Why concerts keep getting more expensive

At the end of 2024, Lexi Toon started saving money for tickets to see Harry Styles with her mom. Over time, she put aside a little more than $1,000.

Then the former One Direction singer announced performances in just seven cities. Toon, 34, lives outside Cincinnati; the closest place to see Styles was in New York, more than 600 miles away. Still, “it was like, we’ll do the trip, we’ll make it fun,” she said.

Except tickets were in high demand—more than $500 each by the time she made it to the front of the online queue—and the cost of round-trip flights to New York plus a hotel tacked on an extra $1,500. Toon won’t be seeing Styles in 2026. She called it “a punch to the gut.”

The price of concert tickets has been increasing for years, a reflection of both rising touring costs and ravenous demand for the top stars. Now music lovers face another potential financial hurdle: As some stars who used to trek from town to town choose to play multiple times in a smaller number of locations instead, many fans also have to drum up additional money for travel and lodging.

Plenty are plunking down their cash. Diony Elias, 45, and his girlfriend spent around $7,000 to see Bad Bunny in Puerto Rico last summer. Well over 11 million people registered to score tickets for Styles’s 30 shows in New York, according to Ticketmaster, a number far greater than the capacity of 30 Madison Square Gardens.

Matej Sokcevic, a 28-year-old fan based in Munich, will travel to both London and Amsterdam to see Styles—“a dream,” he said. He expects to spend 765 euros on his London trip for a ticket, travel, food and a hotel, along with another 425 euros for Amsterdam and 225 euros on his outfit, which comes to 1,415 euros, or about $1,636 in total.

Others were priced out. While Victoria Hupp, a 29-year-old mother of two from near Cleveland, has been a fan of Styles since his boy band days, she didn’t have room in her budget for airfare on top of tickets. “The working class is already losing so much,” she said. “Concerts shouldn’t be for wealthy people only.”

A spokesman for the singer declined to comment.

Staying in one place has become an attractive proposition for major stars. Styles experimented with residencies in a few cities during his previous tour. Bad Bunny played 31 shows in San Juan last summer. The Eagles and U2 set up shop in Las Vegas; Adele picked Las Vegas and Munich.

This approach reduces travel and labor costs for artists and frees them up to test more intricate stage designs, according to Erik Selz, a partner at the agency ROAM whose roster includes the indie artists Andrew Bird and the Magnetic Fields.

“The money you can pull out night after night can absolutely be greater than if you’re bouncing from market to market,” Selz said. And a residency—even a mini one—limits some of the grueling physical aspects of touring as well.

He also sketched out the argument against residencies: Namely that the cost of the journey to the show is largely “transferred to the consumer.”

Some acts that announce residencies have taken pre-emptive steps to emphasize that the additional travel will be beneficial.

When Dead & Company did a series of shows at Sphere in Las Vegas, “we took the money that we’d save and put it into more activations so the extra travel costs were really worth it,” said Bernie Cahill, who co-manages the band and also worked on a residency with another one of his clients, the country singer Dwight Yoakam.

Fans who made the trip to Las Vegas could see a re-creation of the Grateful Dead’s famous “Wall of Sound” speaker system, an exhibit that collected photographs of the group over three decades, immersive art from drummer Mickey Hart or they could watch one of the band’s concerts in a theater. All these experiences were free to the public.

And when Bad Bunny announced his residency in Puerto Rico, the star framed the additional fan expenses on flights and hotels as a boost to the island’s economy. On top of that, he reserved the first nine shows for locals who might have been unable to see him on previous world tours.

These gestures engender goodwill because music lovers have “an expectation of fairness” when buying concert tickets, said Pascal Courty, an economics professor at the University of Victoria. They see their favorite artists as one of their own.

It’s different in sports, Courty continued, where “prices settle at a point, and people accept paying that.” A team’s devoted followers may grumble, but their complaints rarely rise to the level of the hubbub around must-see tours, from Bruce Springsteen to Oasis.

Fans of Styles who can’t afford to travel to his shows argued that he was undercutting his own big-tent messaging. “Here he is singing, ‘We belong together,’” Hupp said, referencing lyrics from his new single “Aperture.” But getting together “feels unaffordable and unattainable to a lot of folks.”

Write to Elias Leight at elias.leight@wsj.com