Many concertgoers have been there: Your favorite artist is coming to town, and tickets go on sale Thursday at 10 a.m. You set an alarm to join the queue hours in advance. Then the clock strikes 10 and the AXS walking man starts his slow march toward your chance to attend the show of your dreams.
But alas, he hardly moves, going nowhere on a treadmill of despair as you wait and wait and wait. All my homies hate the walking man.
You frantically text the group chat: “Has anyone gotten in yet??” “If you get in first, will you get me one?”
If you’re lucky, he eventually takes you to the buying page and you rejoice as you select your tickets. For those less fortunate comes the dreaded message: “There are currently no tickets available.”
Then it’s off to the resellers, where tickets can be double or even triple the face value price.
“It’s just getting out of hand to where I have resorted to buying tickets with zero plan,” said Celia Schwarz, who has lived in Colorado for the last seven years and goes to concerts almost every weekend. “Even if I’m not sure I want to go to a show, I do spend the money and buy a ticket, just to avoid dealing with scalpers later on, but I know a lot of people aren’t able to do that.”
Recently though, she reached her breaking point when she saw that tickets for Australian electronic trio Rufus du Sol at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park were $180 face value.
“They’re one of my favorite artists,” she said, “but I was not going to pay $180 for just GA.”
Plenty of live music lovers in my life have lamented the state of ticket-buying: the scramble, the prices, the dreaded resale market. So for the return of our dormant Weekly Why column, we set out to answer the question: Why are concerts so expensive?
Spoiler: There’s no easy answer, but we’ll give you a rundown of the factors at play.
Are concerts actually getting more expensive?
It’s true that concerts have gotten more expensive. Red Rocks ticket prices, for example, increased by more than 60% between 2018 and 2024.
Even in the last year, prices have seen a substantial jump, with Red Rocks tickets averaging $79.42 this year, compared to $64.80 last year — a 23% increase. Meanwhile, inflation in Denver was just 1.4% from September 2023 to September 2024.
Prices increased nationally too. Average ticket price for the top 100 tours in 2024 was $127.38, an all-time high and 9.4% above 2019, according to Pollstar’s mid-year report.
Despite rising prices, Joe Craig, CU Colorado Springs professor and chair of the economics department, begins answering our question with a caveat many music fans won’t like: Ticket prices are actually too low.
“If you have something that sells out or you have a queue that waits forever, it means whoever set the price was way too low,” he said. “That’s not how consumers feel, but generally, we think of concerts as actually being vastly underpriced.”
Craig said there’s a few theories as to why sellers might initially low-ball ticket prices.
One, he says, is to make sure young, rabid fans — who may have inflexible funds but flexible time — can be at the show to bring the energy.
“Concerts and events like this are experiential. You need the vibe,” he said. “You’ve got to get some of those people in there that are going to probably drink too much, probably take too many drugs, and then you can recoup that with luxury boxes, VIP passes, exclusive access, all sorts of things like that.”
Artists, Craig said, “know the value of that good is actually much higher than the price they release to the public” and will hold back tickets to put directly on the secondary market, aka scalping their own tickets.
“They should price the ticket higher, but if they do and they sell it, then Taylor Swift’s the bad guy. Muse is the bad guy. The artist is the bad guy, and that creates anger from the fans toward the artist that can diminish the sales,” he said. “But if you say, ‘Oh, I just sold out, can’t do anything,’ then no one is mad for just selling out.”
It’s not clear how common that is, but a 2019 Vox article reported that Live Nation (which merged with Ticketmaster in 2010) admitted to helping about a dozen artists scalp their own tickets between 2016 and 2017. At the time, the company said that “requests have declined virtually to zero as tools like dynamic pricing, platinum seats and VIP packages have proven to be more effective at recapturing value previously lost to the secondary market.”
What makes a ticket price?
Though fans often blame ticketing companies for high costs (and in part for good reason; more on that soon), they’re not actually the ones naming the prices.
Prices are set through conversations between promoters, artists and venues, according to David Weingarden, vice president of concerts and events for Z2, which operates and books for Boulder Theater and Fox Theatre.
“We’re all trying to make sure we don’t price it too high, because then not enough people will [buy] it,” he said. “And we’re trying not to price it too low, because then it sells out too quickly or the scalpers get them and they sell them for a much higher price.”
What it costs to put on a show — for both venues and artists — has also gone up, he said.
“We’ve had increases in rent, increases in property taxes,” he said. “We’ve had big-time increases in staffing [costs], salaries .... Minimum wage has gone up considerably. Healthcare and insurance goes up considerably.
“The cost of touring is insane right now. It costs $50,000 to rent one [tour] bus for a month, and that’s not even including gas.”
On top of that, how artists make their money has changed in the digital era.
““[G]oing on the road is one of the main ways artists make money these days, so the increase isn’t too surprising,” Ben Heinemann, a Red Rocks spokesperson, wrote in an email. “Especially in the era of streaming, I think paying to see one of your favorite artists live, even if it squeezes the pocketbook a little bit, is one of the best ways fans can support music, all things considered.”
Then there are ticketing companies, which are partially responsible for the fees and, in some cases, where shows get booked.
