Isnt them being about to charge a high price and still sell out the definition of supply and demand? Not trying to be snarky, just trying to figure out if you meant something else.

The Eras Tour showed just how much fans were willing to pay for live events…

i’m not a Swift defender, but her tour shows how much HER fans are willing to pay for tickets to her show. Look up the list of shows and tours being cancelled because of poor ticket sales.

It’s the popularity of the sport (whether it be the for actual game or gambling) that is driving the price up.

It’s just a wealth inequality thing. As more money gets concentrated into a smaller number of people there is less incentive to design products or experiences for the masses.

Tbh I don’t care if they charge a lot of tickets. I just wish it was affordable and convenient to watch all the games.

Luckily I live in AZ as a Suns fans and most are games are free on TV and the owner mailed out antennas to everyone who asked.

Got student Timberwolves tickets for $50 during the playoffs

I went to the Mavs v Celtics Finals in Dallas for $270ish for bad seats.

When I checked the prices for Spurs v Knicks Finals in SA they are currently around $800 for bad seats.

wtf

edit- Now that’s it’s gameday the tickets for game 1 have dropped to the mid $600s lol

Crediting taylor swift with the concept of supply and demand is crazy work 

Sports teams were working on this long before Taylor Swift. Theres a reason why stadiums have been getting smaller and not bigger. They want high demand and low supply do they can charge an arm and a leg.

I used to go watch the Oakland A’s in the collusion (which is a giant stadium for Baseball) and you could get \(5 tickets pretty regularly. This year they are playing in Sacramento (10,000 seat AAA stadium) and the tickets are a minimum of \)50 all of a sudden.

Reselling impacted this more than any Taylor swift concert did.

Blaming Taylor Swift for why tickets are $6,000 at MSG…ok

Dynamic pricing, personal seat licenses, and teams/venues partnering with Ticketmaster and Live Nation are things that have been going on for decades now.

Especially during the regular season, let alone playoff series or the championship title games or series, those are always going to be high prices.

Airlines were using dynamic pricing, and still do, well before sports.

Teams withhold some ticket inventory across different pricing tiers and use those tickets to help establish the secondary ticket market. That’s what FIFA is doing now with the World Cup and what LA 2028 is doing. Only is it in America where it is so prevalent.

Anything just to blame taylor swift smh. The fact that there is no regulation is a bigger problem. You’re barking at the wrong tree.

The very shit capitalistic system we have rn allows these artists to charge how much they wanna charge. And it’s not just taylor swift tho, it’s about how renting whole arenas and going through very expensive ticketmaster costs a lot more now so naturally the artists will charge more. Not even mentioning that artists’ management could be greedy as well, not just the artist.

Overall just a very shit system that just enables greed (aka capitalism, fuck capitalism).

Hahaha damn look at the pull Taylor has for men to be blaming a women for this shit 

There are a few million fans and about 15000 available seats.

Do the math.

Basically they are trying to get all of the money upfront instead of scalpers making money on secondary markets.

It’s all about perception of going to events, in my opinion. People will say that ticket prices have increased with supply and demand or inflation or whatever but I think they track pretty closely with the growth of visual social media. “Look at me” social media. I’d be willing to bet that of the 20,000 people in the arena, at minimum 8000 of them are posting about it on instagram, Facebook, etc. Pictures of them in front of the arena, pictures of their view of the court, etc. These pictures will often be accompanied by some douchey little saying or song lyric.

I guess that kind of supports the supply and demand part of it though. But it’s demand from people who are not passionate about sports. It’s just something expensive to do and post about to create the perception of “look at me, I’m a baller.”

The sad part is that half of that arena is filled with overspending broke ass people who have no interest in the team, but they are insecure.

There have been several musical acts this year that cancelled their arena tours specifically because they couldn’t sell tickets. Taylor Swift is on a whole different level.

Don’t blame her. Blame the people that spend ridiculous amounts of money to attend games. The market sets the price. If people keep buying insanely priced tickets then prices will stay high

FIFA sold the USA, Canada, and Mexico that each World Cup match is a Superbowl. And boy were they wrong.

Everything is Taylor Swift’s fault /s

Redditor moment.

My biggest issue is that a lot of the people in the better seats aren’t even there to watch basketball. It’s super weird to me.

It’s all about what they can post on social media.

