So he just doesn’t want people to be able to afford concerts?
I probably don’t have to tell you just how insane the market for concert tickets has become.
According to Pollstar, the average price to see one of the top 100 concert tours is now $120, which is almost a 70% increase from the average of $74 in 2010. Over that time, inflation has increased prices overall by 48%, which means that concert tickets have increased by 22% more than the cost of inflation in the past 16 years. And that’s even taking into account that the average price of concert tickets DROPPED in 2025, coming down about 6% from the high of $127 in 2024 (which was no doubt driven at least in part by Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour).
And it’s not like fans don’t see these price increases for themselves. For years, sites like Ticketmaster and Live Nation have tried to hide the actual price of concert tickets by advertising lower prices and then adding on ridiculous fees at checkout, masking the final price you’re going to pay until the very end so that the prices appear lower when you’re actually searching for a ticket.
But earlier this year, the FTC mandated that ticket sellers must display the full price of tickets upfront rather than adding fees on at the end, meaning that it’s no longer possible to hide the ridiculous prices caused by these additional fees.
Obviously simply disclosing the fees upfront isn’t a solution to the problem of out-of-control prices, but it’s a good step towards addressing the problem once people see just how big the problem really is. But if you ask LiveNation CEO Michael Rapino, it’s not a problem at all – and in fact, concert tickets are actually UNDERPRICED.
Rapino made the jaw dropping comments last week at CNBC and Boardroom’s Game Plan conference:
“We just did the Beyonce tour. She’s got 62 transport trucks outside. That’s a Super Bowl she’s putting on every night. 10 years ago, there might have been 12 trucks. So these artists are doing their job, elevating that game. And when you come to that show, it’s a fabulous experience…
Music has been underappreciated… In sports, I joke it’s like a badge of honor to spend 70 grand for a Knicks courtside. They beat me up if we charge $800 for Beyoncé.
We have a lot of runway left. So when you read about ticket prices going up, the average concert price is still $72. Try going to a Laker game for that, and there’s 80 of them. The concert is underpriced and has been for a long time.”
Underpriced?
I think I get the point he’s trying to make, that the price of tickets hasn’t increased in proportion to the cost of production for these tours. But at the same time, because the cost of tickets has gone up, fans are expecting more from live shows to make it worth it to shell out the money for a concert.
And his comments are especially tone deaf right now, at a time when we’ve seen several artists cancel major tours because of a lack of demand. We’ve also seen several music festivals canceled, and others not returning. And if you look online, you’ll see that many tours just aren’t selling as well as expected, with empty seats available for top tours that would have been sold out in years past.
This isn’t even taking into account the role that resellers have on the market. Ticketmaster and Live Nation offer their own resale markets, with at least some limitations on the price of resale tickets, but other sites give scalpers an open invitation to jack up resale prices as much as possible, especially for sold-out shows.
Now, some might argue the fact that shows are selling out and that there’s a market for these jacked up tickets might help prove Rapino’s point that tickets are, at least in some cases, “underpriced.” But if all of the tickets to a show were originally listed for sale at the same price as the resale tickets, would the demand still be there? I’m guessing not, and it’s a virtual certainty that it would price many fans out of the market entirely.
Of course ticket prices aren’t the only thing that makes it cost prohibitive to go to a concert these days. Venues make their money not just on ticket prices but on concessions and parking, as well as merch cuts that many take from artists, and these are just as out of control as ticket prices. Throw in the cost of a hotel room and a couple of meals while you’re traveling for a show and it quickly becomes out of reach for many fans to travel to a major show.
It’s no secret that the economy is struggling, and many fans find it harder to justify spending money on things like concert tickets. And at a time when artists make the majority of their money from touring, while Live Nation and Ticketmaster are under increased scrutiny for taking advantage of both fans and artists (including a lawsuit recently filed by the Department of Justice), it shows just how out of touch the company still is for the CEO to claim that concert tickets are in any way “underpriced.”
But I guess when you control pretty much the entire market, the “price” is whatever you say it is…
