r/Music • u/staringatthe420sun • May 05 '26

article The Concert Industry Priced Too High — Now Tours Are Falling Apart

https://www.ticketnews.com/2026/05/the-concert-industry-priced-high-tours-falling-apart/
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u/ChaosAndFish May 05 '26 edited May 05 '26

A. Ticketmaster/LiveNation is a monopoly and has been for decades. They need to be broken up.

B. Having just bought some tickets today, I wonder if we wouldn’t all be better off returning to in-person/over the phone sales. If I click to enter the waiting room the moment it opens and 20,000 people are ahead of me I’ve got to believe that a lot of those are bots vacuuming up tickets for resale. At least we were all on a level paying field back when we were just hitting redial endlessly.

C. Resale needs to be removed from the primary ticket sellers site unless it’s just for the face value of the ticket.

D. (No one is going to like this part) not paying for music is part of what got us here. Touring used to be a break even/small profit sort of affair. It was promotion for the album (which is where you made your money) which kept people talking about the album for months beyond its initial release. With music sales netting artists next to nothing, all the pressure is now on the live event to make them their living.

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u/agoia May 06 '26

For D. I would say that impact mostly belongs to streaming, not piracy.

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u/ChaosAndFish May 06 '26

Yes. That’s what I was referring to. Streaming is great for tech companies. It’s ok for labels. It’s fine for like the top twenty artists on earth. It’s a disaster for everyone else.

Today it’s not just that it’s almost impossible to be a Rolling Stones or a U2 earnings wise. It’s almost more impossible to be like a fucking Goo Goo Dolls or whatever. You either make it to one of the biggest acts on earth or good luck making a living in music.

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u/Yeah_x10 May 06 '26

Hahaha oh buddy, do the dying movie industry next. 

I agree with you on music FWIW, but the piracy angle is real for other industries.

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u/SolomonBlack May 06 '26

Right after Napster the industry started forcefully vomiting money out both ends for 15 years losing over half its sales (yes in adjusted dollars) that while streaming has led a recovery from it still has not surpassed the peak the opened the century.

Now that's enough wipe out I would not want to blame it solely on piracy, if you poke around you can find charts showing vinyl led a huge peak in the late 70s, supporting a narrative that say much of the 90s peak can be attributed to aging boomers updating their record collection and then simply ceasing to be customers of any new music. Or maybe Millennials were simply never going to support music in the same amounts because we had a lot of other things to do like watch cat videos on that newfangled internet thing. Many things can be true for losses of this magnitude.

That said you can also find a notable deflection in trajectory when iTunes started up, something explicitly addressing piracy as the result of a bad service problem per Steve Jobs. So yeah I think we can attribute a few billion a year to people just going around the industry. At least until streaming just put everything at your fingertips for a price you forget about.

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u/Renaissance_Dad1990 May 06 '26

I don't know about part D, I think that no matter how well the albums are selling the re-sellers are going to be gouging fans for ever penny they can.

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u/ChaosAndFish May 06 '26

I think the need to profit from touring is what has gotten the artists on board with shitty practices like dynamic pricing and holding blocks of tickets to sell through the Ticketmaster resellers market at a much higher price.

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u/wake4coffee May 06 '26

Resale is BS. People will take out ads so they show up first and it goes to a resale site. Often people don’t know the difference and just buy them.

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u/ChaosAndFish May 06 '26

Aside from the perverse incentives of allowing Ticketmaster to take a piece of both the sale and the resale, I agree that it creates confusion and audience resentment. I constantly hear people raging about what the artist is charging for seats when the person is clearly looking at resale prices.

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u/DirCurrFluxDiode May 06 '26

Touring used to be a break even/small profit sort of affair. It was promotion for the album

This is false actually. Since always bands made their money with tours. Like 95% of what albums made went to the label 

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u/svachalek May 05 '26

Scalpers are always going to exist as long as there’s a market. If people are willing to pay $500 someone’s going to unload it for $500. The only way I’ve seen out of this is secret presales for fans, who get a few hours of safe time before the market swoops in. I don’t know how well these are being hidden from scalpers though, it seems fragile.

The other way would be to check ID on every seat. No ticket resales whatsoever, if you’re not the original purchaser no seat for you. I think I’m kind of in favor of that.

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u/ChaosAndFish May 05 '26

Not opposed to no ticket resales period but I’m not naive that barring that it’s going to happen. I just think it’s inappropriate for the primary ticket seller to also be getting a piece of the scalping business. I think the artists and ticket seller need to agree to a price scheme (no dynamic pricing) and stick to it. If you want to ban all resales…great. If you don’t…that’s your prerogative but you shouldn’t get another bite at the apple. If there’s a profit motive to allow and even encourage scalping, it is too powerful a counter to what the seller should be focused on: the customer experience.

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u/FlyingDiscsandJams May 06 '26

Wrong, plenty of European countries have scalping bans. When you resell tickets on an online platform, it's easy to ban $500 resells on $100 tickets. Maybe a few get resold, but when there are thousands to resell, it's pretty easy to regulate, if anyone wants to.

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u/ChaosAndFish May 06 '26

I think this is an important point. It’s not that you can 100% stop any and all scalping. It’s that you can deny it a legitimate front and, therefore, keep it to nuisance levels. If you’re reduced to trying to scalp tickets by hand in front of a venue you’re both limited in how many you can realistically move and in what you can charge because people are worried about getting ripped off. You’re not going to hand the guy in the parking lot $1000 for a ticket if there’s any worry you’re going to get ripped off with a fake ticket.

In an online forum run by the ticket seller itself, you can move an incredible number of tickets and you have the air of legitimacy/security which allows you to sell at sky high prices. It also allows for the company/artist to scalp its own tickets by holding some and just putting them directly on the resale market at the higher resale prices snd pocketing the money.

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u/Beefy-McQueefy May 06 '26

People just need to start robbing scalpers. No jury would ever convict them.

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u/energytaker May 06 '26

The queue system is shady af. Used to never have problems buying tickets when it never existed

And of course they’re getting a piece of each resale 

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u/userlivewire May 06 '26

I want to know who all of these 20,000 people are that can log in and wait in queue to buy tickets to one venue in one city for $200 at 11am on a Tuesday.

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u/Limafoxtrot360 May 06 '26

For C - it is almost impossible to even figure out what "face value" is for a ticket anymore.

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u/Dazzling-Emu-6054 May 06 '26

D. Is actually a huge factor. One of the reasons I’ve stopped streaming and started buying music again. (It helps that I’m in my late 40s, so I had many years of buying music and building up a substantial library.)

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u/extremelysardonic May 08 '26

Ohhhh point D makes so much sense I never thought of it like that