Music for me but not for Thee!

A moment in pop-culture history that always wows me is Kurt Cobain’s reaction to ticket pricing. In an interview circa 1993, the pricing of Madonna's concert tickets at $50 dollars gets brought up, which is met with shock from Kurt and the other Nirvana bandmates. I’m often brought back to this moment; in a world of Ticketmaster, resellers and corporate greed it’s almost impossible to think that things weren’t always this way.  

There’s an urban legend that if you mutter the phrase “The Eras Tour” in the mirror 3 times, all your money disappears and every parent of a middle-class teenage girl shudders with fear. When Taylor Swift began her Eras Tour, fans soon developed a great displeasure when met with the fact tickets were hovering around 700 dollars at minimum, with some ranging to over $2000. How do you expect Taylor to get from her bedroom to her kitchen without a private jet powered by her fans suffering and dead polar bears?  

This biblically large price-tag was a result of two large issues with our current music landscape. With almost all of the tickets selling out in mere seconds, fans resort to second-hand resellers for their Tay-Tay fix. Resellers are the scum on the bottom of almost every community dealing with tangible items, utilizing any means necessary to buy up supply, forcing people to buy from them. Using bots, resellers bought up every ticket before most fans page even loaded. From here, they could simply increase the price of tickets tenfold. With nowhere else to buy from, fans would have to bite the bullet and willingly be scalped of their parents' cash. 

The other cause is more systematic, with ticket merchants like Ticketmaster that have a death-grip on the entirety of the live music scene. Through a tactic of buying and making exclusivity deals with music venues, Ticketmaster has created a monopoly. Ticketmaster's spread has created such an issue that the DOJ filed a lawsuit against the company in an attempt to break this hold. Via this monopoly, Ticketmaster is able to scam music attendees in any way it sees fit. One of these ways is “Dynamic Pricing”, which is nice corporate-speak for highway-robbery. By treating tickets less like a stationery good and more like the stock market, Ticketmaster is able to triple the price of a ticket if they see the demand is great. With these two issues working in tandem, the perfect storm is created to leave you taking out a mortgage on your house to see your favorite artist. The more popular the band, the more the tickets will be scalped and resold, the more scalped the higher Ticketmaster gets to hike its ticket price.  

When will the price stop rising exponentially? Not anytime soon. With small artists being screwed by an inability to change ticket prices and large artists simply not caring because of the mountains of cash they’re making, the issue will not be solved. We can smile knowing we will never have another chance to be witness to live music, instead living vicariously through rich Tiktokers as if we also had a fortune 500 father. With Coachella just occurring with a ticket price of 650 dollars, during breaks in our actual responsibility we happily get to be front row to rich internet celebrities playing dress-up; watching giddily as they stuff their gullets full of 30-dollar chicken sandwiches and wash

it down with 18-dollar lemonade. One may yell “Let them eat cake!”, but who knows if the guillotine is too passé for 2025.