2023-07-21
5 分钟I'm Paul Krugman, opinion writer for the New York Times, usually about economics.
Today I'm going to be talking about live music.
Everybody is talking about how expensive concert tickets are,
and I'm here to tell you that live music isn't as expensive as it could be.
If you look at the entertainment pages at all, or even the business pages,
you may have noticed that there's a lot of concerts happening this summer.
There are a couple of giant tours, Taylor Swift, Beyonce,
and then also maybe more under the radar, just tons and tons of smaller live music events.
I'm a 70-year-old wannabe hipster, and my next concert from which I currently have tickets is a band called Warpaint,
just this very sort of off-beat psychedelic, rocky stuff.
It is a stunning $35 a ticket.
But in terms of the two big tours, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé,
the list prices on the tickets tend to be in the hundreds.
And we are seeing numbers in the thousands.
I don't know quite how high the biggest numbers are and how representative that is of what the average concert goer is spending.
But we are certainly seeing triple-digit ticket prices out there.
Obviously, it's not cheap if you're spending hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars for a Taylor Swift concert, but just wearing my economist hat here, if you actually
compare, particularly if you compare ticket prices to people's incomes, live music is actually a bit of a bargain compared to what it was, say, in the 19th century.
Jenny Lind, arguably the first sort of semi-modern style superstar was a soprano from Sweden,
the Swedish Nightingale, and did a mega tour of the United States in the early 1850s,