What kind of show sell $700 tickets? Does that include an escort?

Michael Rapino, the CEO of Live Nation regularly boasted about how for sports events people take pride in paying thousands of dollars for tickets near the front, and how he wishes it was the same for music.

Live Nation had been engaging in a venue refit programme to make a higher percentage of venue seating - 40% or so - ‘premium’ seating where they can charge far higher rates.

As someone in this thread pointed out the biggest problem with tickets is that (at the top end) musicians certainly but sports teams also sell tickets far below market rates.

It’s a catch 22: if you are a sports team and only sell $1000 tickets you might sell out the show but you alienate your core base who buy lots of other stuff like shirts and caps and beer. If you’re only selling to VIPs you slowly kill what makes your team valuable.

For music it’s harder: for superstar artists you could almost certainly sell out a stadium at crazy prices. But the fans are going to feel gouged and are going to be very vocal and for a lot of musicians that is a red line. There’s been a lot of controversy recently over airline style ‘dynamic’ demand-driven pricing for concerts, and a lot of big name artists have come out against it.

Again, it kills the golden goose. Better to have fans who will pay $100 a ticket every time you tour for the next 20 years whether you are fashionable or not than sell out three years for $1000 a ticket to people who won’t want to buy if you’re not the hot thing.

I was stunned by the prices of shows these days. The closest venue used to be $200 for up close, EXPENSIVE seats. Now they're $350 for open lawn. This is only 5 years apart, and the only difference is they use Ticketmaster instead of selling themselves.

I know! Greedflation is out of control. That used to be the cost of decently prized intercontinental plane tickets 6 years ago (not the cheapest!).

Sadly that is not uncommon these days at all.

For major arena shows, face price floor seats can easily run $500+, going up to $1000+ for the first rows. Even lower level bowl seats can run you that much for front row.

And that's if you managed to get scalpers to them during the original sale. Resale can commonly range as high as 200% - 500% of face price.

For example, for Nine Inch Nails' recent arena tour, face price for pit tickets (GA floor) were around $150-$200, depending on the city. But they were nearly impossible to get, so most fans ended up having getting them on resale, where prices of $300 - $400 dollars were common. You can wait for tickets to drop the day of the show but that doesn't always happen. I know someone who ended up paying $800 for a pit ticket on the day of the show after they shot up to over $1200 at one point.

It is frankly completely out of control.

The kind where both System of a Down and Korn are playing, and we'd like to see them slightly closer than from an airplane window.

So many big shows these days, unfortunately. Not every ticket will be that much, but many of the best seats will.