Which Music Genre Has the Most Expensive Concert Tickets?

Following an analysis of pricing data collected from 2017 to 2021 carried out by touring-industry resource Pollstar, personal-finance website FinanceBuzz found that the average ticket price for a classic rock concert is $119.14.

That price, which is the most of any music genre over the last five years, was buoyed by the cost of seeing Bruce Springsteen’s “Springsteen on Broadway” show, which boasted the top three most expensive average ticket costs (2017: $496.16, 2018: $508.93 and 2019: $506.39) in the analysis. (Whether Springsteen’s Broadway shows should have been factored into the analysis as “concert” tickets is debatable.)

Pop was the second-most expensive genre at $100.65 per ticket, and Lady Gaga’s 2020 tour was the priciest ticket on average among pop acts with a $337.43 average price tag. Bruno Mars was a close second with a $330.73 average price for his 2021 tour. In total dollars, pop generated the most cash with more than $5.2 billion in ticket sales across 137 tours from 2017 to 2021, according to the study. The least expensive average ticket price was for Christian music at $39.38, followed by EDM ($55.05), alternative rock ($63.54) country ($66.18) and folk ($75.21). (Jimmy Buffett was characterized as folk. Sorry Parrotheads.)

“Of course, raw totals do not tell the whole story, so it’s useful to look at which genres produced the most money on a per tour basis,” per FinanceBuzz. “The top three genres remain the same when looking at things this way, with pop tours generating $38.6 million in ticket sales per tour across 137 tours, followed by classic rock ($35.6 million per tour across 100 tours) and rock ($33.7 million per tour across 72 tours).

This week, Springsteen announced that the E Street Band will hit the road for their first tour since the 14-month global River Tour that kicked off in 2016. The new tour will begin in April in Barcelona and include stops in Dublin, Paris, Ferrara, Rome, Amsterdam, Landgraaf, Zurich, Düsseldorf, Gothenburg, Oslo, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Vienna, Munich and Monza. The tour will also hit the U.K. and Belgium. No U.S. arena dates have been announced at this time, but that should change shortly.

“I’m just aching to play, you know and to actually not just play, but to travel and see our fans in all our different cities and feel that life again and see their faces again,” Springsteen, who turns 73 in September, said on his SiriusXM channel. “And, we got an old school, you know, tour planned where we’ll be out there for quite a while and give everybody a chance to see us if they’d like to…So it’s, it’s an old school E Street Band lengthy tour that we’re gonna be involved in. And everybody’s very excited about it.”

Get ready to pay him his money down or it’s gonna be tenth avenue freeze-out.