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Discussion (58 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I've never been a fan of his music, but at that time he really seemed to be focused on ensuring that as many regular fans got to see his shows as possible.
He limited the price of his tickets to I believe $25. This was when he was at the peak of his fame so he easily could have gotten away with charging much more.
Secondly he would often book a massive amount of dates in each city but only announce one of them. The next show in the block of dates would go on sale after the previous one sold out. It didn't fully stop scalpers but the unpredictable nature of how many shows in total there would be and when they would be on sale cut down on a lot of the scalping.
Again, not a huge fan of his music, but he seemed genuinely interested in helping his fans get to his shows.
(they already had it planned but wanted to make sure the first show on the less popular day was sold out first)
I think the whole point is that only Superstar Divas used to be able to operate like this.
Now, even "starving artists" are employing grey-area price-gouging techniques.
My anecdata is that concert fatigue is real.
I doubt this is going to bode well in the mid or long term.
My crystal ball doesn't work any better than anyone else's though...
Yeah, one of the most famous club in Berlin used to pull that trick, now it is about to close because the owners are not making enough money. People aren't fooled by these tactics anymore.
Also production costs do tend to balloon dramatically each time you jump from clubs -> theaters, theaters -> arenas, arenas -> stadiums, etc.
Within the industry - I can see that. Producers, managers, booking, PR, etc everyone loves the bandwagon.
And a big artists not selling as they would is kind of negative news, but I don't think that has anything to do with people respond to the next album.
Just a preference for the artist. If you go for bigger venues and stretch a little bit, you might end up filling it, and then you'd make more money. If you underplay, then you're guaranteed to have a good vibe at the show, which musicians care a lot about.
That's really, I think, the dynamic that most people use. There is an aspect of it that is public perception-facing, but I've been around a lot of musicians ranging from just starting out to household names, I think it's mostly a trade-off between those two options. Just about every musician prefers smaller venues because they're more fun to play, and less financial risk.
Like anything there are exceptions. For example, an artist who wants to headline Madison Square Garden for the first time might make a different choice. But I don't think the strategy is that much about cleverness. It's just about preference.
Not quite sure this is an issue that needs an article in Bloomberg
I’d love it if a news site said occasionally, “there’s nothing really news worthy today. Yesterday’s important stuff will do.”
Also I’m mad I can’t get tickets to see angine de poitrine in Philly.
The show was in a stadium. The sound was terrible. Everyone around me was smoking pot. I was so far away that the musicians were barely visible. The only consolation was that Pink Floyd had a great lights show and a big movie screen behind them showing flying pigs and things like that.
I went to one more stadium show after that--The Smashing Pumpkins and Garbage--and it was somehow worse. The sound was deafening but also unintelligible.
There are many musicians I would love to see, but the big show experience is awful. Fortunately, I have since seen many, many shows in smaller venues. I fondly remember watching Low play in a candlelit (!!) venue with audience members sitting/laying (!!!) on the floor. Way, way better, and definitely hipper than thou.
I've reached a similar conclusion. I've broken my rule a few times, but just about all of them just reinforced my belief in my rule.
Here I tend to aim for venues where the tickets are $25-35. I'll order a couple and invite someone. I've had some of my best concert experiences this way, surpassing the large concerts I've been to by orders of magnitude.
I also find that in most cases, the sound is much better at smaller venues. That is, there are good spots and bad spots, but you can easily move around to a good spot and then it's really good. The large 2000+ venues I've been to have never had good sound, just decent at best.
Considering all of that, everybody in the chain prefers and benefits from sold-out shows for myriad reasons, and all live performance is theatre at its core anyways, so IMO what's a little extra theatre on top to make sure the shows go on in this year of our Lord 2026, where very little is cheap and affordable?
The ticket prices are not high because of market realities. They're high because of illegal monopoly behavior that inflates costs and then steals the money and gives it to Michael Rapino and his friends. The behavior of Live Nation has been shown to be much closer to organized crime than what most people think of as standard business practice.
There's extensive on-the-record testimony and an official federal court verdict backing up my side of this argument.