Every time I go, I’m surrounded by people like this.

If people are paying, it’s pretty unrealistic to expect a for-profit company to charge less.

Started way before Taylor. Sports teams realized that a vibrant secondary market meant they were miss-pricing their tickets to begin with. Instead of pricing games as one of many they priced them as one off events.

I know it’s controversial because there are many reasonable and legitimate reasons to resell a ticket, but ticket resale is a huge problem. As is the online ticket marketplace allowing people anywhere in the world to buy tickets. Ticketmaster being in charge of stadium ticket pricing also doesn’t help.

Just like everything else nowadays, tickets have become commodities and people all over the world trade in them regardless of proximity to the events.

When I was a kid, my family would sometimes decide we wanted to go to a baseball or basketball game. We would drive to the stadium and park, walk up to the ticket booth, talk to a human, and walk away with a set of tickets for relatively cheap. Sometimes we would be getting there basically as the game we’re starting too.

I understand that purchasing tickets online is really convenient. But the price we’ve paid for that convenience is way to high

Honestly the nosebleeds aren’t even worth it. I’ve taken my kid to one single game in nice seats near the middle so that he could experience what it’s like to be at a game. Unfortunately that’s all we can afford and it’s not something we can do every year.

It’s just the gap between the haves and the have nots continuing to widen.

There’s a tipping point.

Maybe we’re close to it.

Maybe we aren’t.

Maybe it’ll take some specific event to galvanize folks.

And by “specific event” I mean something even worse than our country being run by a convicted felon and likely pedophile.

But there is a point where average folks won’t take it anymore.

In all likelihood it’ll require a sustained high unemployment rate. The average person will put up with so much awfulness while trying to make ends meet. But when enough people don’t have a reliable source of income, that’s when the rich will start to worry.

Ticketmaster was offering dynamic pricing long before Taylor Swift decided to go back on tour. Its more or less once the data told them people were willing to fork over an ungodly amount of money for tickets for various sporting events they said okay we’ll keep pushing the envelope.

MOOKIE BLAYLOCK* WAS RIGHT! TESTIFYING IN FRONT OF CONGRESS ABOUT TICKETMASTER BEING A MONOPOLY IN THE DAMN ‘90s!

*“Mookie Blaylock” was the original name of Pearl Jam, who are huge NBA fans, and named their first album “10” after Mookie’s number.

I really think it’s dependent on where you’re watching, for example we had several games this year where you could get a decent ticket for 5 bucks lol

It’s simple supply and demand. There’s no need to overthink this.

In F1 first year in Vegas, the ticket prices and hotels on the strip were extremely expensive initially even for a lot hard core middle-class income F1 European fans who were willing to spend over $10k on certain F1 packages. Prices started to drop down drastically the closer the event arrived since the F1 market decided that those prices will too much for them and everything equalized out.

This is not some conspiracy.

Even if courtside tickets had a face value of $100, the buyer could make thousands selling them. The insane prices are on the secondary market.

There is no way around this.

Even if you were the purest sports fan and got courtside tickets for \(100, you would sell them when someone offered you \)50,000 for them. End of story.

This is just one of the things we have to accept and there is no way around. The league can’t control what others are willing to pay for tickets.

Simple case of riding a moral high horse, nothing to see here. You’d sell your courtside tickets yesterday when someone offers you $75 grand for them.

I went to like 30 Houston Rockets games this season and paid about ten dollars per ticket. Very affordable.

I went to playoff games and the prices were obviously much higher. I paid about 120 for each seat. That’s playoff plus Laker inflation. I wish it was cheaper but not sure how to accomplish that given demand.

Dynamic pricing for sure. As soon as one seat gets taken the rest go up incrementally. Forget about premier events like the championship round.

They didn’t figure out how to charge me shit. I watch it for $0. It’s sad how it is, but I won’t play into it.

I don’t know, I went to a Mariners game last month for $11 on a ticket. It’s the secondary market for premier events that gets crazy.

I’m still surprised consumers aren’t willing to hold the line on what’s basically price gouging. Especially with the home experience being better. Is it really just for the gram?

