Why Do Concert Tickets Cost So Much?

In 1978, I was really put out at having to pay $8 to see the Eagles. Everyone knew that concert tickets were $5 and had been for years. Less than 50 years later, you could easily pay 100 times that much to see your favorite musical artist perform. And there's plenty of blame to go around. For one thing, there are lot more people now, wanting to see a limited number of touring artists. Even at the largest venues, an astonishing number of tickets are reserved for fan clubs, sponsors or their clients, and VIPs, which make retail tickets even more scarce than they appear. Then there are fees added. Then there's the infrastructure that allots tickets, which is expensive even when it works. Buying tickets online with a credit card opens up the system to all sorts of abuses that didn't work so well when you had to visit a box office to buy a paper ticket. Scalpers use the latest tech to bypass the safeguards that make ticket buying difficult for fans. The ease of making tons of money for nothing mean that scalpers are extremely hard to thwart. Read how the modern ticket-selling system works to hoover up your money at Vox.