Buying concert tickets in the past few years has been a struggle. You have to buy tickets months in advance or deal with the insane, inflated prices.
It’s gotten so complicated as well. First, you have to get a pre-sale code; if you don’t, you most likely won’t be getting a ticket. Or you’ll have to buy it from a third party.
Then, before you’re even able to look at tickets, you have to join a waiting room 10 minutes early, stare at your screen waiting to be put into the queue and then stare at your screen more after being placed in the queue. You stare at your number in line, barely moving to finally get put into the sale, only to be met with the show being sold out.
If you get in and tickets aren’t sold out, you’ll probably end up seeing prices going from $80 to $250 after fees are applied in checkout. It’s frustrating, annoying and discouraging.
Why does this happen? Why is it impossible to get your hands on tickets now?
Live music has always been popular, but it now feels bigger than ever. Social media plays a big role in this shift. We first saw this with Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour,” which became a cultural phenomenon.
I was lucky enough to get these tickets for $250, but I saw third-party nose-bleed tickets on sale for thousands of dollars. People were buying more than a ticket; they were buying an experience and a once-in-a-lifetime moment. When millions of people are competing for a limited number of tickets, things are bound to get chaotic.
A huge factor in how this plays out is the structure of these systems. Ticketmaster dominates the industry, holding around 80% of the primary ticketing market. With this level of control, there’s little room for competition, so not much incentive to improve the buying experience.
Customers have to deal with long queues, site crashes and confusing pricing, which makes the experience unenjoyable and inconvenient.
Not to mention the added fees. You may find a ticket listed at one price, only to watch it change as you enter checkout. Service fees, processing fees and facility charges all add up fast.
The lack of transparency feels deceiving. For college students living on a budget, those fees could be the difference between a fun night and staying home.
You can’t talk about buying tickets without touching on ticket resale sellers and bots. You have people buying multiple tickets at a time only to resell them later at escalated prices, or you’re fighting against bots in the lobby. Then suddenly, instead of buying a ticket at a reasonable price, you’re faced with luxury-level prices.
All these factors create a whirlwind of high demand, limited supply, monopolies on tickets and a competitive resale market that drives prices. Making a system where getting tickets feels like going to war. If you’re lucky enough to get one, people call it “surviving the Ticketmaster war.”
So who is to blame for this? The answer is everyone. Ticketmaster, resellers and consumers. All these factors work together.
Concerts are supposed to be a time to dance with your friends, scream your favorite songs at the top of your lungs and make memories. Getting tickets makes the whole process stressful.
Until this process changes, getting tickets will feel like winning the war and it might be harder to get them each time.