Something weird is going on with concert tickets, and everyone who went to a concert this year can tell.
I noticed it this past spring at a Lucy Dacus show. In January, Dacus’s “Forever Is a Feeling” tour tickets went on sale and I fought in the Ticketmaster trenches to snag one solo Radio City Music Hall ticket for myself —I couldn’t get a pair. The price: $82.
When Dacus added a second Radio City date, my friend was able to get two tickets, closer to the stage, and I paid her back for one $98 seat, figuring I could resell my $82 one. But I couldn’t — not in the weeks and months that followed, not even when I dropped the price to $20 below what I paid.
I ended up going to both shows alone after my friend got sick, and both nights, I was able to move up a dozen or more rows to take empty seats next to different friends in the audience who texted me about open nearby. On the first night, the whole row behind me remained empty. Yet the marquee advertised the concert as sold out.
My experience wasn’t an anomaly, either for the price or for my inability to resell the seats. Concert ticket prices are now averaging over $100 in general and can reach thousands for megastars like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. Tour announcements find both fans and scalpers rushing to grab pricey tickets — but after the initial rush, the remaining tickets can lag unsold, as can resale tickets. You probably saw the headlines about Beyoncé tickets dropping down to $55 — and yet the first five nights of the “Cowboy Carter” tour grossed a record-setting $55 million.
It’s simply a fact that concert tickets are more expensive now than they were just a few years ago. According to data from Pollstar, concert ticket prices for the top 100 worldwide tours hit a record-high average of $135.92 in 2024, marking a 41.3% increase from 2019. The average dipped slightly in 2025 to $132.62 — a 2.4% decrease from the prior year’s peak, but still well above both 2022 and 2023 levels.
Most of that money isn’t going into artists’ pockets, particularly for non-superstar artists. Earlier this year, a survey by Ditto found that 82.1% of independent artists said they couldn’t afford to tour and 58.3% said they had turned down touring opportunities solely due to financial reasons. If concert prices are up, yet artists are struggling, what on earth is going on?
“Right-Sizing”
Obviously, something major happened between 2019 and 2025: COVID. The pandemic and resulting restrictions meant that many artists had to cancel or postpone scheduled tours in 2020 and 2021. Then, 2022 and 2023 saw an explosion of live touring — including several superstar artists, like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, who hadn’t hit the road in five years or more.
Brent Lippincott, a booking agent and the co-founder of the independent music booking agency Good Direction, says that the live music industry is currently in a moment of “right-sizing” after the post-COVID boom. After pandemic restrictions eased, “There was this mad rush to go out and do stuff once again, and I think it created this false sense of security in terms of where the industry is concerned,” he explains. “There was this idea that we could just continue to raise prices and people are gonna pay them, and the industry’s going to continue to grow and we have nothing to worry about.”
The mad rush also caused another problem: There are simply so many artists with overlapping fanbases touring that only the wealthiest fans (or those most willing to take on debt) can afford to go to all. For example, Kendrick Lamar and SZA, Beyoncé, and The Weeknd and Playboi Carti all played New Jersey’s MetLife Arena in the span of a single month this past spring. “Fans are having to say, ‘I love Kendrick, I love Beyoncé, but I can’t afford both of them. Which one do I go to?'” says Clayton Durant, an adjunct professor of Music Business at Long Island University’s Roc Nation School of Music, Sports & Entertainment and the founder of the music consulting firm CAD Management.
This goes for smaller acts, too: “It’s very difficult to go on tour in a major market like Los Angeles, Nashville, Chicago, or New York, because you’re going to have something like 30 to 40 ticketed shows happening every night,” says Ryan Vaughn, an independent artist manager at Head Bitch Music and a former touring drummer. “The audience is extremely diluted because there are too many options and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to cut through the noise and get people to come see your show. Unfortunately, there’s too much supply right now and not enough demand.”
This means that sometimes, he says, the answer is simply: “Dude, just don’t go on tour.”
