Quote
Gazza

Quote
tatters

Quote
Send It To me

My Bruce Springsteen stub from 1992 is $25

That was considered "top dollar" at the time, which is why those $32.50 Jethro Tull tickets (see above) seemed so expensive. How much were Stones tickets in 1989? I think it was $22.50 wasn't it? Well, that very same year, I paid $35.00 (face value) to see Lou Reed and John Cale at The Brooklyn Academy Of Music. $35 was an unheard of price for a concert ticket in 1989, but I would have gladly paid much more. You have to be a VU fan to understand what this meant. It was like seeing Lennon and McCartney.

I'm sure it was more because they were charging £20 or more in Europe in 1990.

Who was charging that in europe in 1990?

Oh, I see what you're saying. You think the Stones were charging more than $22.50 in 1989. I don't know. Maybe someone can post a photo of their ticket stub.

Quote
tatters
Any boxing fans out there? (I know Gazza is one) Always wondered why boxing tickets are so expensive. In 1971, ringside seats for the Ali - Frazier fight at Madison Square Garden were $100, or maybe $150. That same year, tickets to The Concert For Bangladesh, also at Madison Square Garden, were $6.50. I never understood that.

Quite a price range for boxing tickets but for the bigger events, the fighters' purses has to be made up by the ticket prices and (in this case) closed circuit costs. There are also several other fights on the bill as well.

Ali and Frazier each got $2.5 million for that fight, which was by some distance the biggest purse in history at that time.

Less overheads for the Concert for Bangladesh - especially as the artists weren't being paid.

Quote
tatters

Quote
Gazza

Quote
tatters

Quote
Send It To me

My Bruce Springsteen stub from 1992 is $25

That was considered "top dollar" at the time, which is why those $32.50 Jethro Tull tickets (see above) seemed so expensive. How much were Stones tickets in 1989? I think it was $22.50 wasn't it? Well, that very same year, I paid $35.00 (face value) to see Lou Reed and John Cale at The Brooklyn Academy Of Music. $35 was an unheard of price for a concert ticket in 1989, but I would have gladly paid much more. You have to be a VU fan to understand what this meant. It was like seeing Lennon and McCartney.

I'm sure it was more because they were charging £20 or more in Europe in 1990.

Who was charging that in europe in 1990?

The Rolling Stones. $22.50 would have been something like £15 at the time. The Stones were charging £10 for the UK dates on their 1982 tour, and with US tickets generally being more expensive than Europe, I doubt very much that they were charging $22.50 in 1989. I'd probably have guessed it'd be closer to $40, if anything.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2012-10-18 05:19 by Gazza.

If The Eagles tour had been a failure, everything would have been different.

hmmm - doubtful. Once the record business collapsed, the concert business became how you made money and so that pressure is inescapable. Plus, as acts started to age the thought began to arise "these guys are going to be gone someday and I'd better see them before they go" which wasn't on people's minds in the 70's







Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2012-10-18 05:24 by Send It To me.

a quick google search for 1989 Stones tickets : Most seem to be $28.50



[www.flickr.com] (cant post the image, just the link - but its $36)

The first tour that I really remember people going "What!?" over ticket prices was the Jacksons "Victory" tour in 1984. Tickets were $30 each, BUT you had to buy them in blocks of four which put the price over the top for a lot of people....

So you see just how expensive those $35 Reed/Cale tickets seemed in 1989.

I remember tickets for Rolling Stones, McCartney and The Who shows in 1989 all being around $30.

Quote
batcave
The first tour that I really remember people going "What!?" over ticket prices was the Jacksons "Victory" tour in 1984. Tickets were $30 each, BUT you had to buy them in blocks of four which put the price over the top for a lot of people....

That wouldn't have even been on my radar, but yeah, $30 was nuts in '84. Not sure what would have been typical then. $17.50 (a guess)?