A 2018 U.S. Government Accountability Office Report found that fees accounted for between 27% and 31% of ticket cost. What made up those fees was not always “fully transparent,” according to the report.
Earlier this year, the Department of Justice (along with 30 states, including Colorado) sued Live Nation-Ticketmaster for monopolization. It’s worth noting that Anschutz-owned AEG and its ticketing arm, AXS, have far more sway than Live Nation/Ticketmaster in Colorado. Some have even claimed the company has a monopoly here in the Front Range.
In Colorado, AEG owns or operates a gaggle of venues including Fiddler’s Green, Mission Ballroom, The Gothic, The Bluebird and The Ogden. It leases others with “near- or full-exclusivity,” including Red Rocks, according to reporting by The Denver Post.
The Ticketmaster lawsuit alleges that the company stifles competition and strongarms artists and venues through exclusive contracts.
“The result is that fans pay more in fees, artists have fewer opportunities to play concerts, smaller promoters get squeezed out, and venues have fewer real choices for ticketing services,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a May press release about the Ticketmaster lawsuit.
‘Lifestyle over pay’
Part of ticket cost comes down to supply and demand. By some metrics, demand for concerts in the Front Range is higher than average, driving up prices both on the primary and secondary markets.
According to a September Finance Buzz article that compared resale ticket prices across 22 major cities for 10 of the biggest tours (think Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen and Drake), tickets in Denver are 19% more expensive than the average across the cities, putting it behind only San Francisco and Toronto on a list that included the likes of NYC, Las Vegas and L.A.
“There could be less supply in terms of sizable places to play,” Craig said. “Or we really like concerts. …If you really like concerts and you’re a wealthy city, you’re gonna pay more.”
“Colorado is such a transplant state,” he added. “People that move a lot, people that choose lifestyle over pay, are going to be more plugged into music and spending money there.”
That holds true for some artists who don’t fall under that “biggest tours” umbrella — though it fluctuates from genre to genre.
Red Rocks tickets for Atlanta-based electro-soul and hip-hop producer Daily Bread were $70 on presale. In the weeks leading up to the show, they neared $200. Tickets are just $60 after fees for his upcoming show opening for Zeds Dead at Detroit’s Masonic Temple — a venue with half the capacity of Red Rocks.
Meanwhile, Cody Philips, who has lived in Denver for two years and estimates he goes to about 50 shows a year, said he was able to snag Fred Again tickets at Ball Arena for just $40.
“If you go to a place where the house genre is much more popular like New York and San Francisco, that’s not gonna happen,” he said. “Denver people love the wubs, jam bands, bluegrass. If you go to a Billy Strings concert, it’s going to be pretty expensive. If you go to a Daily Bread concert or Excision — any of those guys, that stuff’s just way more popular. It’s going to be way, way harder to get tickets.”
‘Parasites’
Both fans and those within the industry say they want to see regulations on the resale market, where costs can become astronomical.
“It’s really raising an eyebrow for all of us to understand how much people are potentially willing to pay for a ticket,” Weingarden said. “That being said, there’s nefarious people in the mix, and they’re gouging people.”
Weingarden calls professional scalpers “parasitic.”
“They have no skin in the game, and they’re benefiting from all of our hard work and making and taking in the money, rather than the artists,” he said.
Colorado passed a law this year that requires ticket prices shown to consumers to be “all-inclusive” rather than tacking on hidden fees at the end, but Weingarden said it stopped short of preventing speculative ticketing, a practice in which resellers list tickets before they’ve even obtained them — perhaps best known from the recent Oasis scandal, when more than 9,000 tickets were listed on resale sites before legitimate tickets had even been released.
The National Independent Venue Association, of which Z2 is a member, is advocating for the Fans First Act, which would put a ban on speculative ticketing (though it would allow a similar practice with the proper disclaimers), among other reforms.
Schwarz, the concert-goer from the beginning of this story, said she would like to see limits on how much tickets can be marked up on the resale market. In countries like France, Portugal and Belgium, for example, selling tickets for more than face value is illegal. But given lobbying efforts from companies like StubHub, such legislation is unlikely in the U.S.
“[Ticketing platforms] are getting money from the original ticket purchase and the reselling, so I think they’re just choosing money over doing something morally right,” Schwarz said. “There’s no reason why on AXS, the ticket resale exchange opens up as soon as the concert goes on sale.”
‘How to play the game’
Pending stricter regulations, some artists and fans are finding creative ways around scalpers and fees.
In October, Jack White announced a surprise show at Bluebird Theater one day ahead of the event. Those tickets were going for as low as $25 for students and required ID for pickup. Tickets were non-transferrable.
In 2023, singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers did a one-day, physical ticket sale at venues across the country to take aim at bots and fees.
Facebook groups and platforms like Cash or Trade also offer a place for fans to resell tickets — but try to sell for over face value and you’ll be booted.
And sometimes, waiting until the day of to buy a ticket can pay off, when resellers have to offload any unsold tickets.
“A lot of it’s just knowing how to play the game,” said Philips. “Having the cash put down for presale for most shows usually pays off if you’re able to get on it… but having all of these bots buying up tickets and then reselling them for a way higher price is just ruining the market.”
Have a question you want us to answer in our Weekly Why column? Email us at [email protected] with “Weekly Why” in the subject line.