Obscene Ticket Prices Shatter Division Between 'High' and 'Low' Culture
Metallica recently announced a new album and tour. As a dyed-in-the-wool metalhead, I had seen the rest of the “Big Four” thrash metal bands—those being Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax—yet Metallica remained an outstanding experience on my metal concert bucket list. Since the band wouldn’t be stopping in Toronto, I excitedly started planning a trip to Montreal to go see them with a friend in August 2023.
How quickly reality destroys our hopes. The day tickets went on sale, there were still a few hundred seats left by the time I went on Ticketmaster. But the absolute cheapest tickets available for the Montreal show cost $1,061. Immediately any thoughts of seeing Metallica left my head. To hell with that. No band is worth paying that much to see. John Lennon and George Harrison could come back to life to play a Beatles reunion show and I still wouldn’t consider paying even half the money it would cost to see Metallica in Montreal. I am not spending almost an entire month’s rent (an expense that is also obscenely high, but which in that case I don’t have a choice to avoid) to see a concert.
It’s not just Metallica. The same price-gouging is increasingly prevalent every time a major artist announces a tour. News of Blink-182’s reunion tour left fans outraged after learning tickets reportedly cost $200 to $600 each. Seeing Bruce Springsteen can cost you thousands of dollars. The U.S. Justice Department is currently investigating Ticketmaster’s owner after sales for Taylor Swift’s latest tour led to a debacle resulting in website failures, cancellations, and tickets reselling for as much as $22,000 a pop.
The chief cause of this price-gouging is monopoly control over the live music industry. Fightback recently wrote about the high cost of concert tickets:
So what’s behind these eye-watering prices? Scalpers buying up and reselling the tickets once they’re sold out? Nope. These are the prices set by the primary retailer, Ticketmaster. In particular, these prices are set according to “dynamic pricing.” This is a euphemistic name for a predatory algorithm that automatically inflates prices when tickets are in high demand. The company has been using this system for several years now, and it means that Ticketmaster sells tickets for prices that, in past years, only scalpers on the secondary market would dare to ask.
But according to Ticketmaster’s absurd justification, this is good. If prices are jacked up to begin with, they argue, then secondary ticket brokers can’t buy them up and sell them at a profit. Indeed, dynamic pricing has curbed the secondary market for tickets. But this doesn’t make tickets more affordable or solve the problem of scalping—it just means that Ticketmaster itself is now the ultimate scalper.
The reason they get away with this is that they’ve attained a monopoly over the live entertainment industry since merging with Live Nation (another ticket retailer) in 2010. Now, this single conglomerate has unprecedented control over most of the live entertainment industry, including tickets, venues, and even the representation of artists. In fact, Live Nation is the producer for Blink-182’s upcoming tour, and as a result the band is playing almost exclusively at Live Nation venues. All of this control allows Ticketmaster to ask virtually any kind of price they want because fans have nowhere else to go. As a result, they have been swimming in profits: last quarter, they reported earnings of $6.2 billion! Making this even more outrageous, up to 78% of the cost of each ticket is made up by extra fees tacked on to the base price.
Of course, there is a certain limit to how high ticket prices could climb before nobody bites. But with all the market information that Ticketmaster has access to, they can set their prices at exactly that limit and make maximum profits. It doesn’t matter to them if this means that fewer and fewer people can afford to experience live music, or if fans have to make bigger and bigger sacrifices to see their favourite artists perform live.
Ironically, as I was facing the fact that seeing heavy metal’s most popular band was now out of my price range, I’ve been gradually moving away from metal in terms of my listening habits. It’s not that I like the music any less. But I do think metal’s best years have been behind it for at least the last decade. The greatest metal bands like Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Pantera, etc. were most prominent in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. In the 2000s there were still excellent bands like Nightwish and Arkona that brought new sounds to the genre. But the general trend in metal for decades has been a shift from clean vocals to the screaming/death growls associated with extreme metal. While extreme metal can certainly be enjoyable, the lack of clean vocals tends to mean less melody, which means fewer great songs.
What have I been listening to instead? In recent months I’ve found myself listening to opera more than ever. Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg has been at the top of my playlist. Influenced by the upcoming schedule of the Canadian Opera Company, I’ve also been absorbing myself in Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto. Wagnerian opera has always appealed to my metalhead side, with its epic theatricality and focus on Teutonic mythology. But what I love about opera in general is that there are so many different elements you can lose yourself in. Wagner had a term called the Gesamtkunstwerk or “total work of art”, which symbolizes much of the appeal of opera for me: combining music, poetry, drama, performance, architecture, production design, etc. into a single spectacular work.
Sometimes when I express appreciation for opera I get the feeling it can come off pretentious. Apparently I’m not alone in that concern. I think this is partly because opera is seen as a chief example of “high” art. It’s become associated with wealthy people dressing in their finest evening wear for a night of sophisticated high culture. In that sense, it’s perceived as the opposite of the masses going to see the latest Marvel film, or their favourite metal band or pop star in concert.
