The real reason it costs so much to go to a concert

You’re in a crowd of tens of thousands of fellow fans. The band starts playing your favorite song. Everyone screams. You will never, ever forget this moment.

Seeing a musician you adore live can be a transcendent experience. But getting to that moment has become a nightmare because getting tickets that won’t completely bankrupt you now requires weaving through an obstacle course. Tickets to a popular show dropping means pandemonium. You might get errors when you try to purchase tickets, and can spend hours waiting in a virtual line to grab any available tickets you can. Then the entire ticketing site crashes, apparently due to too many bots trying to access the site.

On resale sites, tickets are already exponentially costlier than what you were prepared to pay. But you’ve been waiting years for the chance to see them up close — so you shell out the money. In 2024, that can mean hundreds of dollars, even thousands, for the best available seats. The very best tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, as of last year, were sold on resale sites for as much as $200,000 — enough to pay for a four-year private college with no financial aid.