Back in the Nineties, Pearl Jam famously sued Ticketmaster in an unsuccessful effort to rein in the runaway costs of attending a concert. These days, many are raising the same concerns — like Doc McGhee, Kiss’ longtime manager. In the late 1970s, when he was a young man on the rock scene, top concert tickets cost $10 to $11 (or about $50 to $55 in today’s dollars). Last year, according to Pollstar, the industry trade that monitors touring, the average ticket price had soared to around $132. That’s an increase of 38 percent just since 2019, when they cost a comparatively affordable $96.17. “It’s up to us,” McGhee says. “Until people say, ‘We’re not going,’ the prices are going up.”
This summer, that appears to be true. Entry to one of Harry Styles’ 30 dates at Madison Square Garden could cost you as much as $1,000; Alan Jackson’s sold-out touring finale at a Nashville stadium is prompting scalper prices of more than $5,000.
Industry veterans say that sky-high ticket prices are due to three key factors: supply and demand, as reflected in the controversial practice of dynamic pricing; rampant scalping; and one dominant company, Live Nation, controlling every source of revenue, including beer, food, parking, and Ticketmaster service fees, at its 61 amphitheaters and more than 200 other venues in North America. Many hoped the U.S. Department of Justice’s 2024 antitrust lawsuit would break up the world’s biggest promoter, but a March 9 settlement suggests that is unlikely to happen.
(In court, Live Nation disputed nearly every criticism made by sources in this story. “There is no evidence in the record that Live Nation or Ticketmaster drives higher ticket prices or that breaking up the company would lower them,” Dan Wall, the company’s executive vice president of corporate and regulatory affairs, says in a statement to RS. “If the DOJ or states had credible evidence, they would have presented it. They haven’t. After years of investigation and access to extensive data, there is still nothing tying our structure to higher prices.”)
The Justice Department settlement, which requires Live Nation to divest from 13 amphitheaters with which it has exclusive booking agreements, among other things, “isn’t even significant enough to call it a slap on the wrist,” says Stephen Parker, executive director of the National Independent Venue Association. Because the settlement is “virtually nothing” and “has no teeth,” adds a top promoter, prices and fees are almost certain to keep rising.
Even the biggest stars are often powerless to change this system, as Taylor Swift discovered on the Eras Tour. What’s more, Live Nation ticketing employees seemed dismissive of customers when they joked in internal messages about fans who are “so stupid” that the company was “robbing them blind baby,” in reference to high parking and VIP-package costs. (In court, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino called those messages “disgusting” and “not the way we operate.”)
John Scher, a New York promoter who has competed with the company for decades, claims that Live Nation strategically raises offers to artists for playing its own summer amphitheaters, rather than arenas where competing promoters can book shows. “If they play indoors, they have a choice of [second-biggest promoter] AEG, or an independent like me,” Scher says. “But Live Nation will say to acts, ‘If you wait and start the tour in April, we’ll pay you $350,000’ — and many of them say, ‘Fine.’”
‘Legalized exploitation of fans’
In a separate lawsuit, filed by the Federal Trade Commission against Live Nation and Ticketmaster last September, a central issue was “illegal ticket-resale tactics,” in which Live Nation reportedly invited scalpers to use bots to crowd fans out of on-sale queues.
“The price will not change until we stop this legalized exploitation of fans,” says Randy Nichols, a board member for the National Independent Talent Organization (NITO), which represents agents and managers for more than 5,000 acts. “Fans will pay less money when bots stop buying all the tickets and marking up the price.”
Bills currently pending in New York, California, and other states could cap resale prices, potentially allowing artists to set their own face-value prices and ensuring fans don’t have to pay much more than that — something that hasn’t been true since StubHub revolutionized the scalping business in the early 2000s. (For years, Ticketmaster itself has also resold tickets to its own shows online.) “New York has been at this for a long time, and California just introduced a price cap,” says Nathaniel Marro, NITO’s executive director. “There’s really hope here.”
Fielding Logan, head of touring for management company Q Prime South, which represents artists like Eric Church, Ashley McBryde, and the Brothers Osborne, disagrees with the prediction of higher fees due to Live Nation’s corporate dominance. “I can unequivocally say that is not going to make a whit of difference to ticket prices,” he says. “What makes a difference to ticket prices is there are more people who want to attend said show than there are tickets available at those prices.”
But John Kwoka, a Northeastern University economics professor who specializes in antitrust, thinks that supply and demand aren’t enough to explain what’s happening. “I’m one of the economists who’ve argued you need to break up some companies,” he says. “[Live Nation] is one of the companies that proves that.”
There’s no immediate resolution in any of this. There’s no surrender either — and a lot of great escape. White’s slide guitar in “Dollar Bill” sounds like a National Steel on steroids until the solo, when it turns into what seems like a theremin gone postal. “I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing” has a great pop-wise chorus closer to the Pretty Things than Son House. And don’t miss White’s wry aside to the White Stripes’ old creation myth in the second verse of “G.O.D.,” on the way to the real business at hand. “Well, it’s the beginning of the world now,” he declares at the song’s end. “Let’s do it all over again.”
