As the cost of living crisis continues to bite, you might be hoping to find some escapism through the good old world of popular culture. Perhaps you can while away your financial worries with a bit of live music? Well, about that …
Gigs, it seems, have never been more expensive. Every week there seems to be a fresh wave of outrage over the cost of seeing a blue-chip artist do their thing in person. First there was Bruce Springsteen, whose US tour tickets were going – in some cases – for several thousand pounds, prompting fan fury and a flurry of newspaper comment pieces (never underestimate how many journalists love the Boss!) Then there was the Glastonbury price rise, rising from £265 in 2019 to £335 for next year’s festival. (Glasto defenders argue that that figure is pretty reasonable to see thousands of bands across five days – and the festival certainly hasn’t had a problem shifting them.)
Now, Taylor Swift fans are readying themselves for wallet-shredding prices for The Eras Tour, Swift’s first stadium run since 2018. Tickets for the US leg go on sale next week, starting at a reasonable $49, rising to $449 with VIP packages and topping out at just shy of $900. But those fees don’t take into account the dreaded “dynamic pricing” model used by distribution monster Ticketmaster, which was responsible for sending Springsteen’s ticket prices into the stratosphere, and which will probably do similar for Swift’s tour too.
Dynamic pricing – a phrase that, following the rule of frequency illusion, I was unfamiliar with until fairly recently, but now seems to follow me around like a particularly determined wasp – is nothing new for anyone who has booked a flight or ran the gauntlet to get a ticket for one of Avanti’s horribly overcrowded trains. But, until recently, the world of live performance seemed to have escaped its clutches. Now though, with promoters and venues chasing lost profits from the pandemic, it is cropping up more and more. Harry Styles and Joni Mitchell fans have both recently been victims of it, and those rising ticket costs have prompted calls for Ticketmaster to be investigated by the US Department of Justice (truly the 90s are here again). Ticketmaster, for their part, claim that dynamic pricing provides a safeguard against resale websites and touts – though consumers might struggle to tell the difference when it’s costing them four figures either way.
What is striking is that these wild prices seem to be largely restricted to the top end of the market. For small to mid tier gigs, prices – while certainly higher than they were a few years ago – seem to have risen at a slow and steady rate rather than going bananas. For example, if you wanted to see Working Mens Club – a pretty solid example of a mid-tier band (and a pretty great one to boot) – at Manchester Academy, it would set you back a not-horrendous £19. It’s those top tier artists – hugely in-demand, offering up grand, spectacular live performances (and, in the case of Bruce and Joni, possibly not likely to be performing for that much longer) – for whom fans are likely to see themselves (dynamically) priced out.
The solution then is simple. Go and see smaller, less pricey bands! Better still, go and see a band for free – there’s tons of venues across the country putting on gratis gigs every night. (I’m a big fan of Blondies, the east London dive bar in a former Cash Converters that is barely bigger than a corridor but somehow manages to squeeze in a load of great punk and metal bands without charging a penny.) OK, it might not be the pyrotechnic spectacular of Taylor Swift in a stadium – unless you count blown amps as pyrotechnics – but you might encounter the next big thing … and save yourself a fortune in the process.
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