Everyone who has ever told you not to give up on your dreams has clearly never sat in a queue for Noah Kahan tickets. If Ticketmaster is telling you you're 63,000th in line, do not stay in line — you will end up waiting an hour, and there will be no tickets left. I’m saying this from personal experience, and if you're reading this, chances are you’ve had the same one. I count among my losses the great Ticketmaster wars for Olivia Rodrigo, Harry Styles, Dua Lipa and most recently Noah Kahan.
All of which begs the question: are concerts inaccessible these days?
My answer would be yes. Either due to sheer demand, Ticketmaster allowing scalpers to buy up every last ticket or artists pricing tickets at unreasonable amounts, concert tickets are no longer accessible to regular fans. And before you say, “Not my favorite artist,” it’s probably them too. Noah Kahan promised tickets to his "front porch” seating area, closest to the stage, for all stops on his upcoming tour would be $100 for select fans. A week after both the presale and general sale for the shows, these $100 tickets are nowhere to be found, with reports that front porch tickets for Fenway Park reportedly sold for $318.
Despite Kahan’s transgressions, Harry Styles is the biggest offender by far. Fans logging onto presale for his upcoming tour found themselves staring down prices of $1,000 for lower bowl tickets at his Madison Square Garden tour stop. Resale prices for tickets closer to the stage were reported to be going for upwards of $3,000. If I had been able to even get past the queue for Harry tickets, I wouldn't have been able to afford a ticket on top of travel costs to New York (Oh yeah, his only tour stop in the United States is 30 shows at MSG).
An affordable price to me is $50, which I paid to see Phoebe Bridgers in 2022. I’m sure by her next tour, tickets will be far more because that's just the stage of society we’re in. For an artist I really like, I’ll pay $150 per ticket. That’s what I paid to see Noah Kahan at Alpine Valley in 2024, though I never did end up seeing him.
Blame the price hikes on Ticketmaster and resellers all you want, but the government is taking steps to curb those issues. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is currently suing Ticketmaster for deceiving consumers with lower advertised prices than what they actually will pay and falsely claiming to put limits on how many tickets one person can buy. The FTC has also accused the company of working with resellers to bypass those limits.
As a consumer, there’s only one thing you can really do to attempt to change skyrocketing concert ticket prices and lower availability: stop buying tickets. Kathryn Dickel, co-founder and CEO of Midwestix, an independent ticket-buying platform for smaller artists, told Pitchfork in 2023 that, “the only way consumers are gonna change it — because we’re in a capitalist system — is they’re just not gonna go to the concerts anymore.” So in reality, every time you avoid the queue, you're protesting its existence.
At the end of the day, it’s time for artists to actually take a stand and make concerts accessible for everyone who's not super rich. This goes beyond simply limiting resale. It means pricing tickets at a level that a college student can actually afford. For ultra-rich celebrities like Harry Styles (net worth $296 Million) and Taylor Swift (net worth $2 billion), a $100 ticket is a drop in the bucket, and for venues like MSG will still equal $2 million.
For now, most of my favorite artists are in the doghouse, and until I see that $100 ticket, that will continue.
Gabriella Hartlaub is the former arts editor for The Daily Cardinal. She has also written state politics and campus news. She currently is a summer reporting intern with Raleigh News and Observer. Follow her on Twitter at @gabihartlaub.
