This is ultimately a supply and demand problem. If tickets sell out on the secondary market for 10 or 100x the face value, then that's the fair market price. Either artists should charge more, or perform more shows.
They ended up being acquired by a company that was much more into charging top dollar to big-spenders. The company was ultimately acquired by Live Nation and the ticket prices kept increasing until suddenly ticket sales stopped, and that whole category of festivals is now largely dead in Australia.
It's no good optimizing for simple supply and demand in one year if it destroys the product and therefore demand in subsequent years, which is what we're seeing the market. I'm familiar with libertarian principles, but every libertarian economist I've paid attention to has emphasized the importance of second-order effects.
Only if you think spending power is the only criterion that matters when considering who you want coming to the event, and my whole point is that this is not (always) true, given that audience demographics influence the experience and the quality of the performance.
> everything Ive read already suggests that audience makeups are changing at music festivals as more tickets are bought second hand at these considerable markups
For some events, sure, like Coachella and concerts promoted by Live Nation, whose approach is to maximize ticket revenues and who are able to take a cut of the resale price via Ticketmaster's official resale marketplace (though, as I explained in the first comment, this can damage the experience and destroy the brand value of the festival over the long term, as happened in Australia).
Other festivals, like Glastonbury, actively eschew this approach, and have remained relevant and youth-oriented for five decades now.
And the very reason we're having this conversation is that some artists want to reserve at least some of their tickets for buyers who can be qualified more by authentic enthusiasm than spending power, with listening time on Spotify being an interesting proxy for authentic enthusiasm.
Taylor Swift can’t realistically play more shows than she did during the Eras Tour, and it’s unlikely that she’d have sold a million seats in London if she were charging much more than she did.
That's only if the event sells out. The ticket should have sold for a higher price such that the demand was exactly the number of seats available.
Taylor Swift can probably still sell out if she raises the price ten fold, but what kind message does this send to her average listeners? What does it mean if the most popular popular musician of our times prices the populace out? You can of course dismiss the likely negative responses as emotional and irrational, but that's the whole deal with art and culture. You can't build a fan base without catering to their emotions.
And then on the other extreme of music you have people like Fugazi, whose low ticket pricing is very obviously a part of the band's entire artistic and ideological project.
If you want to see what happens when you apply supply and demand to ticket pricing, you can just look at your nearest big league sports team. The recent trend seems to be jacking up the prices as much as they can get away with and catering more and more to VIP guests who spend a fortune in one of those "hospitality" suites. Perhaps not a coincidence that less and less people, especially younger people, around me are casually into sports these days. They got told that they are not welcome in the corporate owned sports venue and they take their attention elsewhere, and all it's left are a dwindling set of diehard fans and C-suite people who are there not for sports but for overpriced steak dinners and are too nicely dressed to cheer for their home team.