I bought 4 tickets to Taylor Swift for my girlfriend and her friends and paid $407.57 total after all of the bullshit Ticketmaster fees.
~$101 per ticket isn’t cheap, but $900+ per ticket is either scalper/resale prices day of the show, or for some fancy VIP tickets, or just a made up number.
Note that the only source listed is bls, and I am pretty sure they don't track concert tickets 🤔.
lol yes exactly. Kind of hilarious and stupid that they reference BLS as a source, which I’m assuming they meant for the minimum wage figure to calculate the hours, but they also don’t show what that minimum wage figure is on the infographic….
Just a really poorly crafted piece of rage bait designed to do exactly what it’s doing here - piss people off so they share it.
If it's any consolation I am still annoyed that you had to pay $100/ticket.
Yeah I can’t think of a single artist off the top of my head that I would personally pay that much to see, but it made my girlfriend happy and that’s worth $100 to me any day
Prime MJ mightve been worth the $100 in hindsight, that dude was built different
100$ still feels like a discount when you think of how much of a show he used to put on. I would have loved to see him live in his prime.
Taylor Swift chose to list on Ticketmaster with full knowledge that those fees would be included.
They sometimes don't have a choice. But also fuck Ticketmaster https://youtu.be/-_Y7uqqEFnY
More info about the price
"life is short and tomorrow is not guaranteed" is FOMO propaganda.
Okay so they used resale prices, AND based it off of average ticket cost for a show in San Francisco, one of the highest COL areas in the country?
That’s not making the logic they used any more sound….
It took two hours of working minimum wage to buy an Elvis ticket ticket.
Elvis ticket cost in 2023 dollars: $31
But minimum wage is $7.25/hr, so $31 is more like four hou... oh wait.
They meant back in the day it took that time
I know! The point is that we're seeing the combined effect of ticket prices increasing relative to inflation and minimum wage falling relative to inflation, compounding the unaffordability.
I talk about the real cost of living all the time.
1960 minimum wage was $1.00/hour and the cost of the average house was $11,000.00. Cost of the average house today is over $300,000.00. Minimum wage should be $30.00/hour, right?
As someone who works in the residential housing industry, the difference between an $11,000 1960s house and a 2023 $300k house is staggering.
Granted, nobody is building houses that are 750-900 SF with one bathroom and no garage (in the US) these days, mainly because they can make more per lot by building bigger, and land is what is in short supply (in desirable, public service areas).
Houses are still impossibly priced for minimum wage because while housing prices have increased (median) 4-5% per year, wages have been lagging for two decades. And that really is a loss in buying power by about a factor of two.
I feel like all entertainment is for the wealthy only now.
When I was a kid in the eighties, I could mow one lawn and get enough money for a field level box seat at either an A's or Giants game with enough left over for a Coke and a bag of peanuts.
I can't even comprehend going to an NFL game today.
Fortunately, I can still see pretty good local or regional bands in bars for anywhere from ten to thirty dollars depending on the band.
it’s so obvious here who supports the locals and who doesn’t
never in my life would i pay that much for a show when i could see probably 50 local shows for that much. And even have a chat with the band afterwards if i want to.
908 dollars???
Yep, that’s one expensive concert ticket. Feels like I’m just getting old and making “back in my day” observations, but I think there’s also something wrong happening here beyond normal inflation.
When you buy something through the internet, you can bet there are lots of mediators taking cuts between producer/consumer, even when buying it through official means. Add in credit cards inflating prices through interests, then add in FOMO marketing to increase prices, then add in scalpers reselling already inflated ticket prices, and tons of other ways that we don't even know that are happening. Abstractions over abstractions over abstractions, modern day innovation is finding a way to put yourself between producer/consumer to extract value without doing any material work. "Survival of the richest by Rushkoff" has some interesting insights on the contemporary tech industry.
Went to see Coldplay last summer. I think for two persons we had to pay like 320 euro. That's almost as much as we spent on 2.5 weeks of holiday this year.
Where would you be able to spend a 17 day vacation for two for 320 euro? That's 20 Euro per night. Maybe enough for accomodation, but not for transport, food, etc.
The industry changed. In the past artists would make fortunes selling albums and shows were a nice way to make the album more popular.
