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I think the most I have paid in recent years to attend a show was almost $150 to see Neil Young & Crazy Horse in 2012. (That does not include the T-shirt I bought at the show.) It was more than I wanted to pay, but I really wanted to see Neil and the Horse live at least once in my life.
Luckily, most of the bands I want to see/venues I usually go to (clubs with 200 to 2000 person capacity, like the 9:30 Club and Black Cat in the DC area) generally charge less than $50 for tickets, usually somewhere between $15 and $40, though some acts, like Richard Thompson, are more in the $75 range. (Thompson is a hell of a live performer, even solo acoustic, that he's worth the higher cost.)
I do have a sliding scale; for someone like Bob Mould I'd probably be willing to pay $150 (though tickets for Bob Mould shows almost never exceed $40). By contrast, when I saw Black Sabbath, a band I casually like but don't love, at Jiffy Lube Live (an outdoor ampitheater near DC) this past summer, and the cheapest reserved seat tickets sold out ($39 excluding Ripoffmaster fees), I wasn't willing to pony up roughly $100 to get a higher cost (and closer) reserved seat, so I bought a GA lawn ticket for $35 excluding fees and hoped for nice weather (which did occur).
Depends on the type of music. Opera I'm willing to pay more than most things. A great jazz artist I'm willing to pay up more since they might not come back to town. Fortunately the rock music I'm likely to see is at small venues and cheaper. Same with jazz clubs, great music on the cheap. I'm also not a fan of large venues. Under $50 bucks for me unless it's something rare or amazing.
I spent $900 for 3 really great seats to a Paul McCartney concert. I wanted my son to be able to say he saw one of the Beatles live and time is marching on.
It was worth it, but not something I am going to repeat very often.
Zero, the only concert I ever went to was the Doobie Brothers in the 1970's. I spent $10.00 for a ticket and spent less than 10 minutes inside. I could not stand all of the crowd and pot smoke inside the venue.
For instance, this just happened last week. My wife and I both love Neil Diamond. We've seen him in concert several times, and it's always a great show, that I will give you.
I actually did the purchase last week since she begged me to do so. I learned I hate Ticket Master....what a cluster that web site is. I kept getting to the end of the purchasing process (no simple feat in itself) and I'd get the message "can't complete purchase" or something to that effect. Several other times it said "no tickets available". After 10 or 12 tries, I finally got tickets....what's up with that ? They collected $40.52 in fees for my "privilege" of buying something from them....and printing my own tickets. That's a pretty good commission for a 1 second digital transaction, with no human intervention involved....on a web site that wasted 45 minutes of my time to make a purchase.
She has purchased the tickets for virtually all the concerts we go to, and I of course am happy to accompany her to the concert...lol I recall her paying upwards of $150.00 (per ticket) for Neil Diamond tickets....way more than I would every pay to see anybody. I'm more in the $50.00 category. If it's more than that, I'd just buy the CD or listen to music on my XM/Sirius or Amazon Prime.
I would be willing to spend up to $400 ticket along for the right act. However if I need to travel somewhere, and I add that then I would be willing to spend around $800.
I remember way back when, when Joe Strummer was alive, that The Clash was going to reunite and play Lollapalooza. I was willing to pay and go anywhere to see them. Off course, it never happened.
The highest I paid was to see U2 during the Magnificent tour, I think I paid $200 to be right in the pit. Muse was opening, so that was one hell of a rock concert.
I went to see The Cure in El Paso, the ticket was only around $80, but I had to travel and stay at a hotel, so the whole affair cost me approximately $400.
Most often...up to a $5 cover for the bar the good local/regional band plays.
The last relatively big name concert I went to was Flogging Molly. In which case the ticketmaster fees were actually higher than the price of the ticket itself. So Ticketmaster is saying it costs them more to virtually reserve a seat and have me self-print a ticket than it does for the band to build up their skills, the venue to operate, etc.
I paid $600 for 2 tickets to see the original Celtic Woman group. I took my sister, and we had seats #1 & 2 in the first row. We also got to meet and get autographs from all the group members at a meet-and-greet afterwards. We were so close to the stage that one of the group members complimented me on my dress! Oh, and the concert date was St. Patrick's Day, so the entire audience was really pumped up. It was definitely worth the price!
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