It’s no secret that we live in an era of increasing fees – shipping fees, service fees, cleaning fees and countless others. We also live in an era of numerous expenses. Gas prices, food prices, car prices, home prices and rent in L.A. are just the tip of the iceberg. So for the love of all things music, I vote that we stop messing with concert tickets. 

Concert ticket prices and attainability are getting out of hand. According to CNBC, concert ticket prices have risen a whopping 95 percent since 2019.

The most famous fiasco regarding concert tickets was Taylor Swift’s concert, The Eras Tour. The event had various initial complications in 2022 during the ticket buying process. Ticketmaster could not handle the loads of people logging into the queue, and many fans didn’t even have the chance to buy tickets. 

Scalpers have made it increasingly difficult to get tickets to shows, as they buy up a large majority of tickets to sell for profit at usually outrageous prices.

Swift attempted to reduce scalper purchases by doing the Verified Fan program, where fans had to sign up for an email that would then send them a ticket link if they were chosen. These tickets became available to fans before they were sold to the general public. 

Some fans were lucky, but others not so much. Normally 40 percent of Verified Fans buy tickets, but in Swift’s case, all fans tried to get tickets at the same time. This broke the system, which then left more people without tickets and forced them to pay scalpers’ high prices.

After sales ended, many fans, even ones who got verified, had to pay hundreds of dollars for a ticket in the nosebleed seats. Swift did offer other opportunities to get tickets by adding shows to her tour. But for most, even getting to the show, especially with tickets priced at face value, was a battle. 

Tickets were already being sold at very high prices due to Taylor’s popularity, ranging from $50 to $2,000 per ticket, sometimes reaching to even farther extremities. Then, to salten the wound, Ticketmaster added its own fees.

Artists like Robert Smith from “The Cure” had to convince Ticketmaster to refund some of the outrageous fees Ticketmaster itself had placed on his fans, which leveled out to be half the cost of their order. Tim Burgess, an English singer, posted a photo on his Twitter page of his transaction. It listed four tickets priced at 80 dollars, but the total order ended up being 172 dollars due to the 92 dollars of “Service Fees, Facility Charges and Order Processing fees” bestowed by Ticketmaster.

In a world where the price of a full tank of gas is enough to buy a meal at a nice restaurant, it is unethical for the price of entertainment to be this high, especially when the money accumulated in sales and fees does not always go to the artist. 

According to CNN, the average American teen spends around four to eight hours on a screen daily, which makes outdoor social events like concerts increasingly important to a chronically online and anti-social world. 

So please, stop making people choose between paying their rent and seeing their favorite artist. 

Ticketmaster, “Why you gotta be so Mean?”