Why are concert tickets fees so high?
Why is the fee for a ticket to a concert so high?
This is specifically through ticket costs; one would bargain that concert tickets have gone up in the year. More than that, it is equally irritating to note the many charges that are incurred after you have paid for the ticket, and these charges may be an additional 25–35% of the ticket price. It is all very well to point out that all that extra money is probably going to the development of new generation networks, and that those annoying fees are high for a reason, but the point is that consumers shouldn’t have to pay them at all.
Convenience Fees
Another extra fee that has become the norm is the “convenience fee”, This is where you purchase tickets through an affiliated ticket seller, usually through the Internet or telephone. Such fees are for the ticketing companies and are sometimes as high as $20 per ticket.
The reason is that they are charging for this convenience of being able to buy tickets without having to physically walk to the venue and stand in line to buy from the box office. As you know, there is nothing like box office tickets, and often, such tickets are sold out in a few hours in the present-day world. The inconvenience that comes with paying a convenience fee is worthwhile since it enables many people to get a chance to purchase tickets for some productions that are in high demand from the comfort of their homes. As it is now common practice for most events to sell tickets online, it is rather unfair and expensive to charge such an amount more for convenience.
Processing Fees
When you purchase concert tickets directly from the box office, from online ticketing companies, through phone bookings, or from third-party reseller sites, one of the things that you are bound to find is processing fees. These vary between $5-$15 and $15 for each ticket and assist in catering for the expenses of ticketing, such as processing the ticket purchase and printing tickets.
Charges for processing could be equally acceptable when customers are buying printed, hard-copy tickets that require being produced and then posted. However, with the number of concerts going paperless e-tickets now, those processing fees are still lingering around. This is particularly the case since the technology used to process digital orders is relatively cheap and easy to implement, making it appear as if e-tickets are overpriced for the small processing fees charged.
Likewise, it presents Facility Fees & Service Charges.
Other hidden charges you might find include extra charges for facilities and charges for services that cost between $5 and $25 for each ticket. Facility fees are necessary to ensure that the venues can recoup the costs of staffing, electricity, and maintaining and upgrading the technology within the facility. Other fees are equally similar, being inclusive of expenses such as ticketing system maintenance and customer relations.
Of course, concert venues have to provide for expenses concerning events, these are quite understandable and seem fair enough. However, when these facility fees reach such a level – in some cases, more than $20 in addition to the face value of the ticket – one might ask what amount of overhead one concert can bring to a profitable arena.
Dynamic & Demand-Based Pricing
Increasingly, concert promoters and ticket sellers have adopted a dynamic pricing approach, more formally referred to as surge pricing or demand pricing. This implies that ticket prices are dynamic over time according to demand to arrive at the maximum profit.
First, there is the opportunity to buy a ticket for a concert at an affordable price. However, for shows that are in high demand and only a limited number of seats are available in the theatre, the prices can easily go up depending on the market for the reselling of the tickets. Through the exploitation of more sophisticated data and algorithms that dictate changes to prices, which can be constant in real-time, the sellers justify their prices to the highest amount that the fans are willing to spend.
Hence, when people are offered low prices for such tickets, it is important to remind consumers that realistic costs, for instance, can increase by thousands of percent. Sadly for fans, dynamic pricing usually implies that you get to be charged more for the most popular or demanded shows.
Secondary Market Upcharges
The second-hand ticket market is also clearly a major factor that contributes to the escalating ticket prices and fees that fans experience. Modern examples of such sites include reseller sites such as StubHub, where individuals with spare tickets, sell their tickets at a higher price. This has created a lot of speculation where tickets are bought solely to be sold at way higher prices to make a lot of profit out of it.
An example of ticket scalping is the use of bots to purchase large quantities of tickets immediately when the sales start, thus forcing actual fans to buy from primary sellers. Secondary resellers then set their prize twofold, threefold, or even 10fold of the face value due to artificial scarcity. Not just this; they add lots of extra charges as well.
Sadly, many super fans who did not make it for the various on-sales end up having to find tickets on the secondary market, which are often more expensive if they want to see their favorite artist. Between Thirsty Speculators and Sneaky Scalpers: Secondary Reseller Sites As another major contributor to additional charges incurred by those attending concerts, there are various fees and excessive mark-ups that reseller sites impose on concerts.
It seems the industry gets more of the profit, leaving less for the fans to enjoy.
There are some legitimate expenses associated with the live events one has to stage and some service charges associated with the ticket-selling process. However, as the concert industry grows to become a $30+ billion business, customers are finding themselves faced with more and more additional fees when purchasing their tickets.
Convenience fees, processing fees, facility fees, and upcharges in secondary markets mean fans end up paying more than face value for a show. More worrisome, demand-based pricing models are optimizing revenues for venues and resellers, with an exclusionary impact on some fans of live music.
The truth, however, is that these concerts would not be possible to stage if there were no fan base of individuals willing to spend on the artists they patronize. All these stakeholders will continue to search for ways to generate revenue for their various organizations, but in the process, they will continue to lose fans. While the live music industry, and especially various fees, may be skyrocketing, who is taking care of fans, who have an increasingly difficult time paying for their tickets?
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