When we were young and going to concerts, most of the audience was under 30, and the tour itself was essentially a big marketing campaign to promote a new LP. If you look at ticket prices through the 1980s and 1990s, seats at an arena show were usually about twice the cost of the album the artist was promoting.

Now you can walk into a “rock” concert, and the crowd ranges from teenagers to people in their seventies. And because artists no longer earn the tidy royalties they once did from selling a $15 CD — remember, in 1991–1992, Nirvana was selling 200,000 copies of Nevermind every week — the concert has become the main event. The album exists to drive people to the tour, not the other way around.

As revenue from physical media collapsed, promoters began testing how far they could push ticket prices. Then the conglomerates came in and bought up the independents. The market held. Promoters realized that if they charged $100 per ticket and the show sold out instantly, they had priced it too low. Next time, the tickets were $150. And it just kept escalating.

The reality is that older, more affluent fans are willing to pay these prices, so they aren’t going away anytime soon. If an artist like Bruno Mars can sell out 70,000 seats five nights in a row, those tickets will only be more expensive the following year.