Beyoncé fans braced for ticket rush – and high prices
Beyoncé fans have booked the morning off work and cleared their credit cards, as tickets for the star’s latest tour go on general sale.
The Cowboy Carter Tour’s six UK dates at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London in June will be her first shows since 2023’s record-breaking Renaissance Tour, and Ticketmaster says prices range from £71 to £950.
After several days of pre-sales, the general sale starts at 12:00 GMT on Friday. It promises to be a massive day for concert-goers, with a string of high-profile tours launching.
Tickets will also be available for Ozzy Osbourne’s final gig with Black Sabbath plus Kendrick Lamar & SZA, Patti Smith, Beck, Morrissey, Mumford & Sons, Razorlight and Smashing Pumpkins.
One fan told the BBC they were willing to pay up to £2,000 to attend Black Sabbath’s charity concert in Birmingham, which will also feature performances from Metallica, Pantera, Anthrax, Gojira and members of Guns N’ Roses.
“This really is Ozzy’s final show with Sabbath,” said Alex Woodford.
“I know it sounds crazy but I would be willing to pay silly money for it because it’s going to be a once-in-a-lifetime show.”
British Beyoncé fan Ben Archer, who has attended all of her concerts since 2014’s Mrs Carter World Tour, says: “She is the one artist I’m determined to see every time she tours.”
Eleven years ago, he paid £60 for a standing ticket. This year, he paid almost four times that.
“If tickets had always been this expensive I wouldn’t have been able to see her as often as I have,” he says.
“I wonder if the increase in price leads to only the diehard fans (myself included!) attending at the expense of ‘recruiting’ potentially new/casual fans who may be willing to take a punt if it was cheaper.”
Going to big gigs is an increasingly expensive pursuit.
Before the pandemic, the cost of getting into a concert was increasing by 3% to 4% a year, according to Billboard Boxscore, which tracks ticket prices.
That number more than doubled when touring resumed, with prices increasing by an average of 9.9% annually.
The last time Beyoncé played in London, the cheapest ticket cost £56.25, while £2,400 VIP packages bought you a seat on the stage itself. An average ticket cost £139, according to figures from Pollstar.
For this summer’s shows, Ticketmaster says “tickets have been priced in advance for the tour, ranging from £71.60 to £950 (including fees)”, but that doesn’t include VIP packages.
In this week’s pre-sales, regular standing tickets were offered at £224.85 – but standing places in small areas closest to the stage were £858.10.
For some tours, including Beyoncé’s last one, prices go up as they are adjusted, based on demand, due to Ticketmaster’s “dynamic pricing” scheme.
That means fans logging on to claim a seat often don’t know what they’ll be charged.
Fans fight back
One person who’s been trying to combat the uncertainty is Fredrica Fekkai, a Beyoncé fan from Washington, DC, who has been crowd-sourcing data on prices for the star’s new tour.
She said some people who had accessed a fan pre-sale in the US had paid well over the odds – sometimes by hundreds of dollars – but most seats in the UK were within the advertised ranges.
Fekkai decided to collate the data after buying her own tickets for the Cowboy Carter tour. In her city, the ticket seller didn’t have to advertise the base price or mark-ups, and she found the process overwhelming.
“I was on the page for hours, wondering what was a good deal,” she tells the BBC.
“I saw online [that] there was a lot of discussion on who was paying what, but of course, nothing was organised. I’ve worked in business consulting for years, so I’m used to finding the takeaways in messy information.”
After putting out a call on Reddit and TikTok, she received more than 1,000 responses from fans – and plotted the results on a graph to show the variance in price.
She noticed that fans who accessed a pre-sale through Beyoncé’s “Beyhive” fan club often ended up paying more than those who went through pre-sales for sponsors like Mastercard and Verizon.
“The Beyhive sale had a lot of panic buying and/or increased dynamic prices from Ticketmaster/SeatGeek – I think both,” she says.
“They see someone is willing to buy a $100 (£80) ticket for $1,000 (£800), so they offer up that price again and again, and it gets snatched up,” she theorises.
Fekkai hopes fans will use her data to keep track of prices when the general sale begins, and avoid paying too much in the rush to secure tickets.
But why are concerts suddenly so pricey?
Ticketing expert Tim Chambers says the expense of touring has exploded over the past couple of years.
As Beyoncé sings on her latest album, it takes 16 Carriages to ferry her show around the world – and the cost of fuel, accommodation and work visas have all rocketed.
The star also employed 304 people on her last tour, all of whom had to be paid a living wage, even on days she wasn’t performing.
But that’s not all.
“There’s also a certain amount of recuperation from the lost years of Covid,” Chambers says.
“Artists were forced to take a couple of years out, because no-one could tour, but they still had living expenses and lifestyle expenses. So apart from the increase in costs, you’re looking to capture what you can from the live experience.”
However, he notes that artists like Ed Sheeran and Coldplay have made deliberate efforts to keep their shows affordable.
Tickets to see Coldplay at Wembley Stadium this summer start at just £20, with 10% of the total proceeds going to the Music Venues Trust to help young bands at the start of their careers.
But most artists, he says, are “lazy”.
“I mean this in the nicest way, but they want to do as little as possible and get as paid as much as possible.”
Increased costs are also exerting a downward pressure on the rest of the concert industry.
“Every time a major artist announces tickets at £200 or £300, the consumer doesn’t necessarily have that additional amount in their wallet, so they look to cut back in where they can,” says Chambers.
“There is an increasing level of evidence to show that the mid-market and the grassroots market are being squeezed by the success of the top tier.”
Michael Rapino, CEO of concert promoters Live Nation, says high prices are here to stay – but argues that musicians will never match what sports teams charge.
“In sports… somehow it’s a badge of honour that if you spend $7,000 (£5,600) for a Lakers ticket, it’s OK,” he told Bloomberg last year.
“But Sally from the Valley believes that she should see Olivia [Rodrigo] at $79 (£63) because, you know, she broke up with her boyfriend to that music.
“So where do [artists] find that line where it’s accessible, the fan feels connected to them [but] they don’t feel like they’re over-gouging?”
No-one knows, he said, but “it’s slowly moving up over time”.
