www.ticketnews.com: Live entertainment is booming — and so are the prices. In the third quarter of 2025, the average concert ticket cost $128.46, up 34% from the same period just six years earlier, according to Pollstar. Among the top 100 touring artists this year, the average show grossed more than $2.4 million, up 29% from a year ago.
7 comments:
I am pretty disappointed by this article's analysis. This article paints the results of the study as solely reflective of the personal and economic values each of different states' residencies hold. They describe the lowest spending states as “budget-conscious music fans” with minimal acknowledgment of the financial standing of each state. While I acknowledge the age old adage, correlation does not equal causation, can one in good conscience write this article without connecting the dots that the highest and lowest spending states directly correlates to the overall wealth of the state. I think it needs to be said that the states in the lowest spending category are all some of the poorest and most impoverished states in the US. These people are not “budget-conscious music fans” because of personal value, they are unable to spend because of their struggling economies. We cannot as a country and a society be afraid to call out the blatant wealth disparity between states and their politics. By framing this as a choice rather than as a necessity we rob these states of the discussions of wealth that need to be had.
I feel like nowadays you have to play so much more to be able to attend a concert or live event. I see any ticket more than $50 as a serious investment that I build my life/spending around to build up after a financial hit. I also think that the price has created a certain kind of culture around concerts–people have to basically fight to get into one, and it becomes a hodgepodge of “i’m a real fan I deserve to be here” and “why are you taking up tickets if you don’t care about the artist.” Also, concerts are becoming bigger productions than they used to be, so it makes sense that they’re more expensive. Still, people aren’t enthusiastic about the ticket prices. I really want to see them driven DOWN in the next few years. I hate staring down a $110 ticketmaster price and thinking, “huh, that’s not even that bad!!!”
A lot of what was mentioned in this article isn’t particularly surprising. Coastal states are spending more on live entertainment, inland states are spending less, prices are rising, et cetera, et cetera. I do think concert prices are really rising far too fast in our modern day, and I think the likely culprit may just be the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the course of the pandemic, workers who were not laid off or furloughed likely cut spending significantly as the nation locked down. As a result, demand built up as the lockdowns dragged on and live events continued to be suspended, so when concerts and theaters started back up again, there was enormous interest. Live Nation and other entities likely saw this as a window of opportunity, and raised prices across the board in order to capitalize on the wave. Unfortunately, it seems like the post pandemic era has normalized this, as prices continue to rise with seemingly no end in sight.
I wish this article went into more detail on why these numbers are what they are. I wish there was some more speculation I suppose. It's very strange to me that Virginia was the highest consumer of live concerts, considering that not many huge music festivals took place there in 2024… But I also wonder if these numbers are tickets purchased in general, or only tickets for events that took place within the states listed. Maybe it was the rise of nettspend that made Virginians inspired to see more live music. Jokes aside, an average of $446 per resident in a year is insane. It really goes to show how expensive concerts have gotten over time. I hate ticketmaster and live nation in general. Not just because of these rising numbers, but because of the amount of scams these companies perform on people. This is why it's important to support independent artists, venues, and diy events.
I didn’t know much about live entertainment spending before reading this, so it was interesting to see how dramatically prices have risen and how differently each state spends. The article does a good job presenting the numbers, but I wish it acknowledged more directly how tied these trends are to economic inequality. It feels misleading to frame some states as simply “budget-conscious” when many residents literally can’t afford rising ticket prices. The idea of “funflation” really resonates, too. Concerts have gotten so expensive that they’re almost impossible to justify unless it’s an artist you really love. It’s wild that a $110 ticket can now feel “normal.” Overall, the data is interesting, but without addressing the wealth gap behind it, the analysis feels incomplete. That said, I’m actually really interested in this topic now. It would be fun to see how live entertainment spending compares in other countries and whether they’re seeing the same trends.
The article definitely could have gone into a little bit more depth about this topic, but overall I'm not necessarily surprised that concerts bring in the most money. I definitely think a lot of this is due to the “Era's Tour effect,” where the tickets were at such ridiculous resale prices that people thought that was a normal amount of money to spend on a concert ticket. I also understand why people say Ticketmaster is a monopoly and I definitely agree with that because the fact that they can get away with being the only place that sells these tickets, and basically most of the time letting brokers get to them first just so the concert can sell out quickly is really upsetting. I wish artists paid more attention to this by either selling it on their own websites or even having some sort of verification that you're not a broker or an AI bot buying them.
This article’s analysis on the current situation with ticket prices skyrocketing seemed to be from a purely economic perspective, but it’s still a perspective that is incredibly telling and important to consider right now. Being someone aware and understanding of what goes into big concerts particularly, I’ve always found the growing prices to be more and more ridiculous in value. An average price of $128.46 is crazy, however that being said, there are some benefits or simply value to the inflated prices. For one thing, it is very much the consumer’s choice to purchase tickets for a show, and bigger artists are bound to cost more. This does in theory help smaller artists grow if people are looking for cheaper shows to go see, but that doesn’t change the fact that mainstream art has been gatekept in economic terms. I simply think that with the economy getting worse and worse, entertainment should be something that people turn to and won’t have to worry about insane prices blocking them off from, but simpler said than done.
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