All those comparatively low ticket prices everyone is citing in this thread from up to 1989 are pre-internet, pre-download prices. Those were the days when people still bought CDs and artists could still make money from albums. Now--guess why--the only way to turn a profit in the music biz is by touring, so the artists make sure they turn their profit any way they can. No one buys CDs anymore, and when you download a song for 99 cents, you're buying a song for the same price a 45 rpm single went for in the 1960s. That's why a concert ticket in many cases is no longer worth the price of admission.

The Eagles ruined concert prices forever. If those shmucks can get $100 plus, anybody can .

Just dug out my ticket stubs from 1989. St. Louis, September 17, 1989, Busch Stadium. Ticket's face value is $31.50, and that was for a nosebleed seat.

And from December 7, 1989, at the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis, face value on my stub is $28.50.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2012-10-18 07:25 by rocker1.

Quote
stonesnow
All those comparatively low ticket prices everyone is citing in this thread from up to 1989 are pre-internet, pre-download prices. Those were the days when people still bought CDs and artists could still make money from albums. Now--guess why--the only way to turn a profit in the music biz is by touring, so the artists make sure they turn their profit any way they can. No one buys CDs anymore, and when you download a song for 99 cents, you're buying a song for the same price a 45 rpm single went for in the 1960s. That's why a concert ticket in many cases is no longer worth the price of admission.

So the explosion in the price of tickets is directly related to the rise of the Internet. I think that's true. Even as late as the Bridges To Babylon tour, during the dawn of the Internet age, Rolling Stones tickets were not unreasonably priced. It wasn't until the No Security Tour that they really skyrocketed.

Ticket mogul Irving Azoff was then best-known as the Eagles manager and just warming up to become a multi-millionaire...thus the Eagles 1994 ticket prices.

I agree that the growing popularity of the Internet caused many bands, managers and promoters to allow ticket prices to raise substantially.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2012-10-18 08:12 by stonesrule.

Paid $60 Australian each for 2 tickets at Enmore theatre in 2003, sold one for $650. Only 1500 seat venue.

you Scalper you!

Going back through some old ticket stubs, it may have been the 1985 Jerry Garcia/David Crosby Holiday Show at Radio City.

In 2006, not including TM service charge fees, I Paid $28.50 for one Beacon 2 - upper level ticket, $30 for Foxboro Stadium tickets, $60 for Baltimore Arena tickets all of these through Ticketmaster not scalpers. The most I ever paid was $500 + TM service fees for a GA upper level standing room only ticket to the Stones concert at "The Joint" in Las Vegas in 2002. Hell that was 10 years
ago and lower level seats were $1000 way back then....



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2012-10-18 07:30 by its good to be anywhere.

eagles didnt start anything,steel wheels tour,atlantic city,150 dollar tix were the start.

The main problem is, concerts are no more for the fan but they are rather social events attended by successful people. Many people do not go out to see the group they love but if some well-known artist's concert is announced they buy tickets because they want to impress their partner/friends/colleagues. Therefore, the expensive packages sell excellently.

Three years ago we attended an open-air Santana concert where 50% of the audience were people who would have liked to see Carlos Santana play the greatest-hits-album they have at home on stage. Even if he had played carbon copies of the studio recordings they would have appreciated it. It was the event to take the lady out.

For the forthcoming Eric Clapton concerts where the normal tickets cost 110 € you can also book the package complete with a selected menu and drinks. This is certainly not intended for the fan to buy but rather for those well-to-to bankers and managers who willingly pay the prices. To me it seems ironic that you even would like to see Clapton playing ('Poor man blues') in a luxury ambience.

No envy here on my side - the age of the rock concerts as we knew them back in the 1970s and 1980 is definitely over, at least for the stars of rock music. If you want to see a decent concert go and buy tickets for Gaslight Anthem - they sell for about 35 €, and hopefully you'll see a group playing for the fans who go to listen to the music and not because there is a banquet going on.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2012-10-19 12:24 by saltoftheearth.

