“Please, Please, Please,” Lower the Prices
Sabrina Carpenter’s fan base is upset at high seating prices for the pop star’s upcoming “Short n’ Sweet” tour.
View of Ticketmaster page for Sabrina Carpenter's upcoming tour. Photo by Ava Kaloz '25
As students return to campuses everywhere, it is clear that summer has ended. With it, the joys and excitement that came from attending a plethora of concerts this past summer has also come to a close. With headliners like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, this summer was one to remember as people everywhere spent their savings to secure tickets for their most beloved artists.
Not only did major names in the music industry go on tours this past summer, but new songs and number-one hits were released, including various songs sung by Sabrina Carpenter, one of the most up-and-coming artists.
As fans listened in to hear songs like “Please, Please, Please,” and “Espresso,” they fell in love with Carpenter’s upbeat, sultry and summery sounds as she sang her way into our hearts. It seemed only obvious that her next move after creating so many hits would be to go on tour. With tours and concert dates, however, come ticket sales — sales that have stood to create mass controversy across the globe.
On June 20 and July 23, Carpenter released the official dates for her upcoming “Short n’ Sweet” tour for the U.S. and the U.K. With prices ranging up to the triple digits, fans have responded in an uproar about how Carpenter’s tickets are overpriced and unaffordable for families and her young fan base.
Fans in the U.K. have expressed aggravation about how the cost of a Carpenter concert has gone from £25 to a whopping £250. That is ten times more than last year. As prices have risen, Carpenters’ fans have turned to social media to voice their concerns and express how Carpenter is not yet a long-established artist.
In an article for the “Daily Mail,” Milly Veitch cites the various comments that Carpenter’s fans have written, many of which have gone on to mock her lyrics writing, “‘I'm working late to save up to see her.” Fans have also begun to insult Carpenter by claiming that she has only two major hits and that her “ticket prices are absolute madness.”
Amid the anger and frustration of her fans, Ticketmaster crashed during sales, causing even more mayhem than the ticket crash during Swift’s Eras Tour presale did. As thousands of buyers went on to buy their tickets to Carpenter’s tour, dozens of resellers began to snatch up the tickets, then selling them back to the public at prices even higher than those listed by Carpenter. Even looking today, tickets range in price from the low hundreds of dollars up to the thousands, depending on the city.
Various Marist College students commented about their experiences buying tickets for Swift’s Eras Tour and Carpenter’s “Short n’ Sweet” Tour, all of which had the same overall theme: Swift priced her tickets high, but given her status within the music industry and her years of experience, she had a right to price tickets as such. Carpenter did not.
“Taylor Swift’s tickets were quite fairly priced for what you were getting,” said Huy Huong ‘25. “It honestly could have been more expensive and would have appealed to the same crowd.”
But let’s leave that idea up to the Swifites: Would you still have bought Eras tickets if they were tens, if not hundreds, of dollars more?
Unfortunately, expensive concert tickets are likely here to stay, as many artists have turned to a scheme called dynamic pricing to price their tours. Dynamic pricing relies heavily on the supply and demand of the population, with prices rising as more people are attracted to a given artist.
While the debate continues over Carpenter’s ticket pricing, it is clear that her ticket prices are here to stay as her popularity has soared, given her summer of top hits. All we can hope for in the future of concerts and tours is that prices will flatline, instead of soar, as dynamic pricing continues. However, knowing the trajectory of the music industry, that is a prediction that is hard to make and harder to follow.
“Concerts have just gotten super duper expensive in my opinion,” said Huong. “Let’s bring back Woodstock tickets when it was like $6.”