‘Some bands are really taking the mick’: Paul Heaton’s plan to make the £35 arena tour pay
Pop concerts these days can be breathtakingly expensive. Prices for a ticket for Taylor Swift’s soon-to-return sold-out Wembley Stadium shows this summer ranged from £59 to £195, with VIP packages reaching £662.
Available tickets to see Irish group The Corrs at Glasgow’s OVO Hydro arena in November cost between £77 and £193, including fees. Meanwhile, a ticket to see Janet Jackson, to pick another act at random, at Manchester’s new Co-op Live mega-arena in October ranges from £73 in the gods (£60 plus fees) to £151 for a mid-arena floor seat, to £450 for a “Gold Janet Jackson VIP Lounge Package”, which – granted – includes light snacks and two drinks tokens (spirits not included).
The latest Office for National Statistics inflation figures reveal that concert, theatre and cinema ticket prices rose by 7.4 per cent in June compared with the year before. Never has being a music fan been so pricey. “Money” – as Pink Floyd said – “Get a good job with more pay, and you’re OK.”
Step forward Paul Heaton. Last month the former Housemartins and Beautiful South frontman announced a UK arena tour for November and December at which all tickets cost £35 plus fees.
Almost every venue promptly sold out, leading Heaton to last week add extra dates, including a show at Co-op Live, whose 23,500 capacity makes it Europe’s biggest indoor arena.
This will be the largest tour of Heaton’s career, seeing him play to 116,000 people. He tells me the tour will “easily” be profitable. All of which raises the question: if Heaton can make money from touring with reasonably priced tickets, why aren’t other people doing it?
Speaking from his home in Manchester, the 62-year-old has a frank answer. Although he doesn’t name specific acts, he says “there are some established bands who were just really, really taking the piss.”
Heaton hopes his tour will be a wake-up call for the music industry. “I’m hoping there’s been a little bit of embarrassment when people have maybe thought, ‘Well, [are our prices] too much?’ Because we can make money,” he says. The singer hasn’t set his prices low “for the attention” but because he genuinely doesn’t want people to over-pay during a cost of living crisis.
Heaton has sold 15 million albums over four decades, which as a principal songwriter is likely to have earned him a degree of financial security – particularly as many of those sales came in the more lucrative pre-streaming era.
Perhaps the imperative to make money is less pressing for him than it is for younger acts. But he’ll still make a “five or six-figure” profit from his tour. And, crucially, he hasn’t had to cut his overheads in order to do so. If this is possible with £35 tickets, it suggests there’s something awry with the system.
Ticket prices are typically agreed on by the artist and the promoter, who is responsible for organising the tour. Prices take into account touring costs – including venue hire, wages, travel, insurance – before a final figure is settled on. Heaton believes artists’ attitude is too often “what can we get away with?”, and he argues that some artists are either “greedy or ill-advised” when it comes to setting prices.
“Hopefully, [they’re] ill-advised. I do think there are probably people surrounding many bigger artists who say, ‘You do realise that if you don’t charge £300 a ticket, you’re going to lose?’ And instead of the artist really looking at the breakdown of [costs], they say, ‘OK, you’re more experienced at this than me. I better go with what you’re saying.’”
Still, he’s had some difficult conversations to keep prices down. His concerts have always been reasonably priced but he noticed ticket prices creeping up post-pandemic.
“During that period my manager, who’s also my promoter, was saying, ‘Look, you really need to put the tickets up.’ In the area where I’m living, rising prices were hitting quite hard. And I just said, ‘Well, no, I want to keep it as cheap as it is,’” he says.
Heaton wants attendees to be “able to afford to buy a drink” when they get to his shows. It feels “mean” otherwise. There’s an added benefit: “What happens at these concerts, I’ve noticed, is that there’s a really good atmosphere. There’s a connection with somebody who charges a reasonable price to an audience who pays a reasonable price.”
Heaton could have charged more; his career shows little sign of waning. Two of his five number-one albums have been released in the past four years, which bodes well for The Mighty Several, his next, in October.
