What Concert Tickets Teach Us About Value
You try to buy Taylor Swift tickets. You open the page the instant they go on sale, and by the time the queue spits you out, the only seats left cost $800. Your first thought: That's insane. These should cost $200. Scalpers are parasites. Ticketmaster is a monopoly.
That frustration is real. But what if the price is telling you something true?
What "Overpriced" Actually Claims
When we say tickets are "overpriced," we're claiming to know what they should cost—some "real" value that the market has distorted. Gabriel Bell makes a version of this argument in his recent post, "The Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing." He draws on Marx's distinction between "use value" (what something does for you) and "exchange value" (what it sells for) to argue that prices distort what things are actually worth.
This sounds right intuitively. The experience of seeing Taylor Swift live has a value that feels separate from whatever number appears on the ticket. But think about what you'd have to believe for that to be true. You'd have to believe that you know the real value of the ticket, and that the millions of people paying $800 are all wrong—or all victims of some system that's forcing them to pay more than they should.
What the Price Actually Says
The ticket costs $800 because there are 70,000 seats and millions of people who want them. That's it. The price isn't ignoring your desire to see the show—it's counting your desire alongside everyone else's.
Tyler Cowen, in Stubborn Attachments, calls prices "aggregated information signals." They're the only way to see collective desire in a world where resources are limited. The $800 price doesn't mean the concert is worth exactly $800 to you. It means that at $800, demand roughly equals supply. Below that price, more people want tickets than exist. The price is the messenger, not the villain.
This isn't a defense of Ticketmaster's fees or scalper bots. Those are real problems with how the market functions. But the underlying tension—lots of people wanting something scarce—doesn't go away if you eliminate the middlemen. Someone still has to decide who gets to go.
The Coordination Problem
Without prices, how would you allocate 70,000 seats among millions of fans?
First-come-first-served? That favors people with free time to sit in virtual queues—not necessarily the people who care most. A lottery? That ignores how much the concert matters to different people. A $200 cap? Then you're back to first-come-first-served, plus you've created a black market.
Prices aren't perfect, but they're the only system that lets strangers coordinate without someone at the top deciding who deserves access. When you're mad at the price, you're really mad at the fact that other people want the same thing you do, just as badly.
The Sentimental Value Problem
Gabriel worries that if the market becomes the "sole arbiter of what is important," we'll lose the things that make life worth living—sentimental value, ecological health, the stuff that can't be reduced to dollars.
But the concert example shows the opposite. The sentimental value is exactly why the price is high. People aren't paying $800 for the acoustic properties of the venue. They're paying because they care—because the experience means something to them that can't be easily replaced. The high price doesn't ignore that meaning; it reflects it.
Cowen would add: getting richer as a society means more people can afford to pay for what they love. A world where concert tickets are expensive but wages have risen faster is better than a world where tickets are cheap because no one can afford to go. His concept of "Wealth Plus" includes not just GDP but leisure time and the ability to pursue what matters to you. Economic growth is how we expand access to meaning, not how we destroy it.
The Message in the Number
The price isn't the enemy of what you value. It's the only way to see how much everyone else values the same thing. Being mad at the $800 ticket is being mad at a world where your desires aren't unique—where millions of other people also want the experience you want.
That's uncomfortable. But it's also true. And ignoring it doesn't make the scarcity go away. It just makes it harder to see.