Why are concert tickets so expensive?
Since his Together Together tour was announced, Harry Styles fans are feeling financial fatigue.
As with nostalgic Oasis fans faced with a sudden reunion, and the Lady Gaga following left not knowing whether to laugh or cry, the phenomenon has been recurrent. Fans are stuck choosing between not being broke or seeing their long-loved artist at a probably once-in-a-lifetime gig, and the trend doesn’t show signs of stopping.
In accordance with the release of his fourth studio album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, the Redditch-born former pop star has placed all bets on his hipster fanbase’s wallets, with tickets for his Wembley residency starting at £44.10 and ending at a whopping £466.35. Fans are rightly furious, and increasingly asking themselves the question: how much do I really like Harry Styles, especially if this is the kind of trick he’s going to pull?
Although greed is a factor, there are many explanations for the global rise in concert ticket prices. For context, a 2025 survey by Pollstar found the average US ticket price for the top 100 tours in 2024 to be $135.92, which was 41% higher than the average 2019 prices, which were $96.17. These figures are towering compared to the modest price of an average concert ticket in 1996, which was a mere $25.81. Although Covid is a factor, with global live music prices jumping up 23.3% in 2023 alone according to Pollstar, some point at dynamic ticketing.
Dynamic pricing basically drives ticket prices up when their demand increases, which means fans eager to buy their Beyoncé or Coldplay tickets as soon as the tour dates drop will find themselves clicking on the Ticket Master link at the same time as thousands of others, and to minimise their risk of losing out on a spot, will probably submit to buying it at its most expensive.
‘Dynamic pricing’ was such a hot topic after its 2024 boom that it made a strong contender for word of the year, and spurred the Australian government to announce it will be banning it altogether. The steep increase in live music costs is also representative of the radical redirection in the way that artists make money. In just a few decades, musicians went from making their revenue in vinyl and CD sales to making almost no money from the distribution of their music. Concerts were more of a promotion for the money-making product, while now, they are the bulk of the artist’s income. They’re charging more for their tickets, are on the road more often, and are making their shows more about entertainment than about the music itself.
Since shows have become such an important form of income, artists have been upping their game. “An artist will see another artist do something and say, ‘Well, they’re my competition, so I’ve got to outdo them’. So the shows get bigger and bigger,” said David Norman, a tour director veteran with names the likes of Prince, Green Day, and Alicia Keys on his tour CV. The process of incorporating lights, costumes, choreography, and emboldening the general performance of the show will have an inflationary effect on the cost of the event.
So as performances mount in their complexity, Ian McAndrew of Wildlife Entertainment, manager of Arctic Monkeys and Fontaines DC, last year explained to The Guardian that an arena show requires at least six lorries to transport all equipment, as well as a crew of about 45 people like managers, sound and lighting engineers, who also need to be transported around the world between shows.
“The actual profit won’t be as significant as you might think because the costs are quite high,” said McAndrew.
An additional factor not to be underestimated is the ticket-selling monopoly. Morgan Harper, a lawyer at the anti-monopoly American Economic Liberties Project, told Business Insider that ”Live Nation-Ticketmaster controls all the core business lines of the industry”, and that this is how the entities are able to ‘extort’ independent venues. This is why, to the sole benefit of Harry Styles fans, the generous fraction of £1 out of every ticket sold from his UK tour will go to support independent venues. It’s the thought that counts, I guess.
The dominance of the American ticket conglomerate compels acts to work with it. This power has meant that Live Nation-Ticketmaster has been able to get away with adding exceptional commission fees that don’t go to the artist or venue. A 2018 estimate from the US Government Accountability Office found that ticketing companies charged over a quarter of a ticket’s original price in fees.
Notwithstanding the mounting costs, it seems that most music enthusiasts are prioritising this expense. Even with budgets strained, “You get to a point where there are just some experiences where consumers draw the line and say, that’s not something I’m willing to give up,” Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at BankRate, told CNBC last year. The concept has been called ‘funflation’, with amusement prices rising, consumers are apparently not resisting the bill if Taylor Swift is in town.
