As if concerts aren’t expensive enough already, you now have to shell out $60 for a bandanna that will disintegrate the moment you exhale near it.
Last year I spent a redacted amount of money on flights and tickets to see Lady Gaga in Sydney. We left our accommodation in the middle of the afternoon to get to the merch stand with plenty of time before the show, as I privately seethed at myself for getting rid of a cool ‘Alejandro’ T-shirt I bought from her Spark Arena show in 2011. This time I would not be so foolish – I would commemorate the night not with photographs or memories, but a T-shirt that I would hold on to and might some day wear while doing the gardening.
Alas, when we got the merchandise stand, of which there were several, my eyes protruded from my skull like the scary woman in the Guinness World Records TV show. There was a checkered black and red beanie that looked like something my primary school bully would wear for AU$80 (NZ$91). There was a waifish bandanna with a bit of print on it for AU$60 (NZ$69) and a simple tote bag for a whopping AU$90 (NZ$103). Ugly T-shirts that looked like they had been spraypainted with lyrics? $80. Hoodies? $185. A cardboard fan? $55.
It’s not just Lady Gaga who has been doing the dead dance on fandom’s bank balance lately. Ben* has been working in live music in Aotearoa since the early 2000s, and has observed how merchandise has skyrocketed alongside the price of concert tickets. While an official concert T-shirt might have set you back $40 in 2005, after Covid-19 he says merchandise pricing changed dramatically. “Everything around the concert industry spiked after Covid, because all these costs like manufacturing and air freight went up remarkably,” he says.
Merch prices spiked accordingly post-pandemic, along with rising fees, and never came back down. “It was like people figured out that they could just keep pushing the envelope,” he says. One of the biggest price jumps he observed was at Billie Eilish’s Spark Arena show in 2022, where T-shirts started at $75. “I thought that was taking the piss, especially for an act geared towards a younger audience,” he says. “Once you pay for the tickets and the parking, that’s often 600 bucks for a family. If the kids want T-shirts, that’s another 200 bucks.”
One Kendrick Lamar fan felt like she splurged when she bought a $100 long sleeve T-shirt at his concert in 2022. “I thought that was steep, but the fabric was super soft and good quality,” she said. “It didn’t have a basic Gildan tag, instead Oklama [Lamar’s alias] was printed as the tag. I thought that was a really good personal touch that didn’t feel so generic.” Three years later, she saw Lamar again in Sydney and was faced with a very different merch offering: “the T-shirts were 100 bucks and had an AS Colour label, so it didn’t feel that personal.”
Last year, Travis Scott’s controversial Eden Park show was another one that had some memorable price points, Ben recalls. “The official T-shirts for that were $85 and the official hoodie was $250, and people were just laughing.” He compares Scott’s more generic designs to those of Metallica, who offered fans a T-shirt with a full-colour print on the front and the back, as well as specific reference to the Eden Park concert, for nearly $20 cheaper. “If Metallica can do it for 70, why is Travis Scott doing it for 90 for something that’s not as good?”
Even fans who don’t normally buy concert merch say they have been sucked in by Metallica’s offerings. “The first piece of concert merch I ever bought was from Metallica’s last tour here in 2010 because it was just such a ridiculous T-shirt with a frazzled, messed up looking Kiwi bird on it,” says diehard fan Troy Rawhiti-Connell. For their Eden Park concert last year, the band even set up a pop-up merch store in the Auckland CBD. “I think when bands tap into giving it a sense of fun and exclusivity, it definitely can compel people to part with their money.”
Of course, it’s not just the merchandise that is rinsing fans these days. “I went to the All Blacks last year and it was $12 for a Steinlager, and an extra 50 cents if you wanted the cardboard holder to put your cans into,” says Ben. “Why do they need to screw every person out of every single dollar they have?” Indeed, at Lady Gaga I spent $31.78 on Maltesers, a bag of chips and a soft drink. And yet, still determined to get some meaningful concert merch, I bought the Mayhem album on vinyl as a practical memento, gently shutting my eyes as I Paywaved.
It was only when I got home to New Zealand that I looked at my bank account and realised: that vinyl cost me literally twice as much as if I had bought it anywhere else, at any other time. With Ed Sheeran arriving in town for a run of big New Zealand stadium shows this week, I beg of you all: keep your eyes open and stay vigilant in these testing times.
