What do Harry Styles tickets and olive oil have in common? They’ve both doubled in price over the past three years. That was the shock that awaited Styles fans once tickets for the singer’s upcoming tour went on sale last month, with some costing upwards of $1,000 (or £750).

Despite the cost, tickets were in high demand. The singer recently returned to music after a near three-year hiatus, announcing a new album, the oddly titled Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, and releasing a new single, the LCD Soundsystem-esque “Aperture”. With Styles’ return to music naturally came the tour announcement, including a mammoth 30 shows at Madison Square Garden in New York and a record-breaking 12-night run at Wembley Stadium in London. At the time of writing, many of the shows are sold out.  

This isn’t surprising. Pop fans are dedicated, especially fans of Harry Styles. Nevertheless, the eye-watering price of tickets to his shows has soured the singer’s comeback. Social media and TikTok were flooded with fans complaining about how much the opportunity to see the former One Direction heartthrob live now cost, with the BBC confirming that the price of some tickets had more than doubled since the last time Styles toured in 2023. Ticket prices were so high Rolling Stone reported that some fans were literally selling their blood in order to afford them.  

“I’m terrified of needles, and I was so scared,” one fan said of the process. “Being in the chair, I was having second thoughts. Like, ‘What am I doing?’ I just want to see one of my favourite artists. We shouldn’t have to be doing all this just to afford tickets for one night.” 

They’re not wrong. Over the past decade, the price of gig tickets has increased a dizzying amount. As The Guardian reported in early 2025, average ticket prices increased by 23.3 per cent in 2023, a trend that the trade publication Pollstar says has only continued – between 2024 and 2025, the average ticket price for a stadium show rose by 18.3 per cent. 

Of course, high ticket prices aren't a new phenomenon. Madonna has been charging fans huge amounts for concert tickets for years (“People spend $300 on crazy things all the time, things like handbags,” she told Newsweek in 2012. “So work all year, scrape the money together, and come to my show. I’m worth it”). But following the backlash that surrounded the Ticketmaster x Eras Tour debacle, and fan awareness of the predatory practices employed by ticket marketplaces like dynamic or surge pricing, it seems people are waking up to how expensive and exploitative modern pop fandom has become. 

It’s not just the price of tickets, either. Taylor Swift and her endless album variants have set a precedent that many artists now follow. Before Styles had even released the first song from Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally, he was selling four different coloured vinyl records for fans to collect, each costing just shy of £30. That’s before we get to the merch bundles, which include a £70 box containing a camera, bumbag and a CD, as well as a bundle that contains a limited edition tomato-coloured vinyl, a “silver glitter cassette” and a CD for £56. Add to this the limited merch drops and the rise of artist-centred pop-up shops employed by the likes of Beyoncé, Billie Eilish and Styles – who, as a perk of the $1,435 VIP package for his upcoming shows, is offering fans a “scheduled time and fast pass access to the pop-up shop” – and pop music suddenly seems like a late-stage capitalist hellscape.

Once confronted with this greed, it’s hard to feel excited or entertained by pop

There will, undoubtedly, be those who point out that things have always been this way. Pop music, as a genre, has close ties with consumerism, profit and commodification, often inseparable from the synthesisers. In the era of CD singles, it was common for artists to release multiple variants in order to boost sales. Often, these singles would even contain a song that fans could already listen to on an album. What differentiated the era of CD singles from our current world of vinyl variants and VIP ticket packages was the price – the most Geri Halliwell was charging for a CD of ‘Look at Me’ was £5.

Of course, in the decades since the dominance of the CD single, how musicians make money from their music has drastically shifted. Streaming means that very few artists are able to make a living from just their recorded music alone; on average, Spotify, the most popular streaming service, pays out between just $0.003 and $0.005 per stream. It’s understandable, then, that artists would turn to merchandise, physical editions and ticket packages in order to recoup costs. 

However, there are those who, despite this harder economic environment, don’t gouge their fans. Bands like The 1975, The Cure and Bleachers, as well as high-profile artists such as Hayley Williams and Yungblud, are able to keep the price of their concert tickets down while avoiding predatory practices such as dynamic pricing. Olivia Dean has even called out Ticketmaster and AXS after tickets for her US tour appeared on each platform’s official reseller marketplaces at 14 times their original face value. Dubbing the companies “vile”, Dean successfully convinced Ticketmaster and AXS to cap the reseller prices. “Live music should be affordable and accessible, and we need to find a new way of making that possible,” she said. 

While ticket touts, the unregulated secondary market, and the monopoly held by Ticketmaster are all an issue, they don’t explain the ungodly amount being charged. Nor does it give a reason why artists are encouraging fans to purchase numerous copies of albums before any music has even been released. In an age of increasing costs, stagnating wages, economic uncertainty and rising inequality, charging fans hundreds – if not thousands – for tickets to a concert makes pop stars seem decidedly out of touch. What’s worse is that the artists, labels, managers and promoters know that fans will fork out anyway, even if it means selling their own bodily fluids. 

Not only does this vampiric exploitation alienate those fans unable (or unwilling) to go to the lengths required to secure tickets, but it’s also sucking the fun out of pop. After all, pop music has always offered a fantasy to escape into. It’s a space for play and experimentation, an arena within which to find catharsis, joy and explore one’s identity. Even when artists are singing about wealth and glamour, there’s usually a silly preposterousness to the braggadocio. When that fantasy bleeds into reality, though, it exposes the greasy, money-grabbing mechanism that powers the music industry. Music stops being art and becomes a mere product to be sold. As a result, you lose your identity as a fan and simply become a consumer, there to be profited from at any expense. 

Once confronted with this greed, it’s hard to feel excited or entertained by pop. What was once a delightful, sometimes ridiculous, and often thrilling form of escapism now seems like just another emblem of our enshittified, extractive existence. Now, when you hit play on “Aperture” and hear Harry Styles sing “we belong together”, it’s hard not to hear the implicit caveat: ‘Only if you can afford it, though.’