Getty Image / Jim Bennett
Pearl Jam simply cannot catch a break right now with fans who are furious over high and low ticket prices.
The anger dates back to early in the year when Pearl Jam announced a ‘Dark Matter’ world tour after releasing the band’s first new song since 2020. Shortly after the tour announcement, fans were irate over £160 ($200) ticket prices for the UK tour dates. Some fans angrily pointed out that tickets in Germany were going for 300EUR in the lower bowl.
Those same fans would surely be overjoyed by a drop in ticket prices, right? Right??? Wrong.
Several days ago, the Sun UK reported that due to poor ticket sales at the upcoming Tottenham Hotspur Stadium show on June 29th and at other UK shows, some tickets had seen a 50% reduction in price. The Sun wrote “Fans of huge rock band left fuming as tickets for stadium show are slashed by 50% after poor sales.”
So the same fans that were stewing over high ticket prices were then furious that they’d bought tickets at the high price only to see the cost of some seats get slashed. And I understand that but at the same time, it’s not as if the ‘good seats’ were selling for dirt cheap and for those who really cared they could list their current tickets on the secondary market and buy tickets at a lower cost.
In Manchester, LiveNation has apparently dropped tickets as low as £49.20 + fees, tickets that were initially on sale for £92.50. On a LiveNation Facebook post about the event(s), one person wrote “What a p— take for all the genuine fans that bought tickets on release! Shame on you LiveNation and Ticketmaster.”
Another fan commented “I can’t justify the cost of tickets today for big acts. Hopefully they (LiveNation not Pearl Jam) will rethink their strategy for next time.”
It’s not just Pearl Jam struggling to sell tickets…
There have been thousands of headlines written about Jennifer Lopez‘s struggles with her tour. It started with the tour being rebranded and quickly morphed into cancellation of dates. The Black Keys, Charli XCX, Troy Sivan, and others ahve all struggled to sell tickets.
One person on Meta’s Threads even went so far as to suggest there’s a conspiracy theory behind Justin Timberlake’s DUI and it was easier for him to get arrested and have it disrupt the tour than to admit poor ticket sales and take a huge financial hit.
In the case of Pearl Jam and others, it seems evident that much of the anger from fans should be directed at the ticket vendors, and not the bands/solo artists. But at the end of the day, the musicians have to be accountable to their fans.