Elevator Fight Did Not Meaningfully Decrease Demand For Jay Z And Beyoncé Tour Tickets

Tickets to Beyoncé's solo tour demanded higher prices individually. But at stadiums this summer, the husband and wife are bringing in more per show together.

Tickets for Beyoncé's last solo tour were expensive and hard to get, but, according to sales figures, tickets for her upcoming joint tour with Jay Z, have prompted more spending on the secondary ticket market.

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Beyoncé's 2013 solo tour, The Ms. Carter Show, traveled the world for nearly a year in multiple legs across 23 countries.

People spent $12.1 million on the secondary market for tickets to the June to August 2013 North American run of Beyoncé's tour alone.

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This is according to estimates from Connor Gregoire, an analyst for SeatGeek, the search engine that aggregates data from ticket resellers like StubHub, eBay, and TicketsNow. For Beyoncé, that comes out to about $464,000 per show.

By comparison, $8.4 million has been spent on the secondary market for Beyoncé and Jay Z's On The Run tour tickets during the first 10 days of resales.

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That's less total, but accounts for fewer dates, coming out to about $523,000 per show, or 13% more than per-show average for Beyoncé's solo tour.

These numbers are based on secondary market data from the 10 days after tickets went on sale, for the first show of each tour leg analyzed. In this case, that includes 46 shows from the join tour's initially announced run, and Beyoncé's June-August 2013 North American run. Notably, some of the shows in this sample — the August 5, 2013 Beyonce concert at Brooklyn's Barclays Center, the July 11, 2014 Beyoncé and Jay Z concert at New Jersey's MetLife Stadium and the August 5, 2014 Beyoncé and Jay Z concert at AT&T Park in San Francisco — had yet to go on sale to the general public during this period. For those shows, resellers listed tickets with speculative prices, based on estimated demand.

So, why is the joint tour pulling in more money?

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According to SeatGeek, spending on second-hand tickets for all music shows has risen in the past year. But only by 3%, much less than the 13% per-show increase in spending from Bey's tour to the joint tour.

It's also because the joint tour is packing more people into each venue.

But all of its shows took place at indoor arenas that held about 20,000 people, while this summer's Beyoncé and Jay Z tour is taking place at much larger stadiums that hold 40,000 to 100,000 people.

Because of that limited supply, fans were willing to pay much higher resale prices for tickets to Beyoncé's tour than for the joint tour. SeatGeek shows tickets for the joint tour have been listed for as little as $37, for a Miami date, on secondary sites. Things get more expensive, for both tours, in big markets: The median listing price for the joint tour's stop at New Jersey's MetLife Stadium is $513. By comparison, the median listing price for Beyoncé's solo stop at Brooklyn's Barclays Center was $603.

Wait, but did the video of Beyonce’s sister Solange fighting with Jay Z in an elevator that emerged online this week impact demand for the joint tour?

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There was a small dip in the average ticket price on the secondary market across all shows on the joint tour this week: a 3.8% drop, from a median resale price of $213 to $205. "But that's likely just a part of the normal ebb and flow of the market," Gregoire said. "There wasn't a meaningful difference."