By Brad Hubbard | 6/10/2024
There have been several stories lately about musical acts cutting back on shows or canceling them all together due to poor ticket sales. They (the musical acts and promoters) aren’t saying it that way but logically that is what’s happening. They overreached in one way or another. I’m going to say these things with some certainty even though people will say differently.
You’ve seen the headlines, ‘Jennifer Lopez Cancels Her Troubles Summer Tour’ or ‘Black Keys Cancel Arena Tour’. Analysis and pundits are chiming in from all corners of the Internet (including this self appointed one) but some of this can certainly give us a snapshot of where the American consumer is on a macro level.
Sorting through the articles, one theory stood out amongst the rest. The price combined with abundance is finally catching up to the ‘experiences’ consumer post Covid. “You’d never before had a moment in time where all the horses lined up at the starting gate and they all went out on the road at the same time,” said Gary Witt, the CEO and co-owner of The Pabst Theater Group in Milwaukee.1
The economic pendulum looks to be swinging back to the mean. During Covid, you saw a massive shift to ‘stuff’ and post Covid vaccine you saw the pendulum swing over to ‘experiences’ and now we’re starting to fall somewhere in the middle. Between inflation, the return of student loan payments and the federal government shutting off the money spigot, the consumer is starting to come back to Earth. In fact the US Federal Reserve Bank of New York said back in February of this year that consumers have hit a new record at the end of 2023, racking up over $1 trillion of credit card debt. With an average of 22% interest on that debt, well that $125 concert ticket (minus the fees, transportation, food and drink) and seeing an artist you saw two years ago may not be worth it financially anymore.
I can personally attest to this thinking. A few years ago Jack White was playing at an arena just on the outskirts of Denver. I had seen him there a few years ago and the sound wasn’t great. While I think Jack White is one of those locks for the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall of Fame, the ticket + the transportation + not a great venue + my third time seeing him were too many obstacles to overcome for me to shell out the money to see him and I passed on the show. Flip that coin to a show in Boulder later this fall. It’s Hani Rani who I have never seen. It’s a small venue on a Friday night and I was able to get two tickets for under $100. Add in the rest and it’s still a deal to see someone I’ve been longing to see.
The cost of concert tickets like just about everything else in the US economy have risen over the last four years putting these events out of reach for a lot of people. It appears now that even the people who can afford to go are choosing not to. And before you jump to the concert tickets are too expensive because of bots and scalpers (which is in part true) argument, ticket prices have been coming down since 2022, at least in my home state of Colorado.2
To those artists and fans who see things not going as they were expecting, find solace in, like a great deal of things, that we’ve been here before. In the early 90’s we saw a similar trend. Tours being canceled and low turnout at others. The criticism, it’s not worth the money. The only tour that really was memorable during those years was Lollapalooza. So artists and their promoters will figure it out. In some cases here there was an overreach on venue size and ticket prices and to be frank, there are a few egos involved in all of this along the way which could also be to blame.
- Stewart, Emily. June 5, 2024. “It’s not just JLo: Why big musical acts can’t sell out concerts anymore”. Business Insider. https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/its-not-just-jlo-why-big-musical-acts-cant-sell-out-concerts-anymore/ar-BB1nFgyV#image=1 ↩︎
- Yamasaki, Parker. November 23, 2023. “It’s expensive to go to concerts in Colorado. Let’s dig into why.” https://coloradosun.com/2023/11/28/colorado-concerts-tickets-price/#:~:text=That%20was%20true%20in%202021,leveling%2Doff%20of%20ticket%20prices ↩︎
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