Concerts are on everyone’s radar recently, especially with the announcement of popular tours from artists like Gracie Abrams and Lana Del Rey. Though the experience of attending concerts is enjoyable, purchasing tickets is definitely the opposite. Currently, the process of buying concert tickets is comparable to a battle. With extremely high prices, as well as tickets being completely sold out after only a few minutes, it has become extremely difficult to see your favorite musical artists live.

This is mainly due to resellers, also known as ticket scalpers. A ticket scalper is a person who buys tickets for the lower face price and resells them at a much higher cost. Although ticket scalpers existed before the Internet, they were much less common. In the present time, ticket scalpers are normally bots, or a program you can apply to your computer. These bots vastly out-number how many real people can buy tickets, as well as being much faster than the average person when securing seats. The price they resell them at is very high, with most prices being unreasonable for teenagers. They stay in business through demand, as although prices seem high, someone desperate enough will always give in and pay them. A Taylor Swift fan paid $20,000 for just four tickets, showing the ticket scalpers that people will pay huge amounts of money. In effect, a lot of people aren’t able to afford the memorable experience of a concert. Concert tickets have become unobtainable for normal people.

Before the Internet, tickets could be purchased over the phone or at in person locations. All you had to do was wait in line outside a designated area, normally a record store. The sooner you got in line, the better the tickets you could have. Another option was to call over the phone to a program called Ticketron, who would supply you with whatever concert tickets were available. These methods had their flaws, but were generally less stressful ways to get tickets. You could wait a few hours after tickets went on sale, and they would still have some available. Having tickets available after a few minutes is almost unheard of now, with popular artists selling out immediately. In order to secure tickets, you must take large quantities of time out of your day to even have a chance at seeing the artists.

Previously, people could wait until they got off of their job and head into a line. That is no longer the case, with a large number of people taking sick days at work or school just to wait on Ticketmaster. When Swift had ticket sales for her Eras Tour, over 3.5 billion system requests were sent to Ticketmaster. This is a combination of bots and fan accounts, all fighting for 52 shows. This short amount of time, with a huge number of people, causes people to become stressed during ticket purchasing. People feel pressured since they only have a few minutes, and there are tons of others waiting as well. This high demand causes this feeling of stress, and makes concert tickets way too hard to get.

Ticket selling apps have noticed this high demand in tickets, so they introduced presales. Presales are aimed to help those who sign up in advance be able to get tickets over ticket scalpers. They can be codes sent to your email or a certain credit card you must have. However, this didn’t work as intended because so many people sign up for presales that the amount of stress doesn’t decrease at all. A specific instance of this was also Swift’s Eras Tour. Ticketmaster had so many people sign up for presale that they gave out too many codes. Thousands of people who thought they were going to the concert suddenly couldn’t get seats. Many people feel that all the codes and things you must sign up for are hard to manage with everyday life. It’s stressful when you must sign up for a new credit card, enter your different  emails into multiple websites, and check to see if you may have gotten a code. Presales are also a new factor that came along with digital tickets, and they overall make getting tickets feel overwhelming.

If you are buying concert tickets and feel extremely stressed, you are not alone. The price has become extremely high due to ticket scalpers, and the demand for tickets is still through the roof. With the short time given to people to get in the digital line and the exhausting number of unnecessary presale codes, buying tickets has become way too complicated. People just want to listen to music and share a memorable experience, not fight for tickets online. Overall, the process of buying concert tickets is extremely difficult, and almost not worth the actual concert itself.