Obscene gig ticket price thread

Was chatting with a colleague about this…there seems to be about a 70% uplift of ticket prices since pre-pandemic in my experience…Body in the Thames summed it up well…if I hadn’t spent more money on records and cds in the pandemic probably as a byproduct of the lack of gig expense I’d feel a little less guilty…felt a bit queasy spending £60-65 on Sigur-Ros at Brixton Academy recently…I can’t be sure as they were never the cheapest but I’m sure it would have been £35 before

Don’t think Sigur Rós have been as cheap as £35 for about 15 years tbf.

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These hikes for mid-large acts also disproportionately affect people who don’t live in the major cities these bands are visiting - if you’re having to pay for train travel and hotel and beers and dinner somewhere and a bit of merch you’re looking at easily 200 quid on one night out.

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Saw them for £20 in 2016

Pretty sure their 2013 tour was about that. I remember weighing up the pros and cons at the time (didn’t but shoulda)

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As well as the collapse of income from elsewhere, they also watched the secondary market for tickets hoover up big mark-ups on face value tickets for years, then decided that instead of taking action to ban it they’d just raise the prices as much as they could themselves.

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Might be true.

I can’t remember what the tickets to see Radiohead in Victoria Park in 2007 or 2008 (can’t recall exactly) were but I remember they were a LOT and I only ended up buying some because my wife hadn’t seen them before and it was at the end of the street.

My friend invited me to see The Wombats with her for £45ish the other week. Nearly wept. Didn’t even realise they went beyond a second album!

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I probably would’ve paid up to £60 to see Tool ad I’ve never seen them before but once I factored in the train trip to Manchester and back plus food plus probably taking a half day and therefore not getting paid for that time it’s just not worth it, especially as I’d be sitting on my own in a nosebleed seat

May as well book a cheap ticket for a different gig at Leeds Arena, stick a Tool playlist on my headphones and pretend

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They were £45 - only know because my computer glitched when I bought them and my card was never charged… but we got tickets still!

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Yeah, I think I paid around £90 for NIck Cave & Warren Ellis last year but think that is the last time I will go see him at his own gig. It’s really hard to justify paying that when you can pay something similar to see him plus a load of other bands at a festival like APE.

Also just paid a load to see NIN but they are a bucket list band for me. I just know they’ll be playing festivals next year though and I’ll be kicking myself.

Just trying to accept there is a lot from mid tier upwards at least i wont see these days and try to avoid feeling excited when tours/shows are announced. Thank god for small/diy shows.

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I still have my ticket for NIN at Newcastle Riverside in 91, I think it cost me around £4.50. Nostalgia aside, if I was a student today I don’t think I’d go to see hardly any gigs whereas I used see two bands a week on average.

1891?

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Cost of last 5+ gigs you went to

Idlewild - £17
Idlewild x2 - £28
Little Simz - £21
Big Thief - £28
BODEGA - £18

do have a £44 Lorde gig coming up though, and Bright Eyes (if it ever happens) was £40 - and Pavement was £44, which I had been considering

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Think if I wasn’t so short I’d probably be up for seeing more gigs at current prices, but at the Turnstile gig I went to last month I literally didn’t catch a single glimpse of anyone on stage and I just wondered what the point of it all was, felt like I would’ve had a better experience staying home and putting a YouTube performance of theirs on the telly rather than staring at some guy’s middle vertebrae for 90 minutes

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yeah whether its the bands I like or the benefit of being in Scotland, I can see most of my “big” favs for £30 or less unless they’re proper indie legacy acts

though did pay £45 for QOTSA back in 2017

The Smile would be £56 if I bothered with that

Two tickets for two nights of the Hold Steady Weekender cost just over £150 in total including all the fees, plus train tickets (£130) plus two nights stay above a pub in London (£250 I think) plus all the food and drink. I think it was worth it because it was our first trip away for a few months and we had a really good time and I was prepared to make a weekend out of it, but when I think about all that money I get a bit uncomfortable. Plus we got covid!

Built to Spill - €23
J Mascis - £26
Cloud Nothings - £14
Skating Polly - £13.20
Wave Pictures - £19

Was supposed to go to three gigs in the last 3 weeks (from £13 to £23), but two cancelled and one I couldn’t go to due having Covid.

I agree that expensive tickets really impacts who can afford to go to a gig and that has a negative impact on the atmosphere. When i started going to gigs there didn’t seem to be many people over the age of 25 there but now you don’t see that many people under that age. Might just be the type of music i like but even stuff that gets played on radio 1 like wolf Alice, little simz who I’ve seen in the last 4 or 5 months has been an older crowd. I just think young people don’t have the money to spend on gigs anymore.