Tickets and Conscience

Today I want to put two names in the same frame—Joan Baez and Taylor Swift—not because they sound alike or have the same values but because they tell us how the culture around music, fandom, and accessibility to their shows have changed in less than one lifetime.

Same art form. Very different worlds.

This episode is about those two worlds.

No boxing match.
No “who’s better.”

Just what it means that one night with Baez cost you five dollars, and one night with Swift might cost someone else a small fortune.

In one: Joan Baez at Catholic University—five dollars a ticket. A guitar, a voice that sounds like it  dropped in from a kinder universe, and the feeling that history, morality, and music are all sitting beside you.

In the other: Taylor Swift in a sold-out stadium—tens of thousands of phones glowing, a three-hour epic of costume changes and choreography, and ticket prices that can look like a month’s rent.

Before I go any further, a brief portrait of Joan Baez - she was born January 9, 1941, in Staten Island, New York and raised in a Quaker family with a strong social conscience. She emerged at the end of the 1950s folk revival, her pure, ringing vibrato and unadorned guitar style making traditional ballads and spirituals feel both ancient and immediate. Her breakthrough came with performances at the Newport Folk Festival (1959–60) and early albums that brought folk music—and later protest music—to a mass young audience. 

Transcript

Welcome to Celebrate Creativity. Episode 505 Tickets and Conscience

Today I want to put two names in the same frame—Joan Baez and Taylor Swift—not because they sound alike or have the same values but because they tell us how the culture around music, fandom, and accessibility to their shows have changed in less than one lifetime.

Same art form. Very different worlds.

This episode is about those two worlds.

No boxing match.
No “who’s better.”

Just what it means that one night with Baez cost you five dollars, and one night with Swift might cost someone else a small fortune.

In one: Joan Baez at Catholic University—five dollars a ticket. A guitar, a voice that sounds like it  dropped in from a kinder universe, and the feeling that history, morality, and music are all sitting beside you.

In the other: Taylor Swift in a sold-out stadium—tens of thousands of phones glowing, a three-hour epic of costume changes and choreography, and ticket prices that can look like a month’s rent.

Before I go any further, a brief portrait of Joan Baez - she was born January 9, 1941, in Staten Island, New York and raised in a Quaker family with a strong social conscience. She emerged at the end of the 1950s folk revival, her pure, ringing vibrato and unadorned guitar style making traditional ballads and spirituals feel both ancient and immediate. Her breakthrough came with performances at the Newport Folk Festival (1959–60) and early albums that brought folk music—and later protest music—to a mass young audience. 

She took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959 and 1960 with nothing more than that unmistakable, bell-like soprano and an acoustic guitar—and people stopped talking and simply listened. That voice could make a 400-year-old ballad sound like breaking news.
She championed nonviolence, civil rights, and opposition to the Vietnam War not as a side hobby but as core identity: marching with Martin Luther King Jr., refusing to pay war taxes, visiting draft resisters in prison, and using concerts as organizing tools. She also helped introduce and legitimize a then-unknown Bob Dylan to wider audiences. Signature songs and performances—“Diamonds & Rust,” “We Shall Overcome,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”—cemented her as a moral and musical touchstone: the archetype of the activist folksinger whose art and ethics are fused. 

As the 1960s unfolded, Baez refused to separate the concert hall from the picket line. She sang at the March on Washington. She marched in Selma. She supported draft resisters, co-founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, and used her platform with a kind of unflinching calm: not a borrowed costume of protest, but an organic extension of who she was. 

Musically, she became known for:
Traditional ballads and spirituals.
Interpretations of other writers—Phil Ochs, Leonard Cohen, the young Bob Dylan.
Her own songs, including “Diamonds & Rust,” that proved she wasn’t just the interpreter of other people’s conscience; she had her own.

This is important for where we’re going: the scale stayed relatively human. Joan Baez concerts typically meant theaters, campuses, festivals—places where you could see the whites of people’s eyes. The technology was simple. The distance between ticket price and moral message was short.

