Concerts used to be the great equalizer. Didn’t matter if you were broke, working doubles at the gas station, or borrowing money from your parents—you could scrape together twenty bucks, buy a nosebleed, and still be in the room when the lights went down. You weren’t just watching music. You were part of something bigger.

That was the dream. The cheap seat meant access. The cheap seat meant community. The cheap seat meant everyone could enter the temple.

Now the temple’s got velvet ropes and algorithms at the door.

Michael Rapino gets onstage at yet another industry conference and calls concerts “underpriced.” Underpriced. The man who pocketed $100 million last year for running Live Nation, the company that turned fandom into a line item on a quarterly report, thinks you and I should be grateful for the privilege of paying triple digits to see our favorite bands.

His defense? 

Averages. 

The “average ticket” is $72, he says. Which is like a billionaire telling you the average American’s rich because Jeff Bezos lives here. Fans don’t experience averages. 

Fans experience chaos: 

Ticketmaster’s queues that crash, surge pricing that turns your phone into a slot machine, bots that eat the inventory before you even get a chance.

And none of that matters to Rapino. His job isn’t to make concerts magical. His job is to keep shareholders fat and happy. Lock down venues, ticketing, promotion, control the whole “flywheel.” No competition, no innovation, just fees on top of fees.

And here’s the thing: Rapino makes obscene money off culture but creates none of it himself. He doesn’t write the songs. He doesn’t play the shows. He doesn’t stand in the pit or wait in line. He’s just a toll collector at the gate. Steve Miller said it flat-out in his Rock Hall of Fame speech, how the suits profit off musicians while contributing nothing to the art. Rapino’s empire is built on that exact imbalance. 

Concerts are underpriced? 

No. 

They just haven’t squeezed you enough yet.

Metallica’s 2025 Australian tour? 

Gone. 

Sold out before you could blink. Standard tickets running all the way up to $750, plus the insult of a “handling fee” slapped on like salt in the wound.

And that’s before the upsells, the premium reserves, the GA “enhanced experiences.” Those packages where you pay through the nose to feel like you’re not just a customer, but a valued customer.

Metallica still sells out because they’re one of the last universal rock metal bands. They are your dad’s band, your band, your kid’s band. The music has never been more available, stream every album in seconds, watch pro-shot live clips on YouTube for free. But the live experience, the reason you picked up a guitar or threw yourself into a pit, that’s become luxury-priced.

And yet, the shows still sell out. Which tells you everything. The desire hasn’t gone away. Fans will always pay. Until they can’t.

Dream Theater hits forty years, and their anniversary tour is already a test of devotion.

Melbourne? $159 just to get in.

Brisbane? $229. 

Adelaide fans reporting $189 GA, with some reminiscing about the days you could walk in for $124.

Still cheaper compared to Metallica but… 

Buying a ticket isn’t just an act of fandom anymore, it’s calculus. How much is too much? How many fees can you stomach? How many rows back until it’s not worth it? The music is meticulous, demanding, progressive. But the ticket-buying process is chaos, economics, market forces. It’s not prog, it’s Wall Street.

And the faithful still pay. Because that’s what it means to be a fan in 2026. You complain, you sigh, and then you show up anyway.

The Harsh Reality for Smaller Acts

But zoom out from Taylor Swift’s glittery Eras tour, the stadium gods, the more established bands and it’s brutal. The middle class of music is collapsing.

Smaller acts are grinding themselves into dust, endless tours through the same cities, like a clingy ex who doesn’t get the hint. Fans are tapped out, financially, emotionally. They’ve seen the show three times already. They’re not coming back just because you showed up again.

Add in the post-Covid hangover, ticket prices inflated, costs through the roof, and you’ve got an unsustainable mess. Vans turned into semis, sprinter vans into buses, overhead that kills. Meanwhile, fans are staring down their bank apps thinking: Do I really need to drop another forty bucks after paying a grand for Metallica last month?

This is where we are. Live music, once democratic, feels more like an airport lounge, corporate, exclusive, transactional.

And the problem isn’t just economics. It’s emotional connection. Fans don’t want perfect production anymore, they want authenticity.

The gatekeepers used to be labels. Now it’s fans. Viral one day, forgotten the next. The old formulas don’t work. The new ones aren’t obvious. The only constant? Connection. That’s it. That’s the whole game.

We’re in uncharted waters. The cheap seat is dead. The middle class of live music is bleeding out. The stadium shows are still printing money, but for how long?

The dream of concerts was always accessibility. Now it’s exclusivity. That’s the tragedy. Because the music hasn’t changed. The fans haven’t changed. Only the gatekeepers have.

And Rapino? He’ll keep cashing nine-figure checks off art he never made, off culture he never built. That was Steve Miller’s whole point when he stood at the Hall of Fame podium and called out the leeches: the suits don’t create, they extract.

The question is how long fans will let them.

The article.