Trending 26th November 2025 by Stellar Magazine

Is (Accessible) Concert Culture A Thing Of The Past?

Maybe

via @arianagrande

Post-Covid concert culture has turned music gigs into something of an inaccessible luxury thanks to extortionate ticket prices and availability.

Seeing your favourite artist in concert is not as simple as it once was. What once was just a fun night-out seeing a singer you love, attending concerts has become an exclusive opportunity reduced to a mere stroke of luck.

Nowadays, if you’re looking to attend a big arena or stadium tour gig, you’ve got to be sure to set aside a figure in the hundreds to afford even one ticket. Not to mention the absolute battlefield that is the Ticketmaster queues…

 

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It’s been reported that concert ticket prices in the UK have increased 521% between 1996 and 2025, and if the prices here in Ireland are anything to go by, we can’t be far off.

For reference, before their return to the stage over the summer, the last time Oasis played Wembley Stadium – a standing ticket cost £44. This time around most fans were paying over £150, not to mention the few who paid over £1000!

Closer to home, Electric Picnic weekend tickets have soared from €175 to €310 since 2006, and a gig in the 3Arena will now set you back at least €70.

While some concert prices in 2025 can be equivalent to a 3-night stay in a hotel, in the 80s you could see some of the biggest musical acts of all time for the same price as a current bite to eat!

 

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While the concept of seeing Michael Jackson for a simple £17.50 may seem like a fantasy (or a scam, if it happened today) this is what music fans once had – concerts that weren’t exactly cheap for the time, but weren’t extortionate either. So, why the change?

Concert ticket inflation is a result of many factors – the main being the platforms we buy our tickets from. When it comes to buying the price is not the only thing you need to worry about, you’ve got to take Ticketmaster queues into consideration… queues which have been known to be 100,000 people long at times.

 

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While Ticketmaster queues are supposed to feature advanced security to ensure efficient bot detection, they have a history of being unreliable for hopeful concertgoers. Thanks to bots and resellers, securing these tickets at a reasonable price has become nearly impossible.

As a result, many fans in the UK and US turn to resale sites like Ticketswap, Viagogo and StubHub as a last resort. These platforms are notorious for extortionate pricing, with the resale value unrestricted.

Believe it or not, nosebleed tickets for Ariana Grande’s upcoming summer tour are being re-sold at a whopping $47,404 in the States – and while of course that is an extreme example, it’s yet another way that concerts are being less and less accessible.

Luckily for us in Ireland, the dreaded ‘dynamic pricing’ has not been introduced on Ticketmaster or Eventbrite. But is it only a matter of time? Dynamic pricing is the new big money-maker from concerts in which the price varies by demand. Taking into consideration the demand from hotels and flight costs around the time of the event – this factor sees ticket prices for major gigs like Oasis and Taylor Swift skyrocket.

It’s truly disheartening to see such greed dominate the culture of live music as we know it. The intensity of ticket pricing and ticket availability has largely erased ‘casual’ concert culture as a form of entertainment, especially when it comes to big artists.

With fans sick of these extortionate prices and tired of losing the ‘ticket wars’ to bots and resellers, hopefully we see a shift in the way these gigs are managed.

Words by Leah Foran