The prices of concerts become more ridiculous with every year that passes. Just look at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, with tickets selling for well over $1,000 in 2024. Today, it’s completely normal for a single concert ticket to be anywhere from $80 to $200. Keep in mind this isn’t the final price you’ll be paying. No siree Bob, there are a couple of other culprits making this one night’s couple-hour experience cost a small fortune. To see the bigger picture, we need to look at ticketing companies and resellers.

For years, companies such as Ticketmaster and SeatGeek have received backlash for their outrageous ticket fees. Ticketmaster’s average rate hovers around 28% of the original ticket price, and SeatGeek is similar at about 30% but can also extend to more than half of the selling price of the ticket. Even worse, neither of these fees factor in taxes. SeatGeek defends itself by claiming that fees help “keep the lights on, pay the sellers that list tickets on our marketplace, and continue to provide a great product for finding live events.” They even front complaints with the disclaimer that their fee range is “commensurate with other ticket market participants’ fees, and are driven by the same supply and demand factors,” as if that justifies the decision to keep the fees so high.

After seeing a small artist I like was going on tour, I clicked into the sale portal the day after tickets had dropped. Imagine my surprise when I saw that the entire show had already sold out. When I called the venue, I was told their entire inventory had gotten bought out, and I’d have to buy from a reseller if I wanted to see the show. Hearing this rang immediate alarm bells in my head seeing since, as far as I knew, this artist wasn’t that popular—the original price of the admission was originally only $33. I checked SeatGeek next and was appalled to see how many tickets were up on the site for resale at triple the original price. A show that had originally cost $33 could now only be accessed for around $90. I was sad to see this but decided to keep monitoring the prices, convinced that the tickets wouldn’t sell due to the size of the artist. In the weeks leading up to the concert, the prices started to drop rapidly, with some of the tickets nearly returning to the original price. Once it reached about $35 the week of the concert, I purchased the ticket from SeatGeek, being greeted by the steep service fee, which was nearly half of the ticket’s price.

The new standard of online resale is ruining entertainment access. In the past when resellers had to go in person to try to scam the innocent public, their job was much less appealing. Today, the power is easily in their hands in the form of an electronic device. With the exorbitant fees that companies can make off these tickets, though, they’re not motivated to stop resellers from taking advantage of people. If there is an easy way to rip people off, there will always be someone there to fill the space in the market. I believe that there should be a ceiling price on resale tickets because of this. Perhaps this ceiling price should even be the original price of the ticket, with the reseller having to pay a small fee to return an uninsured ticket. If there was a ceiling price on online tickets, resale as a business venture would become a lot less enticing.

Although many ticket sale sites have controls to prevent bots from mass purchasing for resale, I’ve found that these systems are often faulty. When trying to buy a ticket for a different concert on Ticketmaster last year, I clicked on the site the day after the presale ended. Tickets were still available for the same price as the presale, yet when I clicked purchase, I received a pop-up from Ticketmaster telling me that the site had identified me as a bot and couldn’t complete the transaction. I refreshed the website and even switched to another browser, but I was still unable to buy a ticket until multiple days later—and even then, I was on a different device. If this system can mistake a human buying a single ticket for a bot, there seem to be deeper issues within its infrastructure. I was lucky that this artist’s tickets were not in high demand and that some were still available by the time I was able to make my purchase. At the time of writing this article, the tickets for the show have completely sold out. The lowest resale price I could find on the site now starts at $108 before fees (for a ticket that originally cost $42).

Companies profiting from the facilitation of resales have created an industry in which the everyday fans of artists can’t attend the concerts of people whose musical journeys they have followed for years. Due to the substantial mass of music circulating today, people who can afford it will likely decide to go to a concert simply because they know someone’s latest viral hit. I think this is completely fine—although some artists would disagree (see: Steve Lacy). However, I do think it’s unfortunate that concerts have become a luxury for the average person because of greedy corporations. High resale prices do not in any way benefit the artist or their team. Instead, they just make it more likely that a sold-out venue may only be halfway full, especially in the case of smaller artists.