I went to Game 7, 2005 NBA Finals. I paid \(75 for section 200 seats. Those same seats I looked up for Game 1 this year and they are \)800-900

In 1999 I went and waited in line overnight for Finals tickets and got 20th row baseline seats for \(50 each for Games 1 and 2. Now if I want nosebleeds in the next to last row of the upper deck on the sideline I'm looking at about \)1000 a ticket on ticketmaster. Yeah think I’ll watch these Finals from home, I’m not on the top branch of the k-shaped economy.

I can still go to a Mets game for $15. 

But it’s the Mets.

Corporations ruin everything

The cheap seats didn’t go anywhere they are still there. Simply fewer of you can afford the cheap option, because many Americans are becoming increasingly poorer. It’s called getting left behind

Not me. They can’t charge me nearly anything. I’m not buying it. Someone else is. 

Weird way to introduce Taylor discourse

I wanted to go to the Auburn Baseball Super Regional this upcoming weekend and the get in price in an admittedly small stadium was over $500. For a shitty seat at a COLLEGE BASEBALL GAME.

If not by price people are willing to pay, how would you determine who should go game? If tickets are too cheap then you will have a shortage of open tickets because people will just buy them without thinking whether or not they want to go.

Your last paragraph is making the same point twice. Taylor Swift took advantage of supply and demand

It’s not supply and demand because the leagues hijacked the ticket selling sites and also grabbed complete control of the tickets themselves when they went fully digital. The deck is stacked the whole way down and you’re getting fuck by more than 1 entity every you try to buy a ticket.

It’s the internet and the cost of travel going down relative to inflation. It’s really simple. Buying a ticket became as easy as pulling out your phone and that was the moment prices began to surge.

Attending games is fun. but if they’re gonna jerk us with pricing, then stream it and fuck them

We’ve been in the post COVID live event boom but it’s starting to slow down, especially concerts. I bet sports will feel it soon.

It’s the same with everything.

“Data” along with differentiated pricing has basically eliminated Consumer Surplus that used to more commonly exist, we all pay much closer to the maximum price we’d be willing to pay for EVERYTHING.

Whether it’s basketball tickets, a hamburger from McDonald’s, coffee from Starbucks or soup from the grocery store.

Companies have gotten VERY good at price discrimination and finding ways to make people who are willing to pay more pay more for what they want. If you’re frugal, it’s tougher to find deals out there.

It sucks to defend the venues, but with resellers and third-party-platforms, I don’t see lowering prices at the venue side without capping profits on the resale side doing anything but allowing resellers to be the ones to capture the demand-generated value.

Not all sports. I can get behind home plate at coors field for less than 50 bucks. 

Really good article. Very detailed and organized.

I just don’t know why politicians don’t crack down on resellers and introduce some reasonable limits to how much of a premium one is allowed to resell at. That literally is the easiest freaking way to get people to root for you

No one needs to go to a basketball game so I really do not care.

Some of the price gouging around airline travel is something we really need to think about as a society

Ban resellers - tickets can only be sold at face value, and the platform can 10% of that.

It’s supply and demand. Demand for the most popular entertainers has increased immensely because of social media winner-take-all effects for user attention, and supply has remained constant because venues can only be so big and singers/athletes cannot just spend more time touring/playing games (and in the case of sports, people would accuse the league of watering down the product).

Cheats depend on city and quality of team …. It here’s the weird part … I’m in denver and went to like 20 nuggets games last year … paying 10-50 a seat using game time after game starts I go outside wait then buy halfway through first quarter … getting good seats most of the time … if u buy months early your gonna get fu..ed on price … also the teams with bigger fan base always gonna price Gouge, my friend a lakers fans and always gets beat up on price like $500 a seat for decent seats … lol fuck that

it’s supply and demand but ticket brokers are controlling everyone’s perception of what supply/demand is, because all we see is what you can buy… there’s no bid/ask type of marketplace except for eBay, which would be much better for determining true demand

I paid 20 dollars for sixers tickets during the season

I think social media is more responsible, a lot of people want to be at a limited event just to clout chase even if they have little interest in the sport.

you have a dizzying intellect

by that I mean you’re an idiot, please don’t post anymore thank you. Apparently Taylor swift invented supply and demand

Am I naive in thinking it really is simply supply and demand? Wealthy inequality has grown. The amount of millionaires and billionaires has grown significantly. The amount of people has grown. At the same time, the amount of seats in your typical arena has remained the same. There’s simply more people desiring the same amount of seats.