Flipped Experiences

Nothing will radicalize a person faster than trying to buy a concert ticket these days. Everyone seems to say the system is bad and/or rigged and yet, it's a miserable experience for everyone involved, unless you're Ticketmaster and/or the person flipping a ticket.

Artists? Concert goers? Good luck.

We may be in a period of our lives where concerts and other live events are rarer events, but hey, they still happen! Well, so long as you can get through the line and not hit your credit limit as soon as you're through.

Patrick: Our neighborhood football alliances—as in, the people who hang out with some regularity—are as follows. Two families are Bears fans. The other family is split between Broncos and Saints. None of the kids in any of the three families gives a shit, outside of knowing that watching football means extended periods where the parents will basically say yes to anything. 

The Bears play the Saints later this year, and if we want to go together—like, everyone—it’d be 12 people. I found someone selling 12 tickets and decided to impulsively pull the trigger without touching base, figuring I could just sell them later. But 12 seats together? That rules! Plus, when I squinted at the phone, it looked like the tickets would end up pretty reasonably per person. 

But as I tapped the button to initiate the payment process, the total blazed at me: $10,000. Like an idiot, I’d looked at a number and somehow mapped that as “total” in my head instead of “per ticket.” Which is what I get for casually scrolling through Stub Hub with a glass of wine in hand.

Despite being a work from home person and despite spending so much time playing games solo, I crave regular social interaction. I like going to live events. I like attending concerts. I like going to sports games. But holy christ, man, even though we live in a society that feels increasingly about doing whatever you want on-demand at home, going “live” is f’ing expensive. 

We’ve been searching for a “first” concert for the kids and landed on Olivia Rodridgo. I missed out on buying tickets at face value because there were EIGHTY-THOUSAND PEOPLE in front of me on Ticketmaster. There was nothing legitimate available when I’d crawled through the digital line—but tens of thousands of tickets already flipped on Stub Hub for thousands each. 

One trick I’d heard about was waiting until the day of a concert and trying to snag tickets a few hours before the performance itself. It’d end up a surprise, but hey, maybe we could still go? I set a reminder on my phone to check ticket prices every few weeks and, in fact, they did come down! The problem is they “came down” from thousands per ticket to “thousand per person,” unless you wanted to sit in a spot that was basically behind the stage. Not a great first concert. 

Rodrigo came and went. So did Carly Rae Jepsen. Each time, I’d be sitting at my computer the moment tickets were available, slowly watch a meter fill, and get to the other side without any tickets available, unless I immediately checked out a reseller. My price tolerance is high for Jepsen because it’s the rare artist that my wife and I make time (and money) to see whenever she’s in town, enough so that I’d already told my kids such a show was in the cards eventually.

But there’s just no world where I can stomach clicking “go” on a concert ticket that’s $800 each.

I don’t think you’re much of a concert person these days (or ever?) but I just had to bitch. I’m sure you must have experienced something in your life that creates similar levels of friction.

Rob: Before 2020, whenever work would have me in New York for more than a couple days, I'd take extra time and try and see a Broadway show. For a year or two, it was one banger after another. Jeff Daniels in To Kill a Mockingbird. An awesome revival of My Fair Lady. A truly unforgettable new play from Jez Butterworth and produced by Sam Mendes called The Ferryman, which was one of the most riveting experiences of my life and which has completely disappeared. This is the pain of live theatre: sometimes if all that's left of the experience you had is your memories, reviews, and then whatever clips and production behind-the-scenes stuff they made for promotional purposes. 

Me being me, I splurged for these shows. For The Ferryman I was in the third or fourth row and those tickets cost $250 in 2018. For similar seats to a drama on Broadway right now I'd be looking at… possible $1000. That's before fees!

I'm not entirely sure what is making everything so brutally expensive, but I have some suspicions. In the first place, life in the United States is increasingly defined by the divergent fortunes of high-earners who are almost completely insensitive to price, and everyone else who has struggled to keep their real income from declining in the face of rising prices and rents and a cooling job market. Even people in that second group who are doing okay and maybe even earning a bit more feel much more pressured and vulnerable than they used to, so they are way more conservative with spending on luxuries. If you're pricing things like show tickets, it's actually easier to see $1000 tickets to the first group than $100 or $200 tickets to the second. The first group see something they want, they go buy it and they don't sweat it too much. The second group, it's a harder sell. Whether or not you want to be in the "luxury good" business or not, you have a lot of incentives to price things that way.