The Price of Concert and Game Tickets Is Definitely a Rip-Off

This will probably come off as an old man rant about the "good old days". Is it just me or are the prices for concert and game tickets ridiculously higher now?

Recently I purchased a pair of tickets to see the Black Crowes (my favorite band) when they play in Vancouver later this month. The face value cost was $375 a piece! Granted, I purchased the VIP package that puts my son and I in the fifth row and includes backstage passes, but...

It caused me to look back at some of my old concert and sporting event stubs that I have saved for over 30 years. Take a look at the caliber of acts, venues and prices and tell me I'm not crazy!

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Are concert tickets really more expensive now or is it just because of inflation?

Sure, the price of everything is higher now that it was in 1990. When I first started driving a car, the price of gasoline was about $1.16 per gallon. Today it is around $3.50. Minimum wage was about $4.25 whereas today it's $13.69. I looked up the history of inflation in the U.S. and, it appears, one dollar in 1990 is worth around $2.08 today -- a little more than double.

Using that math as a reference, I can tell you that concert and event ticket prices are higher than ever and I have the proof!

How much have concert and event ticket prices have outrageously increased

LOOK: See how much gasoline cost the year you started driving

To find out more about how has the price of gas changed throughout the years, Stacker ran the numbers on the cost of a gallon of gasoline for each of the last 84 years. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (released in April 2020), we analyzed the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline from 1976 to 2020 along with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for unleaded regular gasoline from 1937 to 1976, including the absolute and inflation-adjusted prices for each year.

Read on to explore the cost of gas over time and rediscover just how much a gallon was when you first started driving.