Concerts have been a vital part of the music industry for years. Seeing your favorite artist live is one of the most crucial parts of feeling connected to music. Artists enjoy connecting with their fans just as fans enjoy connecting with their favorite artists. But it seems that as the years pass by, concerts are getting more and more expensive. So much so, in fact, that the average person can’t afford a ticket without sacrificing something else. 

By now, most people know about the recent Taylor Swift ticket fiasco. Swift’s Eras Tour tickets averaged from $215 all the way to $500, and that is not counting ticket scalpers who buy tickets in bulk to resell them for more money. 

According to exacthowmuch.com renting a stadium for an event can cost anywhere from $1 million upwards to $3 million. And that’s only the money going to the stadium. 

Take Soldier Field for example. Swift will perform three nights there, and all the tickets are sold out. Over those three days, roughly 124,947 people will be attending. If each person paid $215 for a ticket, those three days would rack up a whopping $26,863,605! Of course, not all of this would be going to Swift, but that is still a crazy amount of money. In fact, Billboard predicts that Swift will make $591 million throughout the whole tour. 

This begs the question: Is there a solution to these expensive prices? 

I calculated how many dates Swift would have to perform at a venue designed for live music like Ravinia to hold all the people that are going to the Soldier Field concerts, because I reasoned that renting out a smaller venue may decrease the prices of the tickets. Turns out, Swift would have to play 37 dates at that one venue. This is totally unfeasible for an artist; she’d be touring for years at that point. Plus, it may not decrease the price at all due to the more limited availability. 

In the end, other than the people Swift has to pay for working for her, is it really necessary to have such an expensive price for the tickets? According to Cosmopolitan, Swift is worth $570 million as of this year. So does she really need that much more money? Of course Swift has the right to make money, and it’s obvious she’s not losing fans any time soon. Swift even publicly complained about the way Ticketmaster handled the ticket sale.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are about 20 more artists I can name off the top of my head that do the same thing with their ticket prices, so don’t think I am just calling out Swift. All I am saying is, and this goes for other artists too, does Swift want to be known as the artist that has good prices for her shows, or does she want to make her fans go broke?