Why have ticket prices gone up in the past decade?

Source: The Biz

In the past few years, concert tickets prices have increased significantly. Why? Ethan Smith from Wall Street Journal takes a deep look into why this is. He came to the conclusion that many artists are getting companies to promote their concerts. These promoters are getting the tickets to sell for much higher because they will receive around 10% of the overall revenue.

One way these promoters are getting people to buy the tickets at such high prices is by making the artist higher fees at venues which causes them to want higher ticket prices to make up for those fees. Smith found that “Big promoters have helped to boost prices by offering artists higher fees at their national networks of venues.” Due to this, artists have to raise the prices of the tickets to make a larger profit for themselves which in turn helps the promoters.

Promoters do this because they “generally pass 85% to 90% of the ticket price to the artist and keep the rest.” Promoters want to make as much profit as they can as do most people. Prior to the past decade or so, artists didn’t have promoters. Now that they have them, they have other people that keep track of prices who dictate prices based on how much money they personally make. This is why ticket prices are skyrocketing these past years and why they likely will continue to grow.

Future Research Question: What are all the fees that determine the ticket prices?