Seperate to the general rising costs of collecting records which is covered seperately, the price of gig tickets is starting to get a bit out of hand and post covid prices seem to be getting a bit obscene (at least in my opinion).
LCD and NIN have probably set the bar for more DIS friendly bands and I can understand the argument that £75 and below maybe isn’t that much when you factor in the increased costs of touring and that Ticketmaster have gone from charging around 10% a ticket to 20% in the case of NIN which doesn’t help.
Muse (not that I would be going) at Hammersmith is a cool £100 for standing and £150 for seating. Roxy music is £200 to sit at the front and it’s similar for for the Stones and Adele. Perhaps Roxy and the Stones isn’t much of a surprise, their whole brand for the last few decades has been the collection of as much ££££ as possible, but it’s still the cost of a weekend away! At the moment the government has passed on an 8% reduction in VAT and it seems like the big promoters and bands have done their best to swallow any savings rather than pass them on to the fans, and like all things once they know people will pay these prices it’s unlikely they’ll want to cut them in the future. As a teenager (mid-late noughties) my dad used to let me go to any gig I wanted because they were £20 ish, if prices go this way there is absolutely no way I could offer that to my lad.
Might be a good place to share any more utterly wild pricing
Tool was ridiculous. Have never seen them and they’ve been a bucket list band for me - in the end had to get a seat at the back of the o2 for £90 total. Will bring my binoculars.
Not going to bankrupt myself going to stand watching bands for an hour or two. Fear that gigs featuring established artists at the very least have become a thing of the past for me, at least with anything close to the same regularity as pre-Covid (and it was becoming increasingly less viable even then).
Can’t afford to buy much music either so as much as streaming really isn’t great for artists, I can’t really afford much else and I used to justify that by supporting artists when they did tour but…
There’s rightly been some chat about this in the Sky Ferreira thread as well as LCD and NiN ones. forty-something quid for an artist with one album (arguably half a good one) in the venue mezzanine is wild
Or maybe people won’t pay these prices, plus buy refreshments & merch etc
The bigger problem is the lack of grassroots small venues to offer an alternative… like covid (and other factors) has bleached the coral reef of live music & put whole swathes of the live ecosystem on the endangered/possibly extinct list
For arena and bigger mid-level gigs, the increases are nothing to do with COVID because they’d already been going on. Case in point: Arcade Fire at the MEN Arena, august 2011; standing ticket with all fees was just shy of £40. April 2018, same venue: standing about £73 all in. Countless examples of this.
Think it said a lot that Phoebe Bridgers tickets being about £30 was met with universal pleasant surprise.
Someone once said to me that £60 is the smallest large amount of money, and that feels about right to me whenever I’m seeing these kind of ticket prices. Once you get over £60 I’m thinking about it differently, need to start doing a cost-benefit analysis, justifying a £150+ night out against those new shelves we need or w/e.
I understand there are a lot of factors behind the high high prices, some of them reasonable and some of them not so reasonable. But I reckon it does fundamentally change what the gig is and how people engage with it once you are hitting those prices.
Had to pass on Cure (never seen) and NIN (have at least seen) this year. Was looking to catch Ghost in a couple of week’s time but they’re after £75+ a ticket, and as much as I know Ghost do a great live show, they are not a £75+ ticket band. Seeing Everything Everything in Notts tomorrow. Think I paid £30 a ticket back in 2019/early 2020, probably be £40+ if I bought them now.