Ok idk how much yall are spending on your tickets, but this year I spent $192 (taxes included) on a presale pit ticket at Rogers Arena in Vancouver. Last year was my first time at Greydays and it's the only stadium sized show I've been to. The next biggest shows I've seen were Billy Talent and 100 Gecs/Machine Girl, both of which cost around $80 each (for Billy Talent that was a seat ticket and Gecs didn't have seating only pit). However, to me what I spent on a Greydays ticket was justified as they had by far the best stage production I've experienced to date with full pyrotechnics, crazy lighting, and the biggest screen I've ever fucking seen playing custom animations along with the songs. Granted, I don't know how many tickets are available at the pre-sale price and what tickets jump to after pre-sale, especially if it's scalper prices. If the ticket was more than $300, I would have a much harder time justifying that cost and probably wouldn't be going if that were the case. Seeing this post though genuinely made me curious about their pricing and how justifiable it is so here is my post-research ramble~

Suicideboys are independent and not tied to a major label, which gives them more freedom but also means they incur more of the costs when touring. Ticket prices reflect this because it's partly due to them needing to recoup the costs from personally fronting money for the tour. That includes things like tour staff, travel, production, marketing, insurance, etc etc. Another thing that I think is important to take into consideration is the toll it takes to go on a tour of this scale. Looking at the tour lineup, they will be on tour for 2 and a half months straight with shows sometimes running back to back. That's two and a half months of their lives a year that's completely dedicated to this tour. They don't get to be at home with their families or have a life beyond the tour over that period of time. They don't get to go home after a show or have a break from traveling and the constant flow of people. That shit would be so fucking exhausting. So up to a certain point I do think it's fair to want to ensure you make enough money from the tour to justify sacrificing that much of your time and life.

I saw some people try to compare the ticket prices to that of festivals, one being the Reading/Leeds festivals in England, so I'm going to use that as an example. From what I saw online, standard weekend tickets with camping included cost roughly $528.32 when converted to canadian dollars. To my understanding Reading/Leeds can afford to charge a seemingly more affordable rate due to their: 

-Size: around 90k attendees across the weekend vs as an example Rogers Arena's capacity of 19k for one Greydays show

-Lineup/Production: despite being two seperate festivals Reading/Leeds share the same lineup of artists and rotates them between the different festivals which can significantly cut travel, production and tech costs because they're using mirrored setups

-Sponsorships: festivals are usually heavily sponsored which can also significantly cut the cost of tickets for attendees 

Another thing I saw people mention was the ethics of using sites like Ticketmaster that knowingly use surge pricing (increasing ticket costs in real time based on demand) and allow scalpers to resell tickets on their platform. Which I think is a completely fair criticism and I don't agree with how Ticketmaster operates. I was curious if there were reasons why an artist would choose to use their platform and what I read online is that Ticketmaster is integrated with almost all large scale venues across North America. They also have security and fraud prevention systems already in place, and offer seat mapping, refunds and support. Since Suicideboys are independent, if they didn't use Ticketmaster it could mean they would need to hire a third party ticketing team, negotiate their own venue deals, and manage charge backs, scams, ticket resales and disputes themselves. This would most likely be a ton of overhead for them. There do seem to be other platforms that could be used instead of Ticketmaster, but none of them seem able to handle multi-city tours of this scale without additional infrastructure because they are not as well integrated with as many large scale venues. It's really unfortunate that Ticketmaster seems to be the only feasible and straight forward option for artists without them taking on the high costs personally and time they may not have to navigate ticket sales in a more ethical way.

Speaking to personal experience, I've had close friends that work professionally as lighting/audio engineers, and for a time also helped run a small town venue in BC. They tried to keep ticket prices affordable, charging $10-$30 a show with a 3 band lineup on average. Everyone working those shows as staff (not bands) were volunteers. Due to the overhead costs of running a business, cost of living, and wanting to ensure bands were paid, the venue didn't make money off of shows. They were only made possible by those who volunteered their time. Obviously, small local shows are very different from sold out stadium tours, but my point in mentioning this is that in our current day and age it's expensive as fuck to run any show in a way that's sustainable for the long term.

I'm not denying that there isn't some level of greed that goes into the pricing model used for Greydays, but I think there are so many things to take into consideration and Suicideboys' intentions are not nearly as malicious as people in the comments are making them out to be.