an insane lineup for that kind of money.
Only like 10 or 15 years later there was a similar opportunity with iron maiden i think. I asked a friend to get tickets, but then it was already that if you didn't buy them the millisecond they went on sale, they were bought up by bots.
I paid $3.50 to see a band a few months. Granted, I got a discount but the tickets were about $25 regular.
In my area at least, affordable concert tickets are still a thing. I see something like $30-60 for most acts, provided they're not mega-popular like Metallica or Taylor Swift. If we look at inflation vs, say, 1995, we should expect things to cost about twice as much, and that seems to pretty much right (e.g. a $20 ticket in 1995 would be a little over $40 today). I went to a Dashboard Confessional concert in the early 2000s, and I think it was something like $40, so today I'd expect that to be $80. I see Dropkick Murphy's tickets (I think similar popularity?) for something like $60-70, which is about right. And before you get into income discussions, wages have been beating inflation (this graph is from COVID, longer term has a similar trend), with the main exception being the year and a half or so of massive inflation.
So I don't think tickets have necessarily gotten more expensive relative to inflation, they've always been kind of expensive. What does seem to have changed is the price ceiling for events seem to have gone up substantially. I don't think I had ever seen single-ticket prices go as high as current Taylor Swift tickets go for, so it seems people are more willing to pay a premium than they were before.
I pretty much only go see local bands play now. Like fuck am I paying 200 bucks to see a live concert.