Tanaka Paschal, 43, was thrilled to be taking her son to Beyoncé’s final Southern California show on her Cowboy Carter Tour this month. They had missed the Renaissance World Tour two summers ago; tickets had sold out so fast, some fans ventured overseas to catch a gig.
“I thought I was not going to be able to see her, so I jumped on it,” she said.
Paschal bought a pair of floor seats for about $900 total, but like many others, she soon had a bit of buyers’ remorse. In the weeks that followed, she saw the price for similar seats drop by hundreds of dollars, then increase, then drop again.
“It’s frustrating,” she said. “The next time, I’m going to wait until the day of.”
When tickets for big summer tours by acts like Lady Gaga, the Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar and SZA go on sale, the prevailing wisdom is you have to move fast during one of the presales offered by artists and credit card companies or you’ll be shut out.
Most, if not all, tickets are usually snatched up immediately, with prime seats popping up on resale platforms like StubHub or Ticketmaster’s own secondary market at inflated prices. (Fans hoping to see Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour famously didn’t even get a shot at the general on-sale: All the tickets were long gone.)
But things have been different for Beyoncé’s tour this time supporting her Grammy album of the year-winning “Cowboy Carter”; tickets moved during the presales, but a glance at the seat maps on Ticketmaster’s pages later revealed not only a lot of pink dots indicating resale tickets, but plenty of blue dots representing available seats that had gone unpurchased, too. And those prices were notably changing.
The complaints have piled up in news articles and on various social media platforms. Tickets in the 200s section purchased for $700 at first, then $200 weeks later; a seat nabbed for $1,300 that dropped to $800; tickets priced at $380, later priced at half that.
“Beehive presale was a scam,” said Rosalyn Davis, 31, of Los Angeles, referring to early availability for fan club members. She said she bought her ticket for $541 but saw the same seats for $330 a few weeks ago.
In interviews last week, concertgoers shuffling into SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., like Davis recalled — often with horror — waiting in a presale queue and watching prices wildly fluctuate in real time. Or briefly breathing a brief sigh of relief when they secured tickets, only to witness the value of their investment plummet.
“I’ve gotten to a point that I’m no longer going to compete in a presale,” said Annie Rodriguez, who paid around $860 for her ticket (seats around hers fell as low as $500). “As a fan who is signing up for the pre-sale so that you can guarantee a seat, you’re hoping that the artist will be kind to their true fans.”
Rodriguez is a veteran concert goer, and spread out the blame. She cited “dynamic pricing” — face values that change based on demand, which has led to $5,000 Bruce Springsteen tickets and a lot of irked fans. Oasis said it was unaware dynamic pricing was being used for its anticipated reunion tour on-sale last September, where fans groused about carts that doubled in price; Ticketmaster denied dynamic pricing was at play.
Representatives for Beyoncé, Ticketmaster and the concert promoter Live Nation did not respond to requests for comment about the Cowboy Carter pricing. But fans have been quick to blame the two companies, whose merger came under additional scrutiny by federal lawmakers following the Swift debacle two years ago. Last May, the Justice Department sued Live Nation Entertainment, asking a court to break up the company over claims it illegally maintains a monopoly in the live entertainment industry.
Fans are less wont to point the finger at their favorite artists: “I don’t speak ill of the queen,” Rodriguez said. The ecstatic fans streaming into SoFi were largely outfitted in their “Cowboy Carter” finest: glittery cowboy hats, bejeweled denim and sashes.
StubHub and the ticket seller SeatGeek both said average ticket prices for the Cowboy Carter Tour are down from the Renaissance World Tour, but perhaps not as much as people perceive. (An Instagram ad for SeatGeek touted Beyoncé tickets at “Up to 30% Off” on April 29, with the fine print adding, “Ticket prices set by the seller.”) Billboard reported this week that the star’s five SoFi dates grossed $55.7 million off sales of 217,000 tickets.
The average price of tickets sold to the Cowboy Carter Tour for all stops on StubHub is about $295, down only slightly from $320 for Renaissance. SeatGeek said its average price for the latest tour was down about 15 percent compared to Renaissance.
The price drops tend to be more stark in markets where a performer is playing multiple shows. The average cost of a ticket in Los Angeles was $195, StubHub said, with a “get in” figure of about $50. In Northwest Stadium near Washington, where she has two concerts scheduled in July, SeatGeek said the average resale ticket price is much higher — around $443.
“Broadly speaking, pricing concert tickets is extremely difficult, much more so I would say than sports, and especially before the on-sale,” said Chris Leyden, the director of category marketing at SeatGeek, which, in addition to selling tickets on the secondary market serves at the primary seller for venues like Northwest Stadium.
Promoters often try to price tickets to their actual market value to get the most money into artists’ pockets as possible and keep resellers away, said Dan Runcie, the founder of Trapital, a research group focused on music, media and entertainment.
Ticketing, said Stephen Parker of the National Independent Venue Association, has become “a war between multibillion-dollar platforms” who “point fingers at each other about what’s going wrong while fans lose.”
Falling prices for Beyoncé’s latest tour, which begins a run of three shows in Chicago on Thursday night, have allowed at least some fans to feel like winners.
When Lisa Williams, 45, of Monterey County, got into the Ticketmaster presale queue, she saw that the floor seats she wanted for SoFi were $1,200 and up. She kept her eye on the prices, and after a few difficult weeks at work, felt entitled to a vacation.
So she bought a ticket two days before the May 9 show there, near where she had been looking — for $380.
“I do wish that they were cheaper,” she said. “Gone are the days where we’re spending $200 for floor seats. But there’s not much we can do about it. I am grateful that I got in at the end and could reap the benefits of them going down.”
Derrick Bryson Taylor contributed reporting.
Matt Stevens writes about arts and culture news for The Times.
The post How Much Does It Cost to See Beyoncé? It Depends. appeared first on New York Times.