Jay-Z has turned the 30th anniversary of his classic debut album into a major marketing event
Jay-Z Knows the Past Still Pays
There’s a pleasant absurdity to the advertisements for JAŸ-Z30 that are currently found across New York’s subway tunnels. Their dramatic imagery — a stark black backdrop pierced through the center with a pair of hands, presumably Jay’s, fixed into the famous Roc diamond — invites a kind of religious authority that feels a touch ironic for anyone who’s old enough to remember all types of handwringing over those very hand symbols only a few years ago. And maybe that’s the point. By now, nostalgia’s grip extends layers deep. So much so that you could find yourself waiting for the train, reminiscing on the days when people still made jokes about the so-called Illuminati.
Jay-Z’s months-long campaign commemorating the 30th anniversary of Reasonable Doubt and the 25th anniversary of The Blueprint has indeed resurfaced the rapper-turned-mogul’s success story. Reasonable Doubt, released in 1996, positioned Jay as not only a resonant voice in hip-hop but also in the increasingly lucrative business around it. After major labels passed, the album was released independently through Roc-A-Fella Records and Priority Records, setting the tone for Jay’s career as a business…man.
And in the full-court press campaign around this summer’s anniversaries, culminating in this weekend’s trio of performances at Yankee Stadium, Jay’s business acumen is again at center focus. You’d be forgiven for throwing around buzzwords like “multichannel” or “cross-platform” to describe the slate of festivities. There was a Spotify-backed takeover of the J and Z trains; custom JAŸ-Z30 subway maps and a Google Maps guide; commemorative Brooklyn Public Library cards; and most recently Bowery Station and DUMBO pop-ups with archival footage and merch. (That these Yankee Stadium shows come on the heels of Taylor Swift’s wedding at MSG suggests some sort of mega-rich takeover of cultural institutions, but let’s leave that one for another day.)
The moves come as nostalgia continues to drive a considerable chunk of the music industry’s profits. In an era when old songs can circulate infinitely on streaming platforms, gaining new life in the form of everything from samples to memes, and when superfans are willing to spend on physical goods, limited merch, and live experiences, album anniversaries have become their own product launches. Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt campaign is only the splashiest recent example.
No wonder, then, that Beyoncé already appears to be setting the stage for her own run of commemorations for the upcoming 20th anniversary of her album B’Day in September. Over the weekend, she released her first new song in two years, titled “Morning Dew (Donk),” to tease the upcoming reissue. According to Luminate, older music still dominates attention, with only 43 percent of U.S. on-demand audio streams in 2025 coming from tracks released in the previous five years. This is also one reason why vinyl and physical formats have seen renewed value in recent years, with the RIAA reporting that vinyl sold 46.8 million units in the U.S. in 2025, compared with 29.5 million CDs. Luminate says superfans are 20 percent of U.S. music listeners and spend heavily on live events and physical merchandise; 73 percent of these fans purchase physical merch, versus 26 percent of general music listeners.
In today’s industry, having a major anniversary is like having a new product to promote, a way to participate in an already thriving marketplace for nostalgia. The demand is visible well beyond official artist stores: Vintage concert tees now trade as collectibles, with one 1967 Grateful Dead shirt selling at Sotheby’s for $19,300 and rare rap tees treated as wearable archives of hip-hop history. Anniversary campaigns give artists and labels a way to reclaim that energy, turning the secondary market’s appetite for old symbols into new, officially sanctioned products.
Jay-Z’s official anniversary store turns that logic into a menu of objects: a $1,500 collector’s crate, a $300 cassette box, $400 Yankees jerseys, and four-figure varsity jackets. Of course, Jay is far from alone when it comes to legacy acts cashing in on nostalgia. He’s more like one salient example of a much larger wave of artists and promoters marketing anniversary products that includes the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness 30th anniversary super-deluxe edition, My Chemical Romance’s Black Parade stadium tour, and the returned Warped Tour, among many others.
Five years before Reasonable Doubt became the occasion for library cards, pop-ups, collector crates, and stadium spectacle, its 25th anniversary was marked by an NFT. In 2021, Sotheby’s and Roc Nation auctioned a one-of-one Derrick Adams artwork tied to the album, billed as the only official Jay-Z-authorized commemoration of the anniversary. Around the same time, Roc-A-Fella was in court over co-founder Damon Dash’s attempted sale of a Reasonable Doubt-related NFT, a dispute that ended with a judgment making clear that no shareholder could sell or dispose of an interest in the album — including through an NFT — without the company’s authorization.
That ownership question is becoming harder to avoid as music enters the AI era, where the archive is not only something to reissue, exhibit, or sell, but something that can be scraped, modeled, and trained on. Last week, SZA took to Twitter to express frustration with AI music company Suno, notably calling out Diplo by name as one of the company’s investors. “DO NOT GIVE AWAY YOUR VIBRANIUM !!! DO NOT TRAIN AI WITH YOUR GENIUS,” she wrote on Twitter. Her complaint was joined by Kenneth Blume, who said Suno’s workers were “stealing from countless struggling musicians.”
For an artist with a legacy as impactful as Jay-Z’s, the current anniversary boom feel like the latest phase of a longer project of deciding who gets to turn hip-hop history into intellectual property. Jay-Z’s legacy deserves preservation; few catalogs have made a stronger case for it. But the more that preservation arrives through limited-edition objects, auction platforms, luxury merch, and authorized experiences, the more it has to answer a harder question: When does protecting the archive become another way of extracting value from it?