In an effort to make tickets to its North American tour accessible to fans of all financial means, Coldplay will offer a limited amount of $20 tickets. The “Infinity Tickets” program offers pairs of tickets for $20 (plus taxes and fees) for seats throughout the venue, from the nosebleeds to the front row.
Registration for Coldplay “Infinity Tickets” is open now through the band’s website. The band will release a limited number of “Infinity Tickets” for every show on the Music of the Spheres World Tour, set to begin on September 20th at Seattle’s Lumen Field. Tickets will be sold in pairs and randomly allocated anywhere in the venue. According to the fine print, these tickets will be “restricted to a maximum of two tickets per purchaser.”
This initiative comes as concert ticket prices continue to rise around the globe, especially for large stadium tours by internationally renowned artists. Of course, the leading current example is pop superstar Taylor Swift, whose massive The Eras Tour disrupted the entire concert economy. In its wake, governments from the U.S. to Brazil and beyond have taken renewed looks at the ways their live music systems operate.
Following COVID’s shutdown of the entire live music industry, ticket costs have climbed to historic heights in what The Wall Street Journal has dubbed “The Year of the $1,000 Concert Ticket“. SeatGeek confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that the average cost of a concert ticket has nearly doubled in the last five years, up from $125 in 2019 to $252 in 2023.
Another poster child for heightened ticket prices is Bruce Springsteen, who made headlines in 2022 when his first global outing in eight years drew eye-catching price tags of up to $5,000 a ticket thanks to Ticketmaster‘s controversial “dynamic pricing” model. Inflated prices climbed even higher still on the secondary market, however in the days leading up to the shows many scalpers on secondary ticketing platforms dropped their prices considerably in an effort to recoup their losses. In one example, tickets for Springsteen’s February concert in Tulsa, OK plummeted to just $6 days before the show. E Street has become the new Wall Street, with savvy concertgoers learning to buy low when others try and sell high.