How to avoid surging prices & scalpers to see your favourite musicians

Have you spent the last few weeks worrying about the forecasted cost of Taylor Swift tickets? Well, we don’t blame you. Live music has seen an ugly boom in pricing in the last few years, but in the past months it’s become incredibly, unbelievably expensive to see live music. Thanks to hefty ticket price hikes, huge demand and the newly introduced dynamic pricing, it’s costing more than ever to get a spot at your fave show. Glastonbury festival recently announced general access tickets for next year would hit an eyewatering £335. And the struggle to land tickets has been felt overseas too — Blink-182 frontman Mark Hoppus couldn’t scoop up tickets to his own show, with the pop punk band’s tickets rocketing up to a hefty $600 in the US.

We’re all feeling the economic squeeze right now, but sky high ticket prices isn’t the only remedy for funding everyone from artists to merch guys. We need to properly pay our industries, but we can’t also risk pricing out lower income communities against poorly regulated ticking infrastructure. But how do we change things then? Well, as 24-year-old Scottish folk singer Iona Fyfe puts it, there are plenty of innovative methods that can be given a try to keep the music scene accessible and affordable. Her first suggestion is the wider introduction of flexible ticketing (“those who can pay a little bit more do and those who can’t pay a little bit less or a donation”), which she implements at her own shows, along with discounted rates for students, youth, unemployed communities and pensioners — a scheme commonplace in cinemas and theatres.

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Another issue that’s hit fans hard is ruthless scalping. Ever wondered what happened to those Rosalía tickets you just missed out on? There’s a good chance they’re being palmed off for twice their value online. As Iona sees it, clamping down on profit buying to sell tickets is one of the only ways to regulate demand. “There needs to be infrastructure to sell on tickets so people aren’t getting scammed,” she explains. “It isn’t going to help your local musician but [it will help with] bigger stadium shows like Taylor Swift who just announced a new tour.”

Ali Grice, a press representative for the UK publications organisation LD Communications, agrees that inflated ticketing has become a “massive” industry issue. To avoid getting caught out, he suggests fans searching for tickets before shows across community Facebook pages and the Twittersphere are great to land “last minute cheap tickets”. With chunky fees following fans around, Ali says a lot of the onus is on the industry itself, focusing on how bands can ease the costs of ticket prices. “Reducing merchandising cuts that venues mandate on touring artists would allow artists to balance the sheets by reducing the overall ticket price,” he explains. “Bands like Porridge Radio have also created ‘honesty systems’ where speculative ticket buyers can access cheaper tickets to their shows through the same portal as everyone else.”

The British rock band came up with the idea, they said, “for people who have not been able to buy tickets due to financial worries.”

While it might not fix all our problems, honesty systems are a sign that a little bit of innovation across the industry can go a long way. In 2019, British rapper Slowthai announced a ‘Bet You A £5er’ tour, selling tickets for £5 in an attempt to draw awareness for keeping fees down, while global star Taylor Swift backed a Verified Fan model for her Reputation tour and the cancelled Lover Festival, to prevent scalpers and encourage fair access to stadium shows for real fans. With adjusted models, there’s a greater chance for all communities to get a fair shot at catching the next big act. To offset gruelling prices, she suggests switching your big tag ticket for Bad Bunny or Glastonbury for smaller venues: “Instead of a £335 Glasto ticket, they could go to 35 smaller venue gigs of emerging artists that only cost £10 a ticket. The fans might actually fall in love with a new favourite artist.”

Shopping around for other artists might not sound like a fair trade-off, but what it does offer a guaranteed fix to show great new talent. But, as lead musician of UK rock band Petrol Girls Ren Aldridge reminds us — there’s a huge difference between big artists and venues compared to small acts and independent scenes. “Independent venues are such a vital part of the music scene and they deserve our support,” she says. If you can’t quite wean yourself off of the festival high just yet though, he suggests seeking out smaller lower-priced festivals like Cardiff’s Sŵn Fest or hunting for free shows and upcoming talent on the events app DICE.

While it might feel like you’re putting in the graft for the shortcomings of an industry, but there’s no guarantee where the next game-changing solution might stem from. For now, perhaps, Ireland has the answer with its three-year Basic Income for The Arts pilot scheme which promises payments of €325 made to 2,000 eligible artists and creative arts workers per week. However, while we can all long for new trialled funding schemes or free travel incentives for young people (as Spain introduced), musician Ren believes the remedy for making music accessible is two-fold: keeping the industry in check while encouraging new ideas and solutions. “Fans and bands are being robbed by the big companies and ultimately the Tory government who created this cost of living crisis,” she says. “Fans deserve affordable gigs and bands deserve to be paid – otherwise, there is no music scene.”

The solutions, if any, on how to keep events affordable long term boils down to work in progress. Having powered through the DIY scene, played in living rooms to festival stages, Ren is appreciative that artists are making the “best” of a rough situation. Finding cheap deals on social media, grabbing DICE tickets for a Rough Trade show, or artists offering exclusive discounted live-streamed links can always fill the gap. So, for now, as prices continue to climb, there’s plenty of hope that live experiences don’t become an experience many can’t afford.