Wikipedia defines “high culture” in the following terms:
In popular usage, the term high culture identifies the culture of an upper class (an aristocracy) or of a status class (the intelligentsia); and also identifies a society’s common repository of broad-range knowledge and tradition (e.g. folk culture) that transcends the social-class system of the society. Sociologically, the term high culture is contrasted with the term low culture, the forms of popular culture characteristic of the less-educated social classes, such as the barbarians, the Philistines, and hoi polloi (the masses).
The purported division between “high” and “low” culture has been on my mind in light of these high ticket prices lately for popular artists. The musicians I mention above have mass popular appeal. In some cases, most famously Springsteen, their careers were defined by an image as champions of workers and the poor.
Fans of these musicians have themselves been denigrated. As a metalhead I’m biased, but I think metal represents some of the most technically and intellectually rigorous popular music out there. Metal has always placed a premium on extremely talented musicians, most obviously with its emphasis on flashy guitar solos. Heavy metal lyrics have focused on weighty issues like war, death, insanity, etc. less often heard in the pop charts, dominated by songs about love and sex (though more commercial metal subgenres such as glam metal have certainly trod that ground). Yet in metal’s heyday, its listeners were portrayed in pop culture as young males of limited intelligence. Think of the famous metalhead duos from movies and TV: Bill and Ted, Wayne and Garth, Beavis and Butt-Head. Even though Metallica were always one of the more critically acclaimed metal bands, Beavis remains the most famous image of a Metallica fan in pop culture.
Whether in metal or other genres, however, seeing many popular artists in concert now has become unaffordable for ordinary workers and youth. To see musicians like Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, or Metallica, fans have to be willing to shell out some serious coin.
Compared to these kinds of artists, going to see an opera is a bargain. Several years ago, I got a season pass to the Canadian Opera Company for something like $430. For that price I got to see six operas at orchestra level. It’s probably one of the best deals I’ve ever gotten. With inflation I’m sure the price of a season pass has increased considerably. Yet even just buying a ticket to a single opera today, the price is favourable. A ticket at orchestra level to see the Feb. 2 COC performance of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro costs a little over $200—less than one-fifth the price of the worst seats in the house to see Metallica. COC tickets a bit further away go as low as $65, but anywhere in the opera house you’ll have a better view of the performance than sitting in the nosebleeds at a stadium concert.
All this is to say that with current ticket prices, I think the division between “high” and “low” art is an outdated notion, if there were ever any value to it at all. It’s much more affordable today for a working class person to go to the opera regularly than to see concerts by major pop artists.
Let’s try another comparison. General admission at the Art Gallery of Ontario is $25, but a season pass is $35. By comparison, one standard adult ticket to see a movie at the Cineplex costs $11-13. If you want to get popcorn and a drink, the cost more than doubles. Hence, a trip to one of Canada’s most popular art galleries is less expensive than going to see the latest Marvel movie with snacks. The less expensive option is seen as “high” culture; the more expensive option is seen as “low” culture.
There’s a further irony here in that what we view today as “high” culture was often seen as “low” culture in its day. Shakespeare’s plays might be the most famous example. When first performed these plays were mass entertainment. Theatres like the Globe had standing room where the masses could watch for a cheaper price. For all his critical acclaim that only increased as the centuries went by and Shakespeare became seen as the greatest writer in the English language, the Bard had a gift for mass appeal and his plays included plenty of instances of bawdy humour. Some contemporary critics even dismissed his works as lowbrow. But with the passage of time, yesterday’s “low” mass culture has become today’s “high” culture.
As someone who has tried their hand at a variety of art forms over the years, I think that the act of creative expression also gives one a renewed appreciation for anyone who can create art that people positively respond to. It’s hard to write a good song! Yes, it takes more technical skill to compose an entire opera than to write a tune on acoustic guitar. But both forms of music can entertain people and brighten daily humdrum existence. It takes a lot of talent to write a symphony; it can take just as much to create a memorable pop song. While I do take issue with the poptimism trend, which can err too much in the other direction by ascribing more weight and significance than warranted to frothy pop music, the value of art is in the eye or ear of the beholder. If someone finds deep significance and meaning in the latest Beyoncé song, I say all the power to them.
If there’s one hope I would have over dismissing the barrier between “high” and “low” culture, it’s that more people should try to experience both. Opera can and should be as popular as superhero blockbusters. In the time before movies, TV, radio, and other forms of mass communication, opera was the popular entertainment of its day, which is why so many cities built great opera houses. At a time when popular media like film have become more formulaic and reliant on IP and spectacle, looking into other forms like opera can be immensely rewarding. There’s so much culture in this world, I think we owe it to ourselves to experience as much of it as possible in the short time we have. Whether that culture is “high” or “low” is largely subjective and less important than the extent to which it enriches our lives.
I've always thought high-profile concert ticket prices to be obscene, but the upcoming Metallica one takes it to a new level. I'm going to pass as well.