Lend me your ears: Cheap concert tickets still exist

Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI When I noticed that Guns N' Roses was playing nearby on a random Wednesday in August, I fired off a text to my boyfriend with a screenshot of the ticket map. "Mainly not serious but," I wrote, followed by, "Is … v cheap." Less than a week before the show, it seemed Axl, Slash, and Duff had come down with a mild case of blue-dot fever. Might we be able to take advantage of it? My Guns N' Roses fandom has always fallen somewhere between a genuine interest and a bit. My older cousin was into them when I was at the age that everything she did seemed impossibly cool, and November Rain is still, rather embarrassingly, one of my favorite songs. I read guitarist Slash's autobiography after rescuing it from a friend's trash — while not a literary masterpiece, it was a funny conversation-starter. As for my ticket dilemma, I weighed the pros and cons. On the one hand, the trek to MetLife Stadium in New Jersey would be annoying, Guns N' Roses is getting old, and Axl Rose is still Axl Rose. On the other hand, a lot of decent tickets were available at a compelling price point, the opener, Public Enemy, was also intriguing, and Axl Rose is still Axl Rose. We pulled the trigger. The experience was … kind of great? Not life-changing amazing, but a fine little adventure I didn't spend that much money on. The stadium was respectably full in the end, too. It got me wondering whether the whole blue-dot fever thing — an online term that's shorthand for undersold events where the sea of available tickets is represented as blue dots on online ticketing platforms — might have an upside for fans. Ticket prices are sky-high for super-hot tours, but there are also plenty of events that don't have such explosive demand. For those willing to be slightly opportunistic — see the aging rockers and former boy banders, catch the losing team already out of the playoffs, strike at the last second — there are good deals and good times to be had. Some concertgoers are already figuring this out. Rather than a hack, the widespread availability of reasonably priced tickets reflects the reality of the live events industry. When a show isn't on fire, consumers can often tell. The space saw a real boom post-pandemic — acts needed to get back on the road to make money, and fans were eager to get out of their houses and into the stands. There was a seemingly infinite appetite to see megastar musicians like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, whose massive stadium tours convinced other artists to book venues bigger than they could fill. This led to oversaturation, and some artists have struggled to get people in seats, especially as the touring market came back down to Earth. When a show isn't on fire, consumers can often tell, in part because they can see all those infamous blue dots on seat maps. In turn, a growing number of fans are making the calculation that instead of securing a ticket right as they go on sale, they might be better off waiting, says Jarred Arfa, the head of global music at Independent Artist Group, whose touring roster includes 50 Cent, Metallica, and Neil Young. "It's kind of like, 'Why commit early if I don't have to?'" he says. If demand is soft, sellers may decide to discount tickets to draw more people in — after all, a ticket is a perishable good, and once Axl Rose walks offstage, it's worthless. Waiting can also pay off because more tickets might become available late in the game. In some instances, the stage and production don't require as much space as anticipated, or tickets that were initially held back for internal purchases and promotional handouts are released. "You then have this kind of rush at the end, but it certainly makes us and the promoters more nervous," Arfa says. Marketing budgets that used to be heavily front-loaded are being reallocated more toward a week or two before a show, as promoters try to coax the procrastinators off the couch. "As an industry, we have to do better at incentivizing people to buy early," Arfa says. Holding off isn't fringe behavior. Data provided to Business Insider by secondary ticketing marketplace SeatGeek shows that 36% of concert tickets on the platform are bought in the week before the event, and 17% in the last 24 hours. In sports, there's a heavier trend toward eleventh-hour buying, with 68% of tickets going a week before and 38% a day before a game. This may be because sports have a specific set of last-minute decision drivers, a SeatGeek spokesperson says, such as weather, standings, and whether a star is playing. Overall, phones have made same-week and same-day purchasing pretty easy. Stephen Parker, executive director of the National Independent Venue Association, says he's had conversations with artists and managers about how to handle sales windows now that so many fans are biding their time. "It is an open invitation to rethink the timeframe in which you are announcing your tour and when tickets go on sale and how much time is allocated to each," he says. Waiting is still a gamble. A show can sell better than expected, prices can rise, and affordable seats can disappear. While it's unlikely there will be absolutely no tickets available for any given event thanks to resale markets, dawdlers may wind up paying a high price if they miscalculate. And for high-demand, mega-popular events, prices may skyrocket and never come down. There's an enormous amount of opacity in the ticketing market, including how much inventory actually exists, who is selling it, and whether scarcity is real. This blue-dot strategy works if you want to do a fun thing on the cheap or are willing to risk plans not panning out, though it's not as reckless as it seems since very few events are complete sell-outs. "It varies on the years, it varies across artists, but a 70%, 80% occupancy rate is kind of the average," says Pascal Courty, an economics professor at the University of Victoria. What makes sense for an individual bargain hunter can be a disaster for the people trying to sell the show, which helps explain why the industry doesn't just slash tickets to $40 to try to offload inventory. Much of the demand for concerts is psychological. People want to go to the thing everyone else wants to go to, and creating urgency and frenzy convinces people to snap up tickets. If fans see a ton of open seats, "you have this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy," Courty says. People may perceive the tickets as "damaged goods," they figure shows aren't selling for a reason. If no one else wants to go, why should they? It does not cost $175 to go and see local or up-and-coming artists in a club on a random Friday night. The worst-case scenario is a canceled show or tour, which most acts want to avoid at (almost) all costs. "A cancellation, to me, is always the worst thing," Arfa says. Even when an artist says it's not because of sales, people read between the lines. And fans want to trust that if an act is out there selling tickets, they're going to reliably show up. Axl Rose onstage at a concert in London in 1992. Also, a preview of my Halloween costume. Pete Still/Redferns For consumers, this is a strange little opportunity. According to Pollstar, a music industry trade publication, the average ticket price for the top 100 worldwide tours was $132.62 in 2025, up 36% from $96.17 in 2019. But there's plenty out there that's below average. The ideal blue-dot buyer is not someone dying to see their favorite artist, looking to fly across the country to see a show, or trying to organize an outing with 10 of their friends. It's someone who's open to being flexible with their time and tastes. It's great to take a chance on an activity and enjoy it for what it is, even if it's not your Most Favorite Thing Ever. Maybe it will be amazing, and if not, you're out a few hours and dollars. "We need people to think about our rooms and our festivals and our spaces as a feeling, as an experience. In some cases, the artist playing the stage doesn't even matter," Parker, from NIVA, says. "It does not cost $175 to go and see local or up-and-coming artists in a club on a random Friday night." Or a group of 60-something rockers who have booked a football stadium they can't fill. In the spirit of full disclosure, we wound up splurging and spending $146 each to sit in the eighth row on the floor instead of going for the truly supercheap nosebleeds. We were close enough that the band didn't look like ants, but far enough away that we couldn't scrutinize how far they are past their glory days. Axl Rose is surprisingly spry, though he did talk to the crowd about his chronic jaw issues for quite a while. I think I'm going to dress up as him for Halloween — all I have to do is find a red bandana, because hair-wise, he and I have a similar thing going on. My boyfriend can get a wig and go as Slash. Going forward, I will be on the lookout for other not-so-hottest tickets in town to leverage blue-dot fever for myself while it lasts. I figure I don't need to love the thing I'm doing, I just have to like it more than what it costs. Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy. 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