When Robson Scott, a live music fan from Newcastle, went to his first gig in 2011, he remembers paying around £30 for a standing ticket to see Katy Perry at Utilita arena. Ten years later, he says, “for arena gigs of that calibre you’d usually be paying over £65.” That’s a rise that far exceeds the UK’s rate of inflation during that time, which was 2.6% per year, on average, or the equivalent of £8.90.
A scan of current ticket prices for artists who are at the superstar level that Perry was in 2011, when she’d had a string of No 1 hits and had released her most successful album Teenage Dream a year earlier, confirms Scott’s experience. Standing tickets for Billie Eilish’s 2022 tour are around £75 for UK arena dates, for example, while Robson recently paid £89 for a standing ticket to see Harry Styles at Emirates Old Trafford.
On top of the decade-long incremental rise, there is evidence of further price increases since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Weekend adult tickets for Green Man festival are up to £210 this year from £189 in 2019, while Latitude festival is charging £227, up from £202 in 2019. The world’s largest live music promoter, Live Nation, said in its latest quarterly financial results that strong demand enabled “improved pricing”, and that the average amphitheatre or major festival ticket price had seen double-digit growth from the last pre-pandemic year.
What’s driving the increase? Greg Parmley, CEO of industry trade body LIVE, points to rising costs and shortages throughout the supply chain, which make putting on gigs and festivals more expensive than before. “From skilled crew right the way through to Portakabins and toilets, there are shortages across the UK that are driving up costs significantly. This is on top of the well-publicised wider inflationary pressures that are flowing through the economy,” he says.
Music agent Natasha Gregory, who is working on the current Idles tour (tickets for which are priced just below £30, with booking fees on top), confirms what Parmley says: “Tour-related costs are through the roof at the moment.” According to Gregory, part of that is due to requiring extra staff for Covid-related checks and cleaning; tests and visas when travelling between markets (the latter due to Brexit); an increase in venue hire fees, and having to change plans or refund tickets as a result of the evolving Covid-19 situation.
“Finally, no one has insurance for these shows, which is impossible to get against Covid,” she says. “If a tour has to be cancelled last minute, no one gets their money back. It’s a big risk for many bands, so you have to add more contingency costs.”
Green Man festival owner Fiona Stewart says her costs have risen 34.5% since 2016 against a 20% rise in ticket prices. This year, “we’ve started to see real problems with sourcing goods and services,” she says, adding that Brexit has also exacerbated issues for festivals. “A lot of the big touring infrastructure, which Britain was a world leader in, has been completely decimated. Now, because you can only make two stops if you’re a British vehicle in any European country, all those companies are moving to Europe so everything we utilise to do with infrastructure has increased in price.”
Stuart Galbraith, CEO of promoter Kilimanjaro Live, says that gig ticket prices are typically set by an artist, their agent and manager in collaboration with the promoter. Prices will take into account costs as well as supply and demand, so “if an artist chooses to go with a very high ticket price, that’s with their full knowledge,” he says. However, Adam Webb, campaign manager at FanFair Alliance, which was set up to challenge industrial-scale online ticket touting, says that demand can be distorted by the secondary ticketing market.
In the US, so-called dynamic pricing is frequently used, which is where gig ticket prices change according to demand (much like flight and hotel prices). The problem with this, says Webb, is that prices are set according to what’s in the secondary ticketing market, too, which can include non-existent and speculative tickets being sold by touts for huge markups. This practice isn’t as rampant in the UK although Webb is starting to see it creep in – an example of which can be seen in the standing ticket prices for Coldplay’s forthcoming stadium shows, which have inflated from £85 face value to over £300 (and that’s for official tickets, not ones from secondary sites).
Webb says: “As we’ve seen with numerous media reports [about] Viagogo in the UK, the big secondary websites appear to be rife with speculative listings. Consequently, using them as a benchmark for your pricing is problematic. Taking what might be a speculative listing and claiming it’s reflective of ‘demand’ or ‘market price’ is a distortion.”
Aside from the effects of dynamic pricing, Kilimanjaro promoter Galbraith does expect to see a continued hike in average ticket prices over the coming years due to increasing costs. “They will increase by necessity,” he says. “We’ve just endured two years of begging the government for subsidy and we’ve done everything we can to keep everybody’s jobs and the industry going.” Suppliers offering equipment and services for live shows, including trucking, stages, security and toilets for outdoor events, he says, “are in a seller’s market and have to maximise their income for survival.”
With the cost of living reaching its highest level in almost 30 years in December, when inflation jumped to 5.4%, while average wages have dropped, is there a risk of live music becoming elitist? “No, I don’t think there is,” says Galbraith. “There will always be hundreds of thousands of artists who want to maximise the number of people coming to see them for as little as possible.
“You could accuse superstars of driving up their ticket prices, but that’s their choice, and I do think that, at a grassroots level, for many names who progress all the way up through theatres, arenas and stadiums, we will continue to see sensibly priced tickets.”
Robson isn’t so sure: “Even with the inflated prices, I’m still going to go to gigs because music is what I live for. But working-class people are getting priced out of seeing the musicians they love.”
