11 min read
Last year, I tried to buy tickets to see a mid-tier indie band at a 3,000-seat venue. Face value was $65. By the time I got through the queue, the only tickets left were $120 each after fees. I checked StubHub out of curiosity: same seats, $95. The resale market was cheaper than buying direct. Something is fundamentally broken.
If you’ve bought a concert ticket in the last five years, you’ve probably had a similar experience. The sticker shock, the mysterious fees, the queue that somehow has 2,000 people ahead of you even though you clicked the link the second tickets went on sale. It all feels designed to extract maximum money from fans while providing minimum transparency about where that money goes.
I spent a few months digging into how concert ticket pricing actually works – talking to venue operators, reading industry reports, and following the money. What I found is both more complicated and more frustrating than I expected.
The Ticketmaster Problem Is Bigger Than You Think
You can’t talk about concert tickets without talking about Ticketmaster, and you can’t talk about Ticketmaster without talking about Live Nation. The two companies merged in 2010, creating a vertically integrated giant that controls ticketing, promotion, venue operation, and artist management across a huge swath of the live entertainment industry.
Live Nation Entertainment owns or operates over 300 venues worldwide. They promote approximately 40,000 shows per year. And Ticketmaster processes tickets for the vast majority of major concert venues in the United States. This means one company often controls the venue where the show happens, promotes the show, and sells the tickets to the show. The conflicts of interest are obvious.
The Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation in 2024, alleging the company used its monopoly power to stifle competition, inflate prices, and lock venues into exclusive contracts. The DOJ’s complaint detailed how Live Nation allegedly threatened to withhold top artists from venues that used competing ticketing platforms. For years, critics and lawmakers had been pushing for exactly this kind of action.
But here’s what most people miss: even if the government successfully breaks up Live Nation and Ticketmaster, it won’t necessarily make tickets cheaper. The pricing problems run deeper than one company’s market dominance.
The competitive field for ticketing platforms is thin. AXS, owned by AEG (the second-largest live entertainment company), handles ticketing for AEG-owned venues. DICE has carved out a niche in smaller markets with a no-resale, mobile-only model. SeatGeek has signed some notable venue partnerships. But none of these alternatives come close to Ticketmaster’s scale, and venue operators often have limited choices because of the bundled deals Live Nation offers: use our ticketing platform, and we’ll bring you better touring acts. According to Billboard’s industry analysis, this bundling strategy is the primary mechanism through which Live Nation maintains its market position.
How a Ticket’s Price Is Actually Set
Let’s trace the economics of a $100 concert ticket. This is roughly how the money breaks down for a typical arena show, though the exact splits vary by artist, venue, and deal structure.
The artist and their team (manager, agent, label) typically receive 60-85% of the face value after venue costs. The venue takes its cut for operations, staff, and overhead. The promoter (often Live Nation) takes a percentage for marketing, risk, and logistics. And then there are the fees.
Those fees are where things get interesting. A “service fee” of $15-30 per ticket. A “facility charge” of $3-5. An “order processing fee” of $5-8. Sometimes a “delivery fee” even for digital tickets. By the time you check out, a $100 face-value ticket often costs $130-145.
Who gets those fees? It varies. Ticketmaster keeps some. The venue gets a cut of the facility charge. And here’s the part that would surprise most fans: artists often receive a portion of the service fees too. The fee structure is partly a way to advertise a lower face value while the total price is significantly higher. Everyone involved has an incentive to keep the system opaque.
Dynamic Pricing: The Practice Everyone Hates
Dynamic pricing is the practice of adjusting ticket prices in real time based on demand. If a show is selling fast, prices go up. If it’s selling slow, they might come down. Airlines and hotels have done this for decades. Ticketmaster introduced it to concerts at scale, and fans absolutely hate it.
The Taylor Swift Eras Tour debacle in 2022 was the moment dynamic pricing became a mainstream controversy. Fans reported seeing ticket prices jump from $400 to over $5,000 while they were waiting in the queue. The outrage was immediate and massive, prompting a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing where Ticketmaster executives were grilled about their practices.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about dynamic pricing: from a pure economics standpoint, it makes sense. If 500,000 people want 50,000 tickets, the market-clearing price is far above face value. Without dynamic pricing, that surplus value goes to scalpers instead of artists and venues. Dynamic pricing is, in theory, an attempt to capture value that would otherwise flow to the secondary market.
