A person sitting at a kitchen table looking at a concert ticket checkout screen, reflecting rising ticket prices, live music and the cost of shared experiences.

Have Concert Tickets Become a Luxury Item?

September 05, 2026•2 min read

Sunday Essay: Have Concert Tickets Become a Luxury Item?

There was a time when seeing your favourite artist live meant saving up, buying a ticket and spending the next three months counting down the days.

Now it feels like a competitive sport with a small financial crisis at the end of it.

You register for presale. You receive a code. You set three alarms. You join a virtual queue at precisely 9am only to discover that 47,000 apparently more organised people are already ahead of you.

Then, when you finally get through, the £90 ticket you had in mind has somehow become £240 because it’s “in demand”.

Of course it’s in demand. That’s why 47,000 of us were sitting in a queue at breakfast time.

And that’s before the service charges, booking fees and the small fortune you’ll spend on getting there, eating something and buying a T-shirt to prove you survived the experience.

I’m not suggesting concerts should be cheap. Touring is enormously expensive. Artists, musicians, technicians, security staff and venues all need paying, and live music is something special.

But that’s exactly the point.

Music has never belonged only to people with large disposable incomes. It belongs to the teenager seeing their idol for the first time, the couple hearing “their song”, and the lifelong fan finally watching the artist whose music has soundtracked half their life.

A concert should feel like a treat.

It shouldn’t feel like something you need to put on Klarna.

Perhaps we’ve become so accustomed to extraordinary ticket prices that we’ve stopped questioning them.

So the next time somebody casually asks, “Did you manage to get tickets?”

Maybe the more appropriate question is:

“Yes. But did you have to remortgage the house?”