It is chaos. It is bedlam. It is all up the wazoo. Nothing makes sense anymore. Suddenly it’s December and my head is spinning. Across this mess of a year some stunning demands have already been made on fans. SZA wanted $549.90 for a dynamically-priced ticket to her Auckland concert. Jerry Seinfeld charged fans $849.90 for front row seats to his Auckland show. Then Metallica outdid everyone by selling VIP packages to an Eden Park performance for up to $4000.
Those tickets are at the extreme end. They have benefits attached. They are packages that offer those that can afford them premium seating or VIP experiences or the chance to take photos with the artist. But, if you get yourself organised, get your name onto the email lists, hustle your way into the pre-sales early and push to the front of the queues, there are usually basic tickets available at lower, semi-reasonable prices.
Drake’s just changed the game. He’s upped the anti. He’s looked at those normal, every day prices and gone, “Fuck that”. He’s jacked them all the way up. There is nothing cheap about Drake’s upcoming Aotearoa tour. You’re going to need to break open the piggy bank, remortgage the house and sell a kidney to be able to afford to see this one. I’m not joking: this is the show that has broken my brain, possibly for good.
A reminder: the 6 God is following appearances here in 2015 and 2017 with a two-night stand at Spark Arena on February 28 and March 1 as part of his The Anita Max Win$ Tour. (I have a theory: he’s coming to the bottom end of the world to hide after being decimated by Kendrick Lamar, who will headline the Super Bowl on the exact same date Drake’s down under tour begins. Coincidence? I think not.)
In 2015, Drake performed in Spark Arena and charged fans $160 for a GA ticket. In 2017, he returned and charged $200 for the same ticket. Those prices were up there, but they were acceptable. No one tweeted about them. No one wrote news headlines about them. With a sea of lights floating overhead, plus the sun and the moon on display, his stage set-up was spectacular. You could see where the money went.
They might start writing headlines now (or not: we all know about the state of music journalism). Pre-sales began yesterday. Do you want to have a guess how much Drake’s charging this time around? I’ll give you a minute. Are you sitting down? Have you finished your coffee? Good to go? In 2025, Drake wants his New Zealand fans to pay $279.90 for a single GA ticket. Yes, $279.90. For one ticket. I’m not making this up.
Look:
But that’s where prices seem to begin. You want to sit down and enjoy his show? Sure. That will cost you a little more, so prepare to pony up. How much this time? A mere $559.85 will score you a seated ticket in Drake’s Mastercard pre-sale. I don’t know how they got to that price. I don’t know why they tacked on the token 85 cents. I wish I was in the board room when someone wrote this figure up on the white board, and everyone just quietly nodded. But here it is, as proof:
I believe these prices break some kind of Spark Arena record. This surely pushes Drake to the top of the leaderboard. Remember, these are just basic, everyday tickets to see his show. Fans don’t get anything else with them. These are up there. Just a year ago, 50 Cent charged $424.90 for a seated ticket. We have now entered a new frontier. There is no ceiling. We’re Charlie in the Great Glass Elevator, flying through the sky.
Yet the grifting doesn’t stop there. For those who want to spend a little more on their Drake experience, he’s charging One NZ customers $479.90 for an early entry package that comes with a gift and a laminate. Or, for $749, you can purchase a VIP lounge experience that comes with a cocktail, drinks, a DJ and “light canapés and bowl food”.
Bowl food. For all the dogs?
You can browse through all of his VIP options here. Once you’ve chosen those, though, the add-ons continue. I added a pre-sale ticket to my basket yesterday just for fun and Ticketmaster immediately offered me two upsells: for $99 I could purchase an annual membership to Spark Arena; for another $154.90, I could purchase another layer of Drake VIP merch on top of whatever kind of tiered ticket I’d already bought.
And so, if you selected all of those add-ons, then ticked the box to include the $91.13 secure ticket fee, and then added on the $8.40 handling fee, and the $9.90 per-ticket fee, a single seated ticket to see Drake in Auckland next year could potentially set you back … wait for it … here it comes … $923.23.
I dunno eh.
Did Drake lose so much money on that Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight he needed to come and take all of ours?
Does he need financial aid to help him win his lawsuit against Universal Music and Spotify?
All those haircuts can’t be cheap, right?
Another question: why has something as simple as buying a concert ticket become an ultra-confusing lottery full of exclusive codes and tiered pre-sales and waiting rooms and jammed queues and dynamic prices and countdown timers that all seem designed to extract as much money as possible from fans?
Could there be a reason this is happening?
If only I could put my finger on it.
This is the point where I say: “No”. More than $280 for a GA ticket, or over $500 for a seat at a Spark Arena show, is taking things too far. Apologies to anyone who will be hanging out for a live Drake review from me in March, but I can’t pay these prices. I simply refuse. As far as I’m concerned, Drake can Toosie Slide his NZ shows all the way into the bin.
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Bonus beat.
I just somehow accidentally subscribed to Boiler Room instead🤣 so now I can’t afford to go any way.
(I wasn’t; and I don’t mind, just a bit confused as to how it happened with out me having to a least push a ‘confirm’ button somewhere😆)
I wonder at what point the concert-going public will vote en masse and just say f#$k that and not go (aka Travis Scott). The teenagers in my house have given those prices the two fingers up. They also pointed out that Spark Arena isn't a great venue no matter what the staging is like which doubly puts them off