ARE WE BEING PRICED OUT OF LIVE MUSIC?

The release of festival tickets usually injects a bit of joy into gloomy winter months, but this year, many major UK festival tickets have crept past the £300 price mark for the first time, confirming a sad trend – the increasing unaffordability of live music

The promise of sun-soaked evenings filled with live music has long provided comfort to fans across the UK – but speak to even the most casual of gig and festival goers and they’ll probably lament the recent uptick in ticket prices. Even Swifties have loudly bemoaned the amount of money they’ve dropped on the upcoming Eras Tour (happily it isn’t until August, by which time it shall be free according to girl maths!). 

Take a rear pitch ticket to see pop peer Harry Styles play Wembley Stadium, for example, which last summer cost £85.65 - a tenner more than it had the summer before. Around the corner, 5 Seconds of Summer played Wembley Arena in June 2015; a first tier seat had cost £32.50 then, rising to £35 for the same level seat at their O2 Arena show the following April. On a nostalgia tour, a friend and I battled a surprisingly vicious presale to nab tickets to their O2 show last October – and to sit in the same section seven years on, we paid a whopping £52.55. 

Of course inflation is a factor at play (according to the Bank of England, £35 in 2016 equates to £45.90 in October 2023 - about 87% of what we paid), but the jump was still jarring. For Olivia Rodrigo’s O2 shows in May, a standing ticket will cost £92.95; that’s over two and a half times the price of seeing Halsey there in March 2020.

Photo credit: Caitlin Chatterton

The harsh reality is that concerts becoming less and less affordable is only damaging accessibility to live music. “I can’t afford to make a day of it like I used to,” says Daisy West, a 21-year-old music fan from Nottingham. “I have to get seats based on what’s cheapest, not what would make the gig more enjoyable.” Years ago they could justify coughing up around £20 a pop to stand in line and see most of their favourite acts from the pit. But now, as it often costs multiples of that amount for the ‘cheap’ seats alone, even prioritising a few shows is becoming a privilege that’s denying a lot of people the experience altogether. 

Aimee Dunn, a 19-year-old gig-goer from Antrim, agrees: “I am going to fewer concerts, as I usually like to get seated tickets,” she said. “Recently I have found that standing tickets (which used to be more expensive than sitting) are now cheaper. A seated ticket ranges from £60-£100; if I had bought a seated ticket a year ago it would have been £30-60.”

Similarly, the festival tickets that have gone on sale in recent months are also more expensive than in previous years. Three nights of camping at Reading & Leeds will now set you back £325, a hike of more than 20% from 2023. For a festival that’s mostly attended by teenagers, that price tag feels particularly hefty and risks pricing young people out of what’s long been considered a rite of passage for many post GCSE music fans. Wilderness is also up to £220 from £199.80 for a weekend of camping; Isle of Wight Festival has risen by 25% to £269.95, and a weekend at Latitude has risen by nearly 36% to £308. 

“I do generally feel like live music is mostly worth spending money on,” says 21-year-old Rachel Wallbank, a student from London. “Often I’ll buy tickets even if it seems expensive – she says. “It depends on the type of music and how much I like the artist. Some festivals are getting insanely expensive though, so I go to way fewer of those and pick a couple I really want to go to. I’m way more selective with festivals than I am with concerts.”

Glastonbury has apparently levelled at £355 after its hoist last year – but £355 is still a lot of cash. When the rise was announced, Emily Eavis took to Twitter (X) to explain: “We have tried very hard to minimise the increase in price on the ticket,” she wrote, “but we’re facing enormous rises in the costs of running this vast show, while still recovering from the huge financial impact of two years without a festival because of Covid.” Alarmingly, inflation research has suggested that tickets for the iconic event could start hitting £869 by 2050 if things continue the way they’re going. 

Between 2018 and 2021, the cost of attending major festivals rose at the same rate it would have if their 2014 prices grew in line with inflation. However, since the pandemic, the gap has increased sharply, with festival producers suffering the same problems as music venues. Many freelancers were left without an income; in 2021 UK Music reported that employment in the industry had fallen by 35% between 2019 and 2020, with many people then applying for work outside of music. The drop in available workers, combined with the ongoing cost of living crisis, means that people’s rates are necessarily higher than they used to be. Energy bills have also soared in every sector: in August 2022, the average price per megawatt-hour was nearly 670% what it had been in August 2013.

All these rising production costs mean it’s hardly surprising that the amount leaving our bank accounts is also higher. It doesn’t feel as though anyone is winning, though. In 2014, the Association of Independent Festivals noted that ticket prices had gone up by an annual average of 6.3% since 2008. They cited growing artist fees as one of the driving factors behind that rise; at the time, Festival Republic’s managing director Melvin Benn “estimated that the rise in headliner fee between 2004 and 2014 [was] 400%”

However, artists on smaller stages are still struggling. Since streaming decimated record sales, live music has become an increasingly important income stream, but it’s far from healthy. After Billy Nomates received online abuse for performing without a backing band at Glastonbury last summer, music industry consultant Chris Sheehan pointed out the potential financial challenges of producing a more elaborate set. 

Outside of festival season, venues are also struggling. 125 venues around the UK have closed in the last year, and in 2022 the Music Venue Trust (MVT) surveyed grassroots venues and found that their average profit margin was 0.2%. 

“My main concern is for the survival of small venues and the opportunity for new bands and musicians to be able to develop and play to an audience,” says 62-year-old Debora Griffith, a music fan from Hampshire. “Most of my most memorable live music experiences have been in small local venues, not huge arenas or stadiums. We need to save them.”

A spokesperson for Ticketmaster, who have been partnered with MVT since 2016, says: “Most recently we launched an MVT upsell on our website, enabling the millions of fans who buy tickets from us to make direct contributions to MVT. We will be matching all donations and will continue to run this upsell every year in our ongoing efforts to protect these essential cultural spaces that are so vital for the entire live music ecosystem.”

For now, the ever-increasing cost of live music – especially festivals – are pushing these events further and further from people’s grasp. Forking out upwards of £50 for an arena show is becoming the norm – something simply out of reach for so many people living in the UK – and festival prices are far outstripping budget airline jaunts to Europe. While Fyre Festival proved that some people are willing and able to spend any amount of money for the bit, for most of us that isn’t possible, and the inaccessibility of real life tunes is a real and growing concern. 

t’s a concern, too, for artists and venues that aren’t backed by huge companies ready to foot the increasing costs. As the price of gigging rises and grassroots venues continue to shut their doors, it will only get harder for new independent acts to break out. 

But all is not lost: small venues around London, including the likes of Omeara and the Shacklewell Arms, do still have free gigs in their schedules, and tickets for this year’s Dot to Dot Festival are a fair £30. If you live outside of a city, though, that may be small consolation for the broader trend of accessible live music stretching ever further out of reach.