EDM fans have felt it for years: festival tickets keep getting more expensive, and paychecks aren’t keeping pace.A new study from Hard Rock Bet puts hard numbers behind that suspicion, tracking single-day ticket prices across 31 major US music festivals since 2015 and confirming that general admission has gotten dramatically pricier.
Ad 0:00 Click for sound 0:00 / 0:00 The study ranks the country’s most popular music festivals based on their average prices for one-day GA passes, pulling directly from the websites of each event as well as secondary sources.Researchers also measured cost per hour of programming, giving a sense of value beyond the price alone.
Ohio’s Secret Dreams, which debuted in 2022, stands out as one of the sharper risers in the dataset, with GA prices jumping 158% from $62 in 2015 to $159 this year.The same goes for Electric Forest, the prices of which rose 140%, from $80 to $191.
Those figures are among the steepest climbs of any festival tracked, electronic or otherwise.This story wouldn’t exist without Insomniac Events, which has grown into a Live Nation-backed powerhouse over the past decade, scaling its festivals with bigger stages and production budgets that dwarf what independent promoters were working with back in 2015.
EDC Las Vegas, one of the largest EDM festivals in the world, saw a 103% jump, with GA now averaging $236 per day or roughly $19.67 per hour of programming.Meanwhile, HARD Summer in LA climbed 90%, from $90 to $170.
Not every fest has hiked prices at the same pace.Miami’s iconic Ultra Music Festival rose 20% over the decade, from $150 to $180, making it one of the more modest increases in the entire study.
Lost Lands, the beloved Ohio dubstep festival launched by Excision in 2017, climbed only 26% while Hulaween in Florida rose a mere 10%.Elsewhere on the list, Coachella’s ticket price unsurprisingly grew at a rate 73%, reaching $2...