Quote
GuessWho
1976 : paid £3.50 (no booking fees then!) to see The Stones in Glasgow, Scotland in a 3,500 venue (all tickets were the same price)

Just put that figure into an inflation calculator - 2012 equivalent - around £24.00

God yeah.. I must have paid that for Stafford Bingley Hall '76.

I was still at school only had a paper round to fund it as well.

I don't remember feeling ripped off.

I remember I was paying 35p to get into Division One (now Premership) football matches.

Again.. funded by my paper round.

Stuff used to be for working classes, then the corporates took over.

You would have no chance today.

The plebs have been incrementally squeezed since Thatcher got into power.

We are seeing the fruits all around us today.

When people discovered they could burn CD's that were perfect copies of the originals, and there was nothing the manufacturers could do about it. Sony tried, by embedding a virus in their CD's, but they were ordered to stop and repair the damage they had caused.

You couldn't do that with vinyl.

There is a timeline of Glastonbury ticket prices on Wikipedia. You can see the price rise every time. When I last went in 1994, it was about £50 for a full weekend camping ticket. Last time, Glastonbury was near £200. I expect next year, it will be up another 10-15%.

Quote
tatters
So you see just how expensive those $35 Reed/Cale tickets seemed in 1989.

Small venues, though. Those tickets I posted were for stadiums.

Quote
backstreetboy1
eagles didnt start anything,steel wheels tour,atlantic city,150 dollar tix were the start.

This is quite correct. Before the Stones started charging silly money on the No Security tour in 1999, when they played arena shows instead of stadiums between 1989-98 their prices were almost always way above what they were charging for stadium shows. (Las Vegas 94 & 97, MSG '98 etc being examples).

The acid test was when they played the UC in Chicago in March 1998, their final US BTB date. Tickets for that tour were about $65 and they even did a couple of normal priced arena shows that spring. For this show, however, as an experiment (and it was widely touted as such in advance) they charged $300, $200 and $100.

Instead of telling them to go @#$%& themselves, enough fans bought tickets to sell the show out. Seven months later, encouraged by that reaction, the band announced the No security tour for early 1999. 35 arena dates with tickets ranging from $40 behind the stage up to around $300. Average ticket price was around $109. They sold out every show.

The bottom line is that enough fans have encouraged this kind of greed for any unscrupulous performer to milk every last drop from them.

The Stones have been more unscrupulous than anyone else and, it appears, their fanbase has been more eager to buy into it/gullible/desperate. (delete where applicable)

I have the ticket stub for the Stones in 72 Madison Sq Garden - Loge seats - $6.50 US

It's a system of contingent pushing that's become widely 'accepted'. It's based on creating virtual shortages, creating fake exclusiveness through useless package deals, creating panic, being non-transparant and being in control of the entire proces - risk minimised. This allows for sky high prices.

The question is: who was first?
Airlines are pushing their seats the same way.
Trains are too, nowadays
Hotel rooms? Be first, be last, be whatever, or bleed.

And what do you need for visiting a concert?
A concert ticket, a flight and a hotel.
Stress Mach 3.

Quote
trainarollin
Going back through some old ticket stubs, it may have been the 1985 Jerry Garcia/David Crosby Holiday Show at Radio City.

Wow. That's freakishly high for back then. I wonder why. Was it some kind of charity event? I remember paying about 8 bucks to see Crosby solo in 1981. Of course, it is a front row orchestra pit ticket, but I hadn't realized the whole "Golden Circle" seating thing had already gotten started as early as 1985.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 2012-10-18 16:08 by tatters.

Quote
backstreetboy1
eagles didnt start anything,steel wheels tour,atlantic city,150 dollar tix were the start.

The Donald Trump gig. At the time I remember thinking, "Don't they know how uncool that is? How'd Keef ever allow such a thing?" Little did we know that was only the beginning.