Sabrina Carpenter Bagging tickets to catch your favourite artist live can often feel like navigating a particularly enraging circle of hell right now. From sellers’ websites crumbling under astronomical levels of traffic, touts targeting in-demand gigs and immediately flipping the goods for a huge mark-up and complicated hoops to jump through (pre-registration, ballots, and fan verification processes), just reaching the checkout feels like an effort worthy of an Olympic medal. And once you’ve made it there, the price tags – often hidden until the very late stages – can sometimes be gasp-inducing.
None of this is anything new, and gig prices have been gradually creeping up to ridiculous prices already over the last few years, further fuelled by an increasing number of musicians – including Harry Styles, Blackpink, Coldplay, Taylor Swift, and Bruce Springsteen – all opting into dynamic pricing. Much like flights, or hotel bookings, which shift in price depending on a number of factors, the idea is that dynamic pricing is reactive to demand – and a number of ticketing sites are now embracing it. Still, my jaw truly hit the floor when tickets for Sabrina Carpenter’s upcoming London shows rapidly hiked to well above the £200 mark.
Look, just like everybody else, I’ve been taking sip after delicious sip of Carpenter’s huge summer bop Espresso at every given chance (quite possibly because Spotify’s algorithm insists on playing it to me approximately every 10 m.