Gigs and concerts

[Ironic Indie Lad]

Genuinely hilarious prices.

Best case scenario is that I dont get tickets, save the money, the concert is a shambles and I pretend I never wanted to go anyway.

That way EVERYBODY wins*

*Except those who attend

[SuperBacon]

This has to stop, but just like football prices, it won't as there will always be people willing to pay. 

Its quite frankly pathetic from the artists. 

[Merzbow]

Rumor has it that there might a cool tiny little hardcore punk and harsh noise gig on in the city on the same night for a fiver or so *cough*

[SuperBacon]

Just now, Merzbow said:

Rumor has it that there might a cool tiny little hardcore punk and harsh noise gig on in the city on the same night for a fiver or so *cough*

Jacked Sabbath.

[Ironic Indie Lad]

It honestly feels like the higher the price, the higher the demand. 

I just wouldn't have been able to go to gigs very often when I was younger if prices were the way they are now.

I can vividly remember Metallica announcing their first Arena tour over here in ages back in 2008. I still have my ticket for that, £40 it was. I can remember thinking that it was pretty pricey by the standards of the time. By the time they did another run of indoor gigs in 2017 it was about £100.

If they played the Hydro, o2, Co-Op etc in 2025 It would easily be £200+ a ticket but you would join the queue and have 50,000 people in front of you.

 

[King Coconut]

1 hour ago, SuperBacon said:

This has to stop, but just like football prices, it won't as there will always be people willing to pay. 

Its quite frankly pathetic from the artists. 

They don't make money from music sales anymore so I say good luck to them. Lars did warn us.

[WyattSheepMask]

1 hour ago, SuperBacon said:

This has to stop, but just like football prices, it won't as there will always be people willing to pay. 

Its quite frankly pathetic from the artists. 

Thats the thing though isn’t it? As long as there are people willing to pay, it’s not going to stop.

It’s why KISS allowed people to watch the sound check for a small fee, and why so many acts do ‘VIP Upgrades’ to shows, which usually amounts to nothing more than early entrance and a lanyard. It’s “How can we maximise every dollar from a show?”, and people pay it for reasons I’ll never quite understand. Look at the Oasis situation last year, people were up in arms about the price of those tickets, but they still paid it. 

Metallica are one of my absolute favourite bands, but even I skipped the last tour over here because of the prices, and that was 8 years ago before the pandemic. I didn’t want to feel like I was being taken advantage of, so I voted with my wallet and stayed home.
 

[CTXRussomark]

5 minutes ago, King Coconut said:

They don't make money from music sales anymore so I say good luck to them. Lars did warn us.

This is a fair point.  I've never done the maths but I do wonder how much money I personally save on no longer buying albums vs how much extra I now pay on gig tickets.  It's undoubtedly more weighted towards the latter but it's impossible to say how much of that is compensating for lost music sales vs increased cost of touring/general profiteering.  I think what makes it feel even worse was the in-between stage around 10 years ago where bands were probably slightly behind the curve on how streaming was changing everything, and so were still touring with fairly reasonable ticket prices whilst also eating the impact of reduced physical sales. 

[BomberPat]

the Sabbath gig is for charity (though how that will work out as a percentage of the gate is anyone's guess), so maybe slightly outside of that. But yeah, they'll keep charging people for as long as people keep paying it, and for as long as bands keep charging it. There are acts who refuse to allow dynamic pricing, and who cap their tickets at certain prices (I was able to get tickets to see Paul Heaton at the O2 for £35 an hour before the show, because he refuses to charge more), but the majority will take what they can get. There's a tipping point somewhere, but if people continue to pay it, they'll continue to charge it.

I don't buy that it's all about lost record sales, though. Lost sales have got bands touring more, or doing more gimmicky tours (playing a classic album etc.), but it's not a decline in record sales that's making Ticketmaster hike their prices up, or venues take more and more of a cut of everything.

[The Curious Orange]

12 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

I don't buy that it's all about lost record sales, though.

