PreferredSeat.com Blog

There are a slew of articles coming out about the price of concert tickets in 2011 and they all have the same theme coincidentally. They say concert ticket prices will come down in 2011 because of the fewer fans and disastrous 2010 concert season with poor attendance and canceled tours.

They do speak a bit of the truth but about the only tickets that are really going to get cheaper are for the acts that are not the most popular and older acts that have been around too often. Even then it will be mainly the cheapest seats in the rear that are being discounted, not anything up front near the stage.

Of the concert tours announced and on sale already for 2011, almost all are more expensive, not less in 2011. Take a look at the 2011 ticket prices for Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Rush, Eric Clapton, George Strait, Kenny Chesney and U2 and you’ll find that they are either the same price or more than they charged in 2010.

But ZZ Top and a number of other acts will have tickets as cheap as $10. They had those kinds of ticket deals in 2010 when they had specials for lawn tickets just to get more fans in the door to buy beer so the prices are nothing new, just the packaging. And ticket brokers like PreferredSeat.com were selling many concert tickets for less than face value in 2010 even for many of the bigger acts.

And you can see the guys from Live Nation and Ticketmaster sitting around in a room trying to figure out how to get the most $$ out of the fans for the least amount of effort to make the stockholders happy once again.

But it won’t work this year any more than it did last year. 2011 will be another tough year for concert fans in general and unless ticket prices come down more than what they’re offering there will be more acts canceling tours again this year. It’s time for the artists to stop thinking of just themselves and maybe strip down the tour for a year and really save the fans some money.