Today music sales is very low and streaming pays 0.004 per stream (average) to an artist, so the album is just a way to push people to buy tickets for shows.
It’s a completely new paradigm for them.
Except for a few big artists, it never was really paying to sell albums. In the 90s, out of a 20$ cd, the artists would only get around 15% of it. The store, distributer and label took the largest part Concert have always been much more paying because of the share from the tickets and the fact that you basically can take all the profits from the merch. Now with most of the streaming platforms and the way they share revenus within pools of artists, it's basically impossible to make a living from selling music, except for 1% that are pushed by labels. Meanwhhile fucking Spotify can give 100$ millions to Douche Rogan and buy the FC Barcelona. Capitalism has won the brainwashing war. I teach music in college amd University and pretty much all of the kids have never bought an actual album and dont see any problem with the current revenue models. Imagine what we could do if we simply ditch Spotify for an user controlled platform.
And when you get there, you'll probably have to look through the phone of the asshole in front of you who thinks there's going to be an alien space ship landing so they have to record it, and not attending something where seeing it with your own eyes is the most important and you can listen to all the pre-recorded songs whenever the hell you want, at infinitely higher quality than what your phone can do. $908 says they never even looked at that video again and it's just dead weight in their phone memory.
there are millions of indie artists you can support without dealing with: ticket fees, lines, crowds, overpriced drinks
Why is Taylor Swift so popular? She sings well but I don't get the hype.
I think a lot of it is a "right place at the right time" as she really got going in the early days of YouTube with songs/videoclips that appealed a lot to teenagers, and now those teens are adults who can actually afford to go to concerts. Kinda like One Direction, Justin Bieber or Katy Perry if they hadn't fallen off of the face of the earth.
isn’t harry styles literally just the remnants of one direction, and also one of the most popular artists of all time?
There are still plenty of cheap concerts to be found if people stop going to see only the most overhyped LiveNation-signed artists ever. In the past year I've seen Black Midi, Black Country New Road, Weyes Blood, Horsegirl, and Jpegmafia all for less than $20 a ticket by supporting my local venue. I really don't feel sorry for people who pay $900 to see an artist from several hundred (or thousand) feet away just so they can flex on social media about it...
It's pretty funny that the only form of relatively affordable in-person live entertainment now is opera
Monopolies is what causes this. Capitalism is just the enabler. But don't kid yourself if you think the rich don't gatekeep certain things in "communist" countries.
There aren't any communist countries, only a handful of states run by communists, who don't even claim to have reached socialism yet.
The problem is the commodity form – goods and services made for their use value and their exchange value. This is a problem in the states run by communists. They don't claim otherwise. Neither does any Marxist.
The world is currently dominated by imperialists. According to Marxists, imperialism is the 'monopoly finance' stage of capitalism, which is what you identify.
In a society that doesn't make commodities or which protects certain goods and services from the logic of commodities, the 'gatekeeping' of art (or any other good or service) wouldn't need to happen.
Art under capitalism, like everything else – food, shelter, clothes, air, water, etc – is commodified. This has awful consequences, which affects every commodity-producing society.
The 'communist countries' have only started on the path to abolish the commodity form. It will take decades to complete, maybe a century or more, and is unlikely to be fully achieved before the world is communist.
Communism is not about safekeeping, capitalism is. Communism is about democratically sharing the means of production. Capitalism is all about class struggles and private property.
908? Where? Cheapest I saw here was 1750 for bleader seats
Several of my professors, who were otherwise quite anticommunist, had personal experience with the Soviet Union's subsidizing of the arts, and praised it quite highly. One, who grew up in socialist Hungary, said that during the 60s and 70s you could to a concert with world-class artists for the equivalent of just a few US dollars. And audiences (he said) tended to be quite musically literate, because recordings of Soviet and even some western artists were cheap and everywhere -- not luxury items in any sense.
Another professor fondly recalled being in Prague during the 70s, and how you could go into almost any church or concert hall and hear very fine performance of often quite obscure early music. He went back years later after "democracy" was "restored," and found that the concerts were still there -- but it was all hack performances of the same two or three pieces that tourists like to hear.
Good memes, bad memes, unite towards a united front.
