Concert Tickets Are a Luxury Item. That Could Change Soon.

Agonizing over ticket prices has become as much a part of concert-going as swaying with your lit phone in the air. When tickets dropped for Rush’s 2026 tour—the band’s first since the death of drummer Neil Peart—fans immediately flooded forums to complain about the ticket cost: “I’m not paying $300-plus for nosebleeds or $650 to $2,500 for the good seats dressed up as something special because you get a few trinkets and early access to the merch booth.” On the Rush Forum, a fan site, one furious devotee referenced the lyrics of the 1980 classic “The Spirit of Radio”: “One [would] like to believe in the freedom of music but glittering prizes and endless compromises shattered their integrity.”

Could 2026 be the year the longstanding agitation over ticket prices finally gets results? Maybe, if public and political pressure can make some budding reforms real. And if fans in their turn stop fulfilling the industry’s assumption that consumers will pay practically any price for premium “experiences,” and even refocus on the music they could be hearing closer to home. Sadly, the best chance of that might involve a waning economy. 

Exorbitant prices have defined North American touring for at least a decade, whether it’s The Weeknd, Oasis, Blackpink or, of course, Taylor Swift, whose Eras Tour ticket fiasco provoked U.S. Senate hearings. According to the most recent annual report by industry monitor Pollstar, the prices of tickets for the top 100 global concert tours rose by 37.2 per cent between 2019 and 2025, compared to average inflation in Canada of about 21 per cent. The biggest player in that market, the Live Nation/Ticketmaster conglomerate, would say that’s just a function of demand: ticket sales for those concerts were up even more, by 50.5 per cent, as more shows sold out and many moved up from arenas to stadiums. The Canadian-born CEO of Live Nation, Michael Rapino, outraged many people in the fall when he claimed that concert tickets are still “underpriced,” compared, for example, to sports.

Beyond the face value of tickets, consumers have felt more bamboozled by the “drip” of hidden fees, or the way “dynamic” prices seem to surge and ebb at different points in the sales cycle. Then, of course, there are the “secondary markets”—a.k.a. scalpers—who scoop up whole blocks of tickets for later resale, sometimes using online bots. This is illegal in most places but enforcement is spotty. 

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Live Nation/Ticketmaster insists it doesn’t collude with scalpers, yet the U.S. Department of Justice is now targeting it in an antitrust suit set for trial in 2026, and the Federal Trade Commission has filed its own suit. (Their complaints echo Canadian investigative reporting in 2018 that found signs of Ticketmaster working in secret with scalpers.) These Biden-era investigations were half-expected to vanish with the change of administration, but they didn’t, and in March, Donald Trump posed in the Oval Office with a star-spangled Kid Rock signing an order encouraging “common-sense reform” on tickets.

Here in Canada, recent uproar over Blue Jays ticket prices during the World Series reignited calls for regulation, which may be repeated with the scramble for World Cup soccer tickets in 2026. Ontario Premier Doug Ford floated the idea of capping reseller markups—the same Liberal policy he scrapped in 2018. Quebec is also looking at beefing up its rules. But Manitoba has moved the other way, lifting its ban on above-face-value resale in 2023. The biggest challenge is policing an online marketplace where sellers can base their websites somewhere else—but logically, that’s easier to control if more jurisdictions share stricter rules. 

​​During the Swift tempest in 2024, some opposition MPs lobbied the Liberal government for broader national action, but the leaders of those initiatives lost their seats in the following election. What they had in mind was similar to the Fans First Act, a bipartisan bill that’s stalled in the U.S. Senate but backed by a long list of artists who signed a 2024 open letter, including Canada’s own Blue Rodeo. 

Artists themselves have the key say in how their tickets are sold. The Cure’s Robert Smith has been a hero on that front, setting low prices, refusing dynamic pricing that fluctuates with demand and making sure sellers follow suit; he inspired Neil Young to adopt the same approach. Smith has said major artists who claim they can’t do the same are either “stupid or lying.” Artists could also work with fan-to-fan resale platforms like Cashortrade.org and Twickets.live, which restrict resales to face value, as the young American band Geese did in 2025. Ticketmaster itself has introduced a Face Value Exchange market for artists who opt in.

Lower prices, of course, mean fewer mega-spectacular shows—and more of the kind that won’t require phalanxes of backup dancers and fleets of trucks to transport sets. Costs are driven up partly by stars vying to turn concerts into experience-economy extravaganzas. They might be wise to scale back. In October, Pollstar found that, after the post-pandemic boom, revenue from the highest-earning tours has flattened and even contracted slightly in the past year. With trade wars and job-market jitters, could a softer economy encourage people to make more modest entertainment choices in 2026?  

That’s always been my preference. Dazzle and bombast have their place, but I prefer the closeness of artists and audiences in smaller venues. They’re relaxed, primed for discovery and surprise, and part of an infrastructure that supports Canadian artists and makes future stars possible. This is the level most at risk no matter what happens with blockbuster-level prices. Smaller artists and venues can’t survive the rising operating and touring costs.

The crisis is as much cultural as it is economic. The Canadian Live Music Association estimates that the country’s live-music business is larger than the fisheries industry and nearly the size of auto manufacturing. Its president, Erin Benjamin, told me that, while resale regulations would help, what Canada truly needs is government support: more subsidies, tax incentives and other investments to keep small and mid-sized venues alive.

“If we lose too many live-music spaces,” she said, “we risk losing the artists who are about to write the song that’s going to change our life forever.” The ones who come, as a young Geddy Lee once sang, “bearing a gift beyond price, almost free.”

Carl Wilson is a music critic for Slate

This story appears in the January/February 2026 issue of Maclean’s. You can buy the issue here, subscribe to the magazine here or send a gift subscription here.