I reckon a big factor was ebay 15-20 years ago made it easy to see just how many people would buy tickets that were being sold on there for way above the actual ticket price - and promoters realizing they could get away with charging loads more if the demand was there.

[Ironic Indie Lad]

Re-sellers have shown just much people are willing to pay to see their favourite artists.

The major artists are big enough that there are enough people willing to pay a premium. Clearly this outweighs the people who opt to just sit it out. I dont think there has ever been a tour quite like Taylor Swift Era's tour in my lifetime. The prices were absolutely ludicrous and yet she was able to do multiple nights in every city in major stadiums. She probably could have put the prices up by £100, added another ten dates at Wembley and still sold it out. 

We also live at a time where the prices fluctuate. As far as I know this was never a thing in the past. The price was the price unless they did like a 2 for 1 deal to shift the remaining tickets or whatever. They can be through the roof during the initial frenzy and then, if there's any left unsold, they just lower the prices. I didn't want to pay what Tool were asking a couple of years back. I just happened to check Ticketmaster a few days before the Manchester date and got a heavily reduced platinum ticket that felt like I was practically sitting on the stage. 

Its a bit of an internal battle for me.

Using Metallica (again) as an example. I remember when the 2017 Arena tour was announced and it was approximately £100 for the Glasgow date for floor or decent lower tier seats. I was thinking its greedy, I have seen them plenty, I will sit this one out, I just cant break that triple digit barrier for tickets etc. Closer to the on sale and the idea of missing out starts to feel worse than parting with the cash.

 

[Dead Mike]

1 hour ago, BomberPat said:

 

I don't buy that it's all about lost record sales, though. Lost sales have got bands touring more, or doing more gimmicky tours (playing a classic album etc.), but it's not a decline in record sales that's making Ticketmaster hike their prices up, or venues take more and more of a cut of everything.

There was a great BBC documentary a few years ago about the music industry & 1 of the episodes was about touring & the relationship between lost record sales & bands being forced to tour more to keep up the lifestyles they’ve become accustomed to. It mostly covered The Police, Fleetwood Mac & Metallica. Tallica’s manager Peter Mensch basically said that for years & years they’d undervalued their ticket price & made the conscious decision to pretty much double them ahead of the ‘Hardwired to Self Destruct’ tour. They didn’t notice any dip in sales.

Ticketmaster are little more a convenient scapegoat. They have no influence on ticket prices or allocations & this is all controlled by the artist. The fact that they’re owned by Live Nation doesn’t help the matter & the practice of giving reseller sites direct allocations of tickets before they’ve even gone on sale to Joe Public is dodgy in the extreme but it’s being done with the knowledge of artists & management to boost fees without attracting the ire of the fans.

This Sabbath gig has been on the news worldwide, there’ll be people traveling from the US & Europe so demand is going to be absolutely ridiculous. I wonder how many people originally planning on going to Download have sacked that off in favour of this?

[Panhead]

I was talking with my friends the other day about possibly going for Sabbath tickets but I can't justify that price. 

I did however get a ticket for Scowl in Manchester for £20. 

[WyattSheepMask]

So a mate of mine got a ticket for the Sabbath show in one of the presales.

He sent me this as he had a look at the ‘VIP- Side of Stage’ ticket out of morbid curiosity 

[organizedkaos]

Combination of multiple things innit.

The rise of Spotify has cut into the earnings of smaller acts (along with general changes to how record labels work / contracts are given out). This combined with the increase in venue costs (due to standard cost of living) has bumped up prices for many smaller gigs.

Bigger acts are making some money of sales but I guess are probably still earning less because now people give their money to Daniel Eck rather than the musicians. Combination of them wanting more money and the fact the smaller gig prices going up have created a sort of inflation. Also, greed.

Then you have Ticketmaster and the like who also parasite the industry taking increasingly larger cuts of the money that should go to artists.  However as others said, they've been around for a bit and people haven't stopped buying tickets in favour of supporting the military industrial complex and streaming records like they have actual music