He’s had two number one singles (the acapella Caravan of Love with The Housemartins and A Little Time with The Beautiful South). Heaton’s Pyramid Stage appearance at Glastonbury in June was an undoubted festival highlight, and saw former Housemartins bandmate Norman Cook, AKA DJ Fatboy Slim, join him on-stage for a joyous Happy Hour (a misty-eyed Cook was also filmed stage-side watching an emotional rendition of Caravan of Love). A Radio 2 favourite, Heaton plays Radio 2 in the Park in Preston in September.
Heaton admits he’s not flash. “I don’t really pay myself to go and entertain,” he says, adding that he sees touring as “like a holiday”. When the Housemartins formed in 1983, he’d been on the dole for two years so asked to be paid a steady wage instead of getting a chunky advance.
Indeed, the cheap tickets chime with Heaton’s all-round reputation as an industry good egg. “The accountants always shake their heads because I always tell them I want to pay as much tax as possible,” he says. When music magazine Q closed in 2020, Heaton donated money to be distributed between its 40 former staff. He wanted “to make sure people weren’t left on their arse”, he later said.
Still, it slightly boggles the mind that ticket prices can vary so much. At Co-op Live, for example, you could buy 10 Heaton tickets for one top-price VIP Janet Jackson one. Or six Heatons for one top-priced Culture Club seat in December.
Another artist who creates quite a contrast is Billie Eilish, one of the world’s biggest music stars. The US singer’s UK arena tour next year has yet to fully sell out.
Her July 2025 show at Glasgow’s OVO Hydro arena – a venue that Heaton has sold out – still has standing tickets available for £147, including fees, and the odd seat at £113. There are also plenty of “Changemaker Tickets” costing £352, rising to £403 when fees are added, according to Ticketmaster.
These tickets are pricey because Eilish will donate £152 from each – they’re also available at other venues – to local charities “in keeping with her commitment to making a difference to the environmental impacts of her music and touring”, a spokesperson says.
She adds that Eilish’s prices started at £67, which research from Live, the body that represents the UK’s live music industry, found is about the average amount people spend on a ticket (ditto starting prices for The Corrs and Jackson).
“A year out from the first show, tickets are selling out fast,” the spokesperson says, adding that all lower-priced tickets have been snapped up and that most of the remaining tickets “are part of the Changemaker Ticket initiative,” which account for just 5 per cent of all tickets.
Jon Collins, the Chief Executive of Live, which represents the UK’s live music industry, says that most ticket prices have increased by less than the rising prices of energy, wages, equipment hire and other costs associated with putting on a show in the last few years. He argues that the variety in ticket prices provides a “great example” of the choice available to consumers. Comparing Heaton and Eilish, though, is not comparing “apples for apples”.
“The type of show that Paul puts on is in many ways not an ‘arena’ show, but he’s of a stature that he can sell an arena. He’s putting on quite a classic show that you might more likely expect to see at a Brixton Academy,” says Collins, who talks of “stripped-down staging” compared with the bells and whistles of an Eilish-style show. “Paul is an outlier in his ability to deliver such incredible value. And it is a brilliant show.”
The “hunger” remains for all kinds of tickets, Collins says. Brits spent £4.5 billion on tickets and in-venue purchases in 2019. This figure rose to £6.1 billion in 2023, according to Live’s own figures. The biggest issue around high prices is the government’s 20 per cent VAT levy on tickets, he says, which means that the government takes a fifth of the price. In France, for example, the VAT rate is 5.5 per cent.
Does Collins not think that some tickets are overpriced? “If they’re overpriced they wouldn’t sell… It’s a marketplace, isn’t it? If a tour does sell a bit more slowly then maybe that might determine where you put the price point next time.”
Heaton agrees that “market forces” are at play. But he says market forces shouldn’t have driven up prices when people are struggling financially. He warns that the danger of constantly rising prices will be a “loss of connection” between audience and performer.
“Weirdly, as the price goes up, music will become less valued, which is strange. People will see it as a chance to get near to an artist but they’ll feel less close to [that] artist. If you’re paying several thousands of pounds for a group of tickets, it’s not a live experience, it’s almost like an out-of-body experience – something you’re going to have to forget quickly otherwise you’ll realise how much you’ve paid.”
Tickets: paulheaton.co.uk