Despite Climbing Ticket Prices, Jazz Fest Remains Good Value

Dumpstaphunk will have the Fair Grounds to themselves for part of their set May 2.

On a price-per-act basis, Jazz Fest is one of the best festival deals in the country.

It had to happen. This year, tickets to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival presented by Shell will finally pass the $100 mark—$105 at the gate. It doesn’t matter that early bird tickets, weekend passes, and even tickets for sale in advance made a per day price of under $100 possible. Some people are going to focus on triple digits and decide that that’s the end of the story.

They’ll point to when tickets were $20 as the good times, and maybe they were. But try to got to Jazz Fest see the acts you saw back then, including a who’s who of New Orleans R&B. Try to get gas today for the price it was when Jazz Fest tickets were $20. Try to buy dinner for that price. Raging at Jazz Fest ticket prices is really raging at the end of the 20th and start of the 21st century.

Attitudes toward ticket prices is largely a measure of priorities. What’s Jazz Fest worth to you? There are clearly a lot of people who still think it’s worth it, but every year on social media I see people who have reached the breaking point and no longer want to pay that cost. That’s not a sign that something has gone wrong, though. People reflecting on what they pay versus the experience they have and deciding that it’s not worth it anymore is a perfectly reasonable response, just as it’s reasonable for those who love it to pay the prices.

On Monday, a study ranked festivals by value, considering how much an attendee paid per band for a day at the festival. The study came from the online gambling site McLuck.com so its rigor is in doubt, but since that math isn’t hard so I’m not discounting it either. The “study” ranked Milwaukee’s SummerFest number one, pointing out that ticket buyers paid $0.62 per act. EDC Las Vegas came second at $1.52 per act, followed by Hard Summer ($2.73), Coachella ($2.98), and Lollapalooza ($3.10). If Jazz Fest were factored into that study, it would come second no matter when you bought your ticket: $1.16 per act if you purchased early bird tickets, $1.30 if you got advance tickets, and $1.43 if you paid for your ticket at the door.

Those Jazz Fest stats come with two asterisks, though. Actually, Jazz Fest is an even better deal if you consider the per set breakdown since each day there are a number of acts that perform twice, whether Columbian artists who play on two stages a day, or artists who also have an interview in the Allison Miner Music Heritage Stage. Since the McLuck study counted number of bands, so did I.

The bigger asterisk is that my numbers are based on a seven-day schedule, omitting May 2 and The Rolling Stones. That day drastically changes the math since an average Jazz Fest day features 73 acts and parades that I didn’t include. There will only be 34 acts on May 2 with the Lagniappe Stage, Allison Miner Music Heritage Stage, and Kids’ Tent closed that day. Since that day’s ticket costs $220, the numbers balloon to $4.55, $4.70, and $4.84 per act, depending on when you bought your tickets. I feel comfortable omitting that day though since the other seven days reflect Jazz Fest as it usually is, while May 2 really looks like a Rolling Stones concert with an unusually robust program of opening acts.

There’s no doubt that the tickets will be objectively too expensive for many people. I’ve been there, and it’s an awkward truth that there has often been some daylight between the democratic rhetoric of Jazz Fest and the financial realities of it. The festival has always presented itself as being on the side of New Orleans’ culture, but it’s a showcase of the culture that not everyone can afford. It’s a tribute to the strength of their marketing and booking that many New Orleanians and festival fans see Jazz Fest through that lens.

As George Wein documented in his book, Myself Among Others: A Life in Music, New Orleans business men brought him to town to start a jazz festival in the late spring to encourage tourism at a time of year when it started tailing off. The festival wasn’t designed to save or support New Orleans’ musicians; it was started to leverage them to bring in tourism dollars. It’s to the credit of the Foundation and Festival Productions that they’ve found ways to do both, but the challenge of how to maintain that balance is always going to be awkward and leave people disgruntled. When the ticket price hits a tipping point, the buyers will say so.

In the meantime, at least Jazz Fest is a good value.