The problem is that “economically rational” and “fair to fans” are not the same thing. When someone who’s been a fan for twenty years can’t afford to see their favorite artist because an algorithm decided that demand justified $800 floor seats, the economic argument feels hollow. These demand-driven pricing algorithms work similarly to the algorithms that decide what news you see online – opaque systems optimizing for engagement and revenue rather than fairness. Music has a cultural and emotional dimension that doesn’t fit neatly into supply-and-demand curves.
The Resale Market Is a Feature, Not a Bug
The secondary ticket market (StubHub, Vivid Seats, SeatGeek) is worth roughly $15 billion in North America. That’s an enormous amount of money flowing through resale channels, and it exists because of the gap between face value and what the market will actually bear.
Professional scalpers and ticket brokers use bots and multiple accounts to buy large quantities of tickets at face value, then immediately list them at markups of 200-500% or more. Despite laws against bot purchasing in many states, enforcement is minimal and the practice continues largely unimpeded.
What’s less well known is that artists, venues, and even Ticketmaster itself participate in the resale market. Ticketmaster operates its own resale platform. Some artists hold back a percentage of tickets from the initial on-sale and release them later at higher prices through “platinum” or “official resale” channels. According to reporting by the FTC, the lack of transparency around ticket holds and allocations makes it nearly impossible for consumers to know how many tickets were ever available at face value in the first place.
In my experience covering this industry, the single biggest source of fan frustration is this lack of transparency. If only 30% of a venue’s tickets are available to the general public at face value (with the rest allocated to presales, credit card holds, VIP packages, and artist/promoter holds), fans deserve to know that upfront.
The resale market also creates perverse incentives for venue operators and promoters. If a significant percentage of ticket revenue flows through resale platforms anyway, there’s less pressure to make the primary market work efficiently. Some industry insiders have told me, off the record, that the resale market is essentially tolerated because the alternative – enforcing non-transferable tickets across the board – would create massive customer service headaches and alienate fans who legitimately can’t attend a show they bought tickets for months ago.
Why Artists Don’t Just Charge Fair Prices
You might wonder why artists don’t simply price tickets at what the market will bear and eliminate the resale problem entirely. Some do. But most face a genuinely difficult tension between maximizing revenue and maintaining their relationship with fans.
An artist who prices floor seats at $800 because that’s what the secondary market would charge gets accused of being greedy. An artist who prices them at $150 gets to look fan-friendly while scalpers pocket the difference. Neither outcome is great, and artists are caught in the middle.
There’s also the touring cost problem. Putting on a major tour is staggeringly expensive. Production costs for an arena tour can run $500,000 to $1 million per show. Add in crew salaries, transportation, insurance, venue fees, and marketing, and an artist needs to sell a lot of expensive tickets just to break even. For many artists, touring has become the primary revenue stream as recorded music income has declined – largely because of the streaming services that now dominate music and video consumption – which puts even more financial pressure on ticket pricing.
Some artists have tried creative approaches. Kid Rock did a $20 ticket tour. Garth Brooks capped his ticket prices. Pearl Jam famously fought Ticketmaster in the 1990s. But these are exceptions, and they typically only work for artists with enough leverage and willingness to sacrifice some revenue for principle.
The Verified Fan Experiment
Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program was supposed to help. The idea is straightforward: fans register in advance, prove they’re real people (not bots), and get priority access to purchase tickets. In theory, this should reduce bot purchases and ensure more tickets go to actual fans.
In practice, the results have been mixed. Verified Fan does reduce bot activity to some degree. But it also creates a pre-sale mechanism that can feel exclusive and opaque. Being “verified” doesn’t guarantee you can buy tickets – it just gets you into the queue. And once you’re in the queue, dynamic pricing can still push prices far above face value.
The Fee Transparency Problem
One of the most achievable reforms – and one that’s finally gaining traction – is all-in pricing. This means showing the total price including all fees upfront, instead of advertising a base price and adding fees at checkout.
