Who has paid the equivalent of a month’s rent for a single Taylor Swift ticket?🙋♀️(guilty!)
At the time, I asked myself, "What is happening?!?!"
I think I’ve finally figured it out, and it’s actually a really important phenomenon to pay attention to.
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Question for you: What’s the best concert you’ve ever been to?
I’ll go first: U2 outside of Dublin, camped out all day on a grassy hill.
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Transcript: Remember When Concert Tickets Were Affordable?
Has anyone else noticed that the price of concert tickets and sports tickets is through the roof?
Now, I think it’s maybe a little bit of the Taylor Swift effect, but I just bought tickets for my daughter to see Sabrina Carpenter. To sit in the bleachers at Madison Square Garden, it was four or five hundred dollars per ticket.
I’m thinking to myself: there are thousands of seats in Madison Square Garden. Even though these were resold on StubHub, there are probably hundreds or thousands of people paying $400–$500 to sit really, really far away at a Sabrina Carpenter concert.
I’m 47, and when I was a kid, concert tickets were $40–$50. Yes, there’s inflation, but I think there’s something else going on. Kids are willing to pay an outrageous amount of money for the experience of seeing music and sports live.
I think this has to do with the fact that so much of their life is virtual, so much of it is AI and fake. To see a human being perform live, surrounded by other people experiencing it together—all those nervous systems going on emotional journeys with music—is something we crave as human beings. These kids are craving it, and they’re willing to pay for it.
The same thing goes for sports events. To see a tennis match with literal blood, sweat, and tears—there’s nothing more human than that. There’s nothing about it that AI could ever replace. The experience of feeling alive, going on an emotional journey with other humans in close proximity, has become a peak experience for kids and adults—something they carry with them for months.
My daughter has said to me about concerts: "I want this more than anything else. More than clothes, more than shoes, more than jewelry. I want this experience, and it will carry me through for months."
As a mother, it feels outrageous to spend this much money on tickets. But as an observer of human beings, I find it fascinating that experiences which cannot be reproduced online have become so incredibly valuable to us. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, that feeling of aliveness and connection is deeply awake in us.
I’m not someone who thinks much about how to build businesses or make a lot of money, but if you are, I think it would behoove you to realize that anything you sell that makes people feel alive is something they will crave. Anything that makes people feel connected.
I have a son who is a musician, and I told him, "If you can get up on stage and make people feel something, you’re giving them something they want and need. You’ll be serving people—and hopefully selling out concerts and records too."
I don’t like the prices of these tickets. But I do love the feeling of being collectively together. I’m trying to translate that into other things that don’t cost as much, because I think it’s possible.
Sports races are a good example, like running the New York Marathon. You don’t need fancy concerts or big sporting events to feel that connection with other human beings. You can find it in so many other ways. You just have to know what you’re looking for to meet that need.
Thanks for listening. All my love.
