I've never paid more than $40 for a concert ticket. I like to pay $20. I noticed some local ads for the Eagles and the Rolling Stones with tickets costing several hundred dollars a piece (if I'm not mistaken, one of the Stones' tickets was $650).

I'd expect a higher price for a big name band...but...Barenaked Ladies? Pshaw.

I'd take that $400 and get a nice hotel for the weekend, order room service, and play $10 an hour video games on the tv in the suite. But that's just me. Hehe.

No, darlin', it's NOT just you. I am disappointed that I can't see my boys play their funky music. And dance in their crazy way.

Concerts definately seem to just be getting higher. I guess they're still filling the stadiums or they couldn't keep charging that much. I guess if its just someone that you would be sad if they died in a plane crash and you never got to see them, you should just bite the bullet and buy the ticket. If your life wouldn't be ruined, then you should spend your money elsewhere.

The most I spent was $150 for me and my husband to see Jimmy Buffett, Alan Jackson and George Strait. And we were so far in the nosebleeds, it was ridiculous but I had a blast even though Jimmy buffett was only 1/2" tall.

BTW, Barenaked Ladies played at TCU maybe a year or so ago and I know they weren't that expensive here. I guess their price is going up.

Should we even get started talking about the $12 parking and the fees that front gate or ticket master tack on and make it go up another $50?

It is odd but single bands headlining their own shows tend to be higher than big festivals and groups. This gets worse for bands who are really only making money by touring since they haven't released an album recently. That being said, 89 bucks is waaay over the top for these guys...

Supply and demand has caught up with the touring industry. When I was growing up a band (and their label) expected to lose money on a tour. Album sales were the bread & butter of the industry and the more you toured, the better your albums sold.

I'm not sure where the trend shifted, but now touring is where the money is and CD sells take a distant second in terms of money making parts of the business. Both, of course, make money, but the bands themselves seem to get a better cut of the touring pie than they do from CD sells.

I like the BNL, but they've never been on my list of "gotta see" bands. There are only a handful of bands I'd pay over $100 for, and they ain't one of them.

Dear lord, singerwho? How are things up there in ------?

That out of the way, BNL are good, but not that good. 2-4 for tickets, plus parking, plus snacks, t-shirts, babysitting for all four young uns.......sheesh.

I'd buy 200 dollars worth of CDs, see a 20 dollar concert, and think happy thoughts about all the money I saved. (by switching my insurance to Geiko! (which I would never do after the fiasco I had with them in Monterey, USAA rules!!!))

Yeah, I am trying to repent of my non-blogging ways.

Anyway, BNL is great in concert. They are spontaneous and crazed onstage. Totally worth it the other times I have seen them.

But I shall have to give this one a miss. Life goes on.

And life here in ------ (aka Maryland) is good, SNS. Nice to hear from you too.

--the cheapest seats I found online were $89 each! The most expensive seats were over $200 each!--

What website did you go to? On the Ticketmaster site, tickets for the Baltimore show are $42 and $52. After their surcharges you're probably looking at $50 to $60 a ticket.

Even their New Year's show is on sale for only $75. Still less than $89.

Good luck.

>> --the cheapest seats I found online were $89 each! The most expensive seats were over $200 each!--

>> What website did you go to? On the Ticketmaster site, tickets for the Baltimore show are $42 and $52. After their surcharges you're probably looking at $50 to $60 a ticket.

Umm, the show is sold out, and unless you go to a scalper you're not getting any hits on Ticketmaster. And that's where I got the $89 price.

Scalpers, or scalper style sites (there are several out there, not remembering the names right now, except for "StubHub") are in it to make a buck.... as much as I hate it, unless the venues/artists institute some common sense ticket selling rules, the situation will never get better.

Heck, even at $42 and $52 face, by the time you add the Ticketmaster charges, taxes, and other stupid fees, the prices are near $62 and $72 anyway. Add in a small profit for the scalper and the prices hit the levels you have posted.


Personally, I'm like several of the other folks above. I'll take a heckuva lot less money and spend it to buy some concert DVDs, several CDs or other such things I can use to enjoy the music/performances without paying the big money.

I've paid what seemed like big money along the way to see Springsteen (at least twice, once during the Born in the USA stadium tour which did truly rock!, and back when he got the E Street band back together with him as a sort of reunion tour in 1999). For Springsteen 1999 I paid about $100 for my ticket, and went with my boss from my employer at the time. She paid for her own ticket also. Not great seats, but not that bad either. MCI center in D.C. If you've been there (noting that you're from Maryland area, so you may have been there), you know that the upper deck seats are up there pretty good. Even front row seats up at that level are fairly high up.

I also paid top dollar (at the time) for tickets for U2, the Rolling Stones (actually I was much more interested in their opening act, Counting Crows who were just getting to be big at the time), Pink Floyd (went with a bunch of guys I worked with, great show, for the money it was probably worth it).


There's a batch of other shows I've seen, but really most of them never quite seemed to be "worth it". The tickets were relatively expensive each time, or at least most times. The best deals I ever got were from HFStival tickets just before they started doing them at the stadiums all the time. Back then they had at least a dozen different bands put on the show at the P.G. Equestrian center. The tickets were almost dirt cheap. Worth paying at least twice as much for one of the bands, much less seeing 12 or more bands in a day for the price.


My musical tastes have changed over time though (very much so really), and lately I've been more into "Today's Country" music and there I've had a few bargains come up for me. Sara Evans at the Maryland State Fair last year. Great show, free once you paid for the admission to the fair. I'd have paid a helluva lot for a concert by her, so I was thrilled to get to see her for free.

I've seen some shows done at Six Flags America near D.C. Trace Adkins was there and did a nice set for free, once you paid admission to the park. If you paid for a season pass in the discount period, you'd have full use of the park any time you wanted during the season, and getting to see the concert for free once there was cool.

Back in 1999 I was able to take my daughter to see Brittany Spears when she was still primarily bubble gum poppy, rather than slutty trashy. Again, she was doing a Six Flags show. As it turned out, she did the show at Six Flags over Texas (Dallas) when I was there doing a lot of Y2K roll-out work for a client of a former employer. We got tickets for that show dirt cheap (if you got the tickets in advance you were guaranteed to get into the show and didn't have to fight to get tickets once admitted into the park).


Anyway, as I've grown older, I've mellowed much about concerts. Sporting events seem to be a much better deal to me, so I've been wasting my money there, rather than on concerts. I've also gotten to be pretty cheap about buying CDs and music in general. I pay for satellite radio (mostly to get sports programming on it), and listen to a lot of music that way. If there's something by an artist I really like, then I might buy it, but most of the time I pass knowing that I'll be bored to death with the music soon enough anyway (since all radio stations over-play the crap outta stuff).

Umm, the show is sold out, and unless you go to a scalper you're not getting any hits on Ticketmaster. And that's where I got the $89 price

Well, there you have it--you must now just dedicate your life to getting concert tickets before they sell out Seriously though, you can set Ticketmaster to email you updates of certain bands so that you will know when their tickets are on sale.

I've seen a bunch of shows in the past six months, and the only one that I spent more than $100 a ticket on was U2 (at Madison Square Garden, and totally worth it!). The rest were right around $35 with all taxes and fees and whatever--but I got most of them due to the Ticketmaster alerts.