How much does it cost to see Beyoncé? It depends

Tanaka Paschal, 43, was thrilled to be taking her son to Beyoncé's final Southern California show on her Cowboy Carter Tour this month.

- MATT STEVENS

They had missed the Renaissance World Tour two summers ago; tickets had sold out so fast, some fans ventured overseas to catch a gig.

"I thought I was not going to be able to see her, so I jumped on it," she said.

Paschal bought a pair of floor seats for about US$900 (29,900 baht) total, but like many others, she soon had a bit of buyers’ remorse. In the weeks that followed, she saw the price for similar seats drop by hundreds of dollars, then increase, then drop again.

"It’s frustrating," she said. “The next time, I'm going to wait until the day of.”

When tickets for big summer tours by acts like Lady Gaga, The Weeknd, and Kendrick Lamar and SZA go on sale, the prevailing wisdom is you have to move fast during one of the presales offered by artists and credit card companies or you'll be shut out.

Most, if not all, tickets are usually snatched up immediately, with prime seats popping up on resale platforms like StubHub or Ticketmaster's own secondary market at inflated prices. (Fans hoping to see Taylor Swift's Eras Tour famously didn’t even get a shot at the general on-sale: All the tickets were long gone.)

But things have been different for Beyoncé’s tour this time supporting her Grammy album of the year-winning Cowboy Carter; tickets moved during the presales, but a glance at the seat maps on Ticketmaster's pages later revealed not only a lot of pink dots indicating resale tickets, but plenty of blue dots representing available seats that had gone unpurchased, too. And those prices were notably changing.