When I first heard of Harry Styles’ upcoming tour to showcase his fourth studio album, I was excited at the possibility of scoring tickets to one of his highly anticipated tour dates.

But slowly, I realized that was out of the question. The presale and on-sale prices ranged from $50 to just over a grand, but since I hopped on the bandwagon a little late, my options seemed limited to exorbitant resale prices.

How had concert prices skyrocketed this high? As a global superstar, Harry Styles’s previous tours had been financial successes.

To account for nuances, we have to look at all the resources put into these large-scale tours, from the individual artists’ hard work on their music to producers, crew members, dancers, and others involved in the creative process.

But at the end of the day, artists have the final say on their concert ticket prices. And is paying a couple hundred dollars to be in the nosebleeds or forking out as much as three grand to get a premium seat worth it to see your favorite music artist?

For many, it is, even if the cost far exceeds their financial capabilities. A large part of why ticket sales have increased so much in recent years has to do with dynamic pricing, a strategy to determine pricing by looking at various market components, from supply and demand, competitor pricing, and consumer patterns, according to “Pricefx.”

Ticketmaster, the world’s largest ticket marketplace, is notorious for using dynamic pricing; this is something that artists have the choice to opt out of or even make their own negotiations with the company.

Although Ticketmaster’s monopoly over concert prices poses issues in terms of overall affordability, there are many measures that can be instituted to mitigate these effects — and it does stem from the artist themselves.

I never realized how much control artists had over the price of their concert tickets. I understand that this is a huge balancing act; artists and their teams have the right to adequate compensation, but some of the pricing of these concerts seem to be blown out of proportion, especially in light of the fact that artists can dictate the prices.

Music is a universal language; it can be transmitted across linguistic, physical, and cultural boundaries. Ideally seen as a connecting facet of human life, financial barriers in today’s music industry have impeded the real power of music: its accessibility.

Concert prices should not be a barrier to seeing your favorite music artist, especially since there are so many ways to mitigate these costs, from increasing venue space to having more specific, tiered-pricing instead of dynamic pricing.

Famously, when the band Oasis reunited in 2025 for their first live performances since their dissolution in 2009, the pricing for tickets due to the extremely high demand skyrocketed, leading Oasis to actually do away with dynamic pricing for the North American tour dates.

This outward nonconformity to the high resale tickets that are synonymous with major ticketing companies illustrates the power artists can have on concert prices.

Additionally,  according to “NPR,” artists like Olivia Dean, Billie Eilish, and Hozier have also sought to reduce the effect of high resale prices by utilizing the “Face Value Exchange” feature on Ticketmaster, which ensures tickets can only be sold at the price a consumer originally paid for them. w

Though these means have not been in vain, concert ticket prices are still at an all-time high.

By incorporating more methods to mitigate high resale costs, like increasing venue space and decreasing dynamic pricing, the bridge to more affordable and accessible concert tickets will allow music’s real power to be experienced and heard by all.