I go to a few concerts a year and enjoy them, but the only Ticketmaster concert I’ve ever been to was last year. I paid $115 each (with fees!) for good floor seats to see Weezer, Dinosaur Jr, and the Flaming Lips in 2024. The multi hundred or multi thousand dollar event tickets are insane, I’d never pay that much for a concert.

I am lucky to have local independent music venues (First Avenue in Mpls, they own a few local venues) with sub $100 ticket prices that have acts I want to see, which isn’t the case for everyone. Taylor Swift fans (for example) are squeezed as hard as possible for every penny, I think it’s absolutely disgusting.

Here in Oslo Norway, Ticketmaster is almost everywhere. Yet the local venues, Ticketmaster ones included, have tons of shows in the $30-50 range. That's for venues with a capacity for 500-1500 people.

We have larger venues for larger artists, almost always international ones, and there ticket prices are often starting at around $80-100 and quickly go way up if you want a good location.

However personally I found I enjoy the sub-$40 concerts the most. Mainly because the smaller venue lets you get close, sound is usually much better and quite often I find a lot more passion on stage at these venues, which turns into more memorable experiences. And if the concert ends up not being my thing or just not that great, then I've just wasted the price of a few beers so no big deal.

One thing that keeps Ticketmaster in its reins here in Norway is our legislation, which limits the kind of processing fee shenanigans and similar they can do. Also scalpers became much less of a problem after they introduced a law that you can't charge more than the original price when reselling tickets.

I stopped being willing to give money to Ticketmaster years ago, which automatically means that there are entire venues and artists that are off limits to me. That meant I spent more time and money on smaller, independent venues and artists.

And honestly? It really improved my concert-going experience.

OT but I saw this show in Vancouver and was shocked at how few people knew the Flaming Lips and how many young kids were into Weezer. I went with my son who I thought had weird musical taste and wanted to see Weezer, but a ton of his friends when to the concert as well for the same reason.

The price was worth it to see the giant pink robots though!

I regularly go to smaller local venues to see shows. It usually costs ~$40, but even there the tickets are sold by Ticketweb, which of course is owned by Ticketmaster. It's cheaper, but it's impossible to get away from the evil empire.