Thousands of other fans, myself and a great artist all sing and dance together in a way that feels intimate and special. That’s how live music is. It draws people in, and when someone’s favorite artist is coming to town, there is always a scramble to get tickets.
Concert culture has begun to normalize high prices for these tickets, and even getting them is no easy feat. Many have resorted to buying nosebleed seats, which are the furthest away from the stage.
The guarantee of getting tickets is also much lower, especially due to bigger artists touring less but performing shows that are more expensive, longer and overall quite extravagant. People have become more willing to buy these tickets because they don’t know the next time their artist will even be coming to town.
One way to get tickets is through presales, which allow superfans to access tickets through a specialized code before they go on sale to the general public. For USC students, skipping class or even actively participating in the sale during class has become normal.
“My roommate skipped class a few times to do presales and still ended up having to do general sale,” Lila Vesce, a freshman studying business administration, said.
Signing up for these presales can be easy, but the ratio of people to tickets is small, and oftentimes the presale can feel like a full-time job with having to queue in at exactly the moment tickets go live. Once they do, depending on the fan’s place in line, they may not be able to secure tickets. Therefore, the best chance to attend a once-in-a-while concert may feel like a worthy excuse to miss a class.
Sometimes, tickets for concerts end up too expensive to even buy them at all. A big cause for this has been bot accounts, which sign up for presales, buy the tickets and resell them for hundreds to thousands of dollars more.
In 2023, Taylor Swift announced her Eras Tour. It was her first time touring in years, and people spent thousands of dollars on tickets.
Smaller artists have also raised ticket prices. Olivia Dean spoke out on the additional Ticketmaster fees and resale fees, keeping a cap on prices in order to allow more fans to go.
“The prices at which you’re allowing tickets to be re-sold is vile and completely against our wishes,” she said, and ensured her tour wouldn’t let this happen.
Students agree that dealing with Ticketmaster has become a pain.
“Ticketmaster as a whole is always a mess,” Max Bodaken, a freshman studying business administration, said. “For example, for Kanye when he performed at SoFi, I got lucky and was within the first 3000 people in the queue, but when I joined the queue for Calvin Harris yesterday, I was over half a million back.”
The system is unpredictable. Though Ticketmaster is intended to make tickets easier to get, it’s still for profit, and the goal is to make money, not necessarily to provide all attendees with an experience.
Jen Guerin, a freshman studying business administration, had a similar experience with the same sale.
“I tried getting tickets for his concert, but I got put into the queue behind 150,000 people. I actually had class 15 minutes after presale so I left my computer open in class, even though I wasn’t allowed to have my computer in class,” Guerin said. “I just kind of hid it and then for the first ten minutes of class I kept looking, and then I put it away and gave up hope.”
John Summit is coming to the L.A. Coliseum on Dec. 12th, a place every USC student calls home, and students are scrambling to get tickets.
Giving in to this new ideal and paying the amount of money that Ticketmaster charges amplifies the problem. Having more artists speak up against what Ticketmaster is doing, going directly through venues to acquire tickets and requiring secondhand ticket sellers to have fee transparency are possible ways to improve this crisis. Normalizing that this isn’t normal needs to happen; otherwise, the concert ticket crisis will only get worse.