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Rock Concerts and Wealth Gaps
1,131 Words 3/14/25 By David Demers Ticket prices were only $5 when the folk-rock band Eagles performed July 7, 1974, at Memorial Coliseum in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Nearly fifty years later, when the band played in late January 2024 in Phoenix, a seat in front of the stage was $7,000. Prices decreased in denominations of $1,000 as seats receded from there. The cheapest seat I could find was $300 in the nose-bleed section. That $7,000 ticket price was 1,400 times higher than the $5 ticket. To reach the $7K threshold, that $5 ticket would have to had grown at a compounded rate of 15.6 percent per year. That's five times faster than average inflation rate and twice as fast as the average annualized return in the S&P 500 Index, which is 7.5 percent. ... The concert-ticket incident faded in my memory for a couple of weeks, until I saw a pie chart ... . The wealthiest 1 percentile of families own nearly a third of the nation's wealth (30.3%) — almost as much as the bottom 90th percentile — while the bottom 50th percentile collectively own only 2.5 percent. The top 10th percentile own two-thirds of the wealth (30.3% + 36.6%), and the remaining 40 percent of Americans (the 50th-to-90th percentile category) own 30.6 percent. So what does concentrated wealth have to do with the price of concert tickets? ... CLICK PDF ICON ABOVE LEFT TO CONTINUE READING | ||