The FTC issued a proposed rule on “junk fees” that would require upfront pricing in live event ticketing. Several states have passed or proposed similar legislation. Ticketmaster actually experimented with all-in pricing for a while before reverting, claiming that showing higher upfront prices led to lower conversion rates. In other words, people bought fewer tickets when they saw the real price from the start. That tells you everything about how the current system works.
All-in pricing won’t make tickets cheaper. It will make the true cost visible, which is a different but important thing. When you know a ticket actually costs $145 instead of seeing $100 and getting surprised at checkout, you can make a more informed decision about whether it’s worth it.
The comparison to airline tickets is instructive. The airline industry went through its own “junk fee” reckoning and eventually adopted all-in pricing for base fares (though baggage and seat selection fees remain controversial). The transition was bumpy, but consumers adapted quickly, and comparison shopping became much easier. There’s no good reason the same approach wouldn’t work for concert tickets, except that the current opacity benefits the companies selling them.
Another transparency issue: the presale system. Before tickets go on general sale, a significant chunk of inventory gets allocated to credit card presales (Amex, Chase, Citi all have deals with promoters), fan club presales, venue presales, radio station presales, and VIP packages. By the time the “general on-sale” happens, the best seats are often already gone. Fans show up at 10:00 AM sharp, ready to buy, and find that the front sections are already sold out. The general on-sale isn’t really “general” in any meaningful sense.
What Would Actually Fix This
There’s no single solution to the concert ticket pricing mess because it’s the result of multiple overlapping problems: market concentration, demand that exceeds supply for popular acts, misaligned incentives, and a secondary market that profits from inefficiency.
A few reforms would help. Breaking up the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger would restore some competition to the ticketing market. Mandatory all-in pricing would give consumers real price transparency. Stricter enforcement of bot laws would make it harder for professional scalpers to operate. Non-transferable tickets tied to ID would kill the resale market but would also create legitimate problems for people who need to sell tickets they can’t use.
The harder truth is that for truly popular artists, there will always be more demand than supply. No policy can change the fact that millions of people want to see Taylor Swift and there are only so many arena seats. The question is who captures the surplus value: the artist, the ticketing company, or the scalper. Right now, the answer is “all three, and the fan pays for it.”
Blockchain-based ticketing has been floated as a technological solution. The pitch is appealing: put tickets on a blockchain, make them non-duplicable, limit resale to authorized channels, and let artists set maximum resale prices with smart contracts. In practice, blockchain ticketing hasn’t gained meaningful traction. The technology adds complexity without solving the fundamental supply-demand imbalance, and the environmental concerns around some blockchain implementations created PR headaches. A few companies, like GET Protocol and YellowHeart, are trying, but adoption remains minimal.
The most promising approach I’ve seen is what some call “slow ticketing” – releasing tickets in smaller batches over an extended period instead of a single high-pressure on-sale date. This spreads demand across multiple sales windows, reduces the incentive for scalpers (who need to buy everything at once), and gives fans multiple chances to purchase. A few festivals have adopted this model with good results, but it requires patience from both artists and fans.
How to Spend Less on Tickets Right Now
While the systemic issues work themselves out (slowly, if ever), here are practical strategies that have saved me real money on concert tickets.
First, buy tickets on Tuesday or Wednesday the week of the show. Secondary market prices drop significantly as the event approaches because sellers would rather get something than nothing. I’ve consistently gotten 30-40% discounts by waiting until the last few days.
Second, check the venue box office directly. Some venues still sell tickets at their physical box offices without the online service fees. It’s inconvenient, but saving $30 per ticket on a pair of tickets is worth a trip.
Third, follow artists directly on social media. Many artists release small batches of tickets or announce special presales through their own channels. These tickets are often at face value without the platform markups.
Fourth, consider less popular shows. I’ve had some of my best concert experiences seeing mid-level acts at smaller venues where tickets are $25-40. The intimacy of a 500-person venue often beats the spectacle of an arena show, and you can actually see the performers without a screen.
The concert ticket market is a mess, and it’s going to stay messy for a while. But understanding how the system actually works puts you in a better position to make smart purchasing decisions instead of just getting frustrated every time you try to buy tickets. Before your next purchase, use an ROI calculator to figure out what you’re actually spending per hour of live entertainment compared to other options. Know when to buy, where to look, and what you’re actually paying for. It won’t fix the industry, but it’ll fix your wallet.
