CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

The reality now is the ticket sellers and bands are the main scalpers and everyone else are now secondary scalpers.

Now that tickets are all electronic and the ticket sellers operate secondary markets there is no "face value" anymore and pricing is dynamic. Not all tickets are released at once and many are offered at "platinum" prices at first.

All through the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's and 00's concert tickets were around $40-$50 in 2025 dollars, now that is just the service charge. Just go on eBay and look at some ticket stubs then put the price / date into the CPI calculator.

It turns out that the bands couldn't beat the scalpers so they became the scalpers, charging outrageous prices with the assistance of the ticketing companies.

So stopping bots isn't as important as it was when CAPTCHAs were effective, since there is a lot less money on the table for professional scalpers to capture.

Concert tickets are still that low, you just can't go to stadium shows for supermassive artists at that price. A saturday night at a popular EDM venue with a 2k capacity headlining an artist with ~500k monthly listeners on Spotify will run you about $25 for the floor or $50 for VIP. A "sticky floor" bar venue ticket with a capacity of maybe 300 for an alt-z band with somewhere in the realm of 250k-3M monthly listeners on Spotify will run you about the same.

Being up at the rails at a Girl in Red concert set me back $60 at a 5k person venue. If you want to see supermassive artists for that kind of unit price you have to "buy bulk" and go to festivals.

Most of my concert tickets are still priced around $40 inclusive, after taxes and fees, and from the likes of LiveNation, Etix, DICE, AXS, and so on.

All my friends that complain about the rising cost of concerts tickets don’t realize that they just see the same old bands year over year. These scrappy up and coming bands that they saw as a kid aren’t scrappy anymore. That’s why blink-182 can charge $700 for the pleasure and still sell out — because most of their fans are in their late 20s or 30s, have disposable income, and number in the millions.

Go to a $20 show for a band today and who knows, maybe they will charge you $700 in 20 years. Plus you can tell everyone that you saw them before it was cool. /s

In some cases, but in most cases even well known bands that had been around had tickets that highschoolers could afford. Only a handful of bands were like triple the average and would have been the likes of Rolling Stones Springsteen and such, but aside from them, no, most well known bands were not selling tickets at ludicrous prices.

I might have given blink-182 as an extreme example but $80 for tickets is still selling for a lot more than the $7 cash at the door that I paid when I saw them in a tiny skate shop 10 years ago.

Many bands don’t make it all of course, but I can still pay $7 cash for shows today at that shop and some of them are going to be able to charge $80 in a few years.

I don't think that when people say "a concert" they mean something that happens every Friday and Saturday night. I think it means a unique event.