Bagging tickets to catch your favourite artist live can often feel like navigating a particularly enraging circle of hell right now.
Freom sellers’ websites crumbling under astronomical levels of traffic, touts targeting in-demand gigs and immediately flipping the goods for a huge mark-up and complicated hoops to jump through (pre-registration, ballots, and fan verification processes), just reaching the checkout feels like an effort worthy of an Olympic medal.
And once you’ve made it there, the price tags – often hidden until the very late stages – can sometimes be gasp-inducing.
None of this is anything new, and gig prices have been gradually creeping up to ridiculous prices already over the last few years, further fuelled by an increasing number of musicians – including Harry Styles, Blackpink, Coldplay, Taylor Swift, and Bruce Springsteen – all opting into dynamic pricing. Much like flights, or hotel bookings, which shift in price depending on a number of factors, the idea is that dynamic pricing is reactive to demand – and a number of ticketing sites are now embracing it.
Still, my jaw truly hit the floor when tickets for Sabrina Carpenter’s upcoming London shows rapidly hiked to well above the £200 mark.
Look, just like everybody else, I’ve been taking sip after delicious sip of Carpenter’s huge summer bop Espresso at every given chance (quite possibly because Spotify’s algorithm insists on playing it to me approximately every 10 minutes).
I’m nearly as obsessed with the country-pop influenced Please Please Please, and its brilliantly self-aware music video, starring her IRL boyfriend Barry Keoghan. The two hits have dominated the UK charts since their respective releases – at one point, they occupied number 1 and 2 at the same time.
Still, I find it remarkable that a still-emerging artist like Carpenter can command these kinds of truly wild sums. On the one hand, if there are people out there happy to hand over nigh on the price of a Glastonbury ticket or a weekend away to see an artist with a handful of hits to her name and a breakthrough album still to come, then more fool them – but I still miss the good old days, when everybody in a venue paid the same fixed price.
Some artists, it must be said, have staunchly refused to engage with dynamic pricing. Face value standing tickets to see fast-rising pop star Chappell Roan cost about £30 – those lucky enough to bag the precious goods all paid the same amount.
Ditto Charli XCX’s upcoming Brat Tour: standing tickets for her London gig at The O2 cost £45 plus booking fees. Once they were gone, they were gone. The whole thing felt fairer, and less of a cash grab. Far fewer fans were priced out as a result.
For other big names, however, it is a different story. Thanks to dynamic pricing, Billie Eilish tickets are still available, months after her UK tour went on sale, and will set you back well over £300.
A standing ticket for Dua Lipa at the same venue costs almost £220. These are both artists who just released their third albums ‒ and who will inevitably tour again in a couple of years ‒ rather than all-time greats playing special, one-off, once-in-a-lifetime concerts crammed with decades-worth of classic hits.
That might feel slightly more worth spending the big bucks on. But for a fairly bog-standard arena show, from an artist still staking their claim over a place in the history books? At this point, the whole thing is toppling over into pure greed.
