‘Tickets have become status symbols’: From Harry Styles to Taylor Swift, why is live music bigger and more expensive than ever? | Pop and rock

SBeing assigned a venue like the O2 Arena in London was considered a high point in the artist’s career. Now, just sell one The night there might seem a bit depressing. Ray and Olivia Deen will play six nights each at the 20,000-capacity venue this year; Dave is playing four, Ariana Grande is playing 10. Harry Styles, not to be outdone, last month announced an astonishing 30 dates at New York’s Madison Square Garden, with more than 11 million people applying for advance access, plus a record 12 nights at Wembley Stadium: the most in a single leg of a tour. Taylor Swift only managed eight.

Swift’s Eras tour, which has grossed more than $2bn (£1.6bn), no longer seems quite so outlandish: Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres tour ran for four years and grossed $1.5bn, and the Weeknd’s After Hours Til Dawn tour also spans four years and has passed the $1bn mark. It’s imperative that world leaders get involved in the battle for tickets, with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum asking South Korean President Lee Jae-myung to help book more BTS shows in her country, just as then-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly asked Swift to come to Canada. Meanwhile, the Singapore government has paid for SWIFT’s six offerings in the country to be exclusive to Southeast Asia.

Styles and Swift now have generations of dedicated fans who come to see them every time they tour. But this does not fully take into account the volume of demand. Why do superstars feel bigger than ever, and are they in danger of dominating the rest of the live music industry?

“Post-Covid, there was so much pent-up demand that when arenas and stadiums could open, there were a significant number of people who wanted to experience that again,” says Emma Bownes, senior vice president of venue programming at AEG — the world’s second-largest events company after Live Nation — Last year was the busiest ever for the AEG-operated O2 Arena, which hosted 239 shows, and Bownes doesn’t expect any slowdown. “We’re looking forward to a really busy 2026, and we’re booking for 2027 now.” “Because of the demand, agents and promoters are booking tours much earlier than they used to, and they’re using parts of the calendar they never used before,” she says. “Artists used to play festivals in August, but this August we have 10 shows with Ariana; we have Summer Walker and A$AP Rocky.”

Archie Marks, a 20-year-old university student from Birmingham, is one of those driving the demand: he says he goes to “most of the big pop concerts that are attended by a lot of gay people,” and estimates he has been to about one show a month in 2025, as well as a few stadium shows throughout the year. Going to concerts is expensive, of course, and Marks says he “don’t spend a lot of money on clothes or anything, and I keep my food store for basic necessities,” and most of his disposable income from his hospitality and teaching businesses goes to tickets. He points out that the increase in popularity of these events “has a lot to do with TikTok,” especially since clips of artists bringing in special guests, or debuting new songs, tend to go viral on the platform, “creating FOMO,” which leads to increased demand for tickets.

Marx uses his younger sister as an example. “I love her to death, but she has no musical taste. She listens to musical theater albums and that’s it,” he says. But when Sabrina Carpenter toured the UK in 2025, his sister wanted to go to the show, even though she was “really cut off” from Carpenter’s actual music. He says the same goes for Styles’ upcoming tour. “It’s about social media having access to something no one else has, or wanting to be the first person to have access to it,” he says.

One artist manager I speak to on the condition of anonymity — whose background is in live events and working with arena-selling artist — says the coveted ticket has become “a status symbol: to say you were on an Eras or Beyoncé tour, that’s huge.” While she feels the demand for tickets is “a good thing for the music industry,” she is concerned about the smaller artists on her roster, who are still playing stages and clubs, and whose concerts fans may be ditching for higher-priced arena shows. “Some of these tickets are up to $600. They take money out of people’s pockets, and in the United States, there’s only so much money available.”

More artists like Styles are opting for residency tours, where they may settle into one arena or stadium for a few nights at a time, just as Adele has done with 10 consecutive dates in Munich in 2024. Residency shows require less muscle, as the show’s elaborate set-up and production only need to be set up and packaged once. Such shows pass the cost of travel onto the consumer, rather than the artist’s own touring production, which means more financial outlay for audiences.

Because of these costs, Marks says that when artists play arenas and stadiums, and charge “triple-figure” prices, “I expect a budget” — that is, high production values, with dancers, costumes, sets, and more. Last year, he was impressed by Lady Gaga’s ornate and stunning “Mayhem Ball”, but felt somewhat belittled by a concert at Cardiff’s Lana Del Rey Stadium. “I paid a little more for Lana, and you couldn’t necessarily see where the budget went — the stage show wasn’t very impressive, and the tracklist was a lot shorter,” he says. “I felt like my money wasn’t going toward anything, whereas with Gaga, it felt like that.”

The artist manager says the large-scale band she works with feels that pressure from fans. “People get distracted easily these days – you actually have to put money into the production. There’s more of an expectation than just a band putting on a solid show.” That’s not always easy, she adds, especially since touring costs have remained high post-Covid, requiring a team that can sometimes swell into the hundreds, with specialized lighting techs, managers, stagehands and others to navigate custom productions. “Even on a large scale, if your tour is making millions of dollars, those production costs would be crazy. It’s not like this [artists] They became very wealthy from it. The high-profile, social-media-friendly scene of these shows is putting pressure on independent artists to increase their output as well, she says: “People don’t expect to see just a band anymore.”

Industry-wide demand for concerts in the U.S. has actually “dwindled” recently, says Ariel King, a correspondent for live music trade magazine Pollstar, and points out that there are more shows in stadiums and arenas because the big artists “are the ones who can afford to tour constantly.” It’s tough for mid-level artists touring theatres, who “don’t get as much production, have a limited output, but the costs are still high” – while economies of scale start at the arena and stadium level.

Even if teams try their best, there is no guarantee that the fans will be happy. There was a notable backlash to Styles’ tour announcement, with some fans complaining that there had been an unreasonable jump in prices compared to previous tours: for Wembley Stadium, standing tickets were at least £144, and while some seats were as low as £44, others cost more than 10 times that. Olivia Deen took on Ticketmaster, Live Nation and AEG late last year after tickets for her US tour, which sold out in minutes, appeared in resale outlets at wildly inflated prices (a practice the UK government announced in November it planned to make illegal). The artist manager says it’s “almost impossible” to hold large-scale shows without using a big ticket service like Ticketmaster, due to contracts with some providers. “I was so happy to see Olivia Dean standing up for ticket services,” she says. “I think it will take more and more artists speaking out and coming together and boycotting these services, because they have a monopoly on them.”

However, fans still go out of their way to secure tickets for certain shows; Marks says his mother had “somewhere around 300,000” in the queue for tickets to see Styles in London. But just because a show features an international star, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s better. “I went to see Perfume Genius for £15 in Manchester and it was one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to,” says Marks. “It was just him and his band and a chair. And that was it.” “Immense.”