In my area at least, affordable concert tickets are still a thing. I see something like $30-60 for most acts, provided they’re not mega-popular like Metallica or Taylor Swift. If we look at inflation vs, say, 1995, we should expect things to cost about twice as much, and that seems to pretty much right (e.g. a $20 ticket in 1995 would be a little over $40 today). I went to a Dashboard Confessional concert in the early 2000s, and I think it was something like $40, so today I’d expect that to be $80. I see Dropkick Murphy’s tickets (I think similar popularity?) for something like $60-70, which is about right. And before you get into income discussions, wages have been beating inflation (this graph is from COVID, longer term has a similar trend), with the main exception being the year and a half or so of massive inflation.
So I don’t think tickets have necessarily gotten more expensive relative to inflation, they’ve always been kind of expensive. What does seem to have changed is the price ceiling for events seem to have gone up substantially. I don’t think I had ever seen single-ticket prices go as high as current Taylor Swift tickets go for, so it seems people are more willing to pay a premium than they were before.
In my area at least, affordable concert tickets are still a thing. I see something like $30-60 for most acts, provided they’re not mega-popular like Metallica or Taylor Swift. If we look at inflation vs, say, 1995, we should expect things to cost about twice as much, and that seems to pretty much right (e.g. a $20 ticket in 1995 would be a little over $40 today). I went to a Dashboard Confessional concert in the early 2000s, and I think it was something like $40, so today I’d expect that to be $80. I see Dropkick Murphy’s tickets (I think similar popularity?) for something like $60-70, which is about right. And before you get into income discussions, wages have been beating inflation (this graph is from COVID, longer term has a similar trend), with the main exception being the year and a half or so of massive inflation.
So I don’t think tickets have necessarily gotten more expensive relative to inflation, they’ve always been kind of expensive. What does seem to have changed is the price ceiling for events seem to have gone up substantially. I don’t think I had ever seen single-ticket prices go as high as current Taylor Swift tickets go for, so it seems people are more willing to pay a premium than they were before.