I still remember walking onto the campus of Catholic University for a Joan Baez concert.No VIP throne, no dynamic pricing, no “presale codes”—just a gym full of students and seekers. And every seat five dollars.

And then she walked out on stage.

One guitar. That impossibly clear soprano. Songs that floated somewhere between medieval ballad and nightly news bulletin. It wasn’t just beautiful; it felt like you were being invited into a moral conversation. For five dollars.

That moment becomes and anchor: same art form—song, stage, story—but an entirely different economic and cultural universe than a Taylor Swift stadium night.

With Joan Baez, it wasn’t spectacle. It was her voice. Those songs. A sense that you’d paid not just to be entertained, but to be invited into a more serious, more compassionate version of yourself.

So with Joan Baez, you have small-to-mid-size venues; voice and guitar as the whole production. Tickets were historically priced to be reachable for students, activists, and working people; in some cases she reportedly pushed back against “unreasonable” prices as     with her politics. 

Music as witness: civil rights, peace, human rights. The glamour is moral seriousness and vulnerability, not spectacle.

Hold that feeling. We’re going to bring it back.

Taylor Swift’s ethos

Songs as serial autobiography and storytelling across genres.

A deliberate embrace of scale: stadiums, LED runways, costume changes, massive production teams.

A fiercely modern business ethos: branding, partnerships, and a highly strategic fight for artistic ownership—very different politics from Baez, but still a story about a woman insisting on agency inside a male-dominated industry. 

Now, Taylor Swift was born December 13, 1989, in Pennsylvania and arrived as a teenage country singer-songwriter in Nashville. Her early albums (Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now) framed her as the diarist of adolescence—hooky melodies, highly specific storytelling, and a carefully built “girl-with-a-guitar” authenticity.

Across the 2010s and 2020s she executed one of the most successful series of reinventions in pop history: country to pop (1989), darker electro-pop (Reputation), pastel pop (Lover), indie-tinged lockdown albums (folklore, evermore), then blockbuster projects such as Midnights, The Tortured Poets Department, and The Life of a Showgirl. She amassed record-breaking sales, streams, and awards, including multiple Grammys for Album of the Year, and became a defining global pop figure. 

Crucially, Swift turned a contract dispute over her early masters into a public campaign about artists’ rights, re-recording much of her catalog (“Taylor’s Version”) and, in 2025, finally regaining ownership of her work—an aggressive, very public assertion of creative and economic control. 

Her Eras Tour (2023–24) became the highest-grossing tour in history, a multi-continent, multi-billion-dollar enterprise, supported by a vast industrial ecosystem of staging, screens, dancers, film deals, and tourism spikes. 

Now, Taylor Alison Swift was born December 13, 1989, in Pennsylvania. She learned early that country music had room for a teenager who wrote in spiral notebooks about crushes, humiliations, ambitions, and vengeance. She went to Nashville not as a TV-manufactured product, but as a kid alarmingly determined to turn lived experience directly into songs.

Her early work—Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now—made her the narrator of a particular American girlhood: prom queens, pick-up trucks, and the terrible algebra of who called whom first. Then came a sequence of reinventions that would make even veteran pop stars dizzy:

Crossing fully into pop with 1989.
Darker, reputation-rebuilding experiments.

The pastel universe of Lover.

Surprise indie-folk turns with folklore and evermore.

New blockbuster eras with Midnights, The Tortured Poets Department, and beyond.

Along the way she became:
A global touring powerhouse.
A meticulous architect of her public narrative.
A symbol (especially to younger fans) of female autonomy in an industry not famous for handing that out.

When her early master recordings were sold without her consent, Swift did something both emotional and ruthlessly business-savvy: she set out to re-record her catalog, “Taylor’s Version,” reclaiming artistic and financial control and turning contract law into a pop storyline millions followed. 

Then came The Eras Tour.

149 shows. Roughly 10 million tickets. A reported gross exceeding $2 billion—making it the highest-earning tour in history. Average face-value prices in many markets were in the low- to mid-hundreds, but the secondary market often blasted into four digits. One major analysis put the average resale price around $1,600 per ticket across the tour. 

And Swift did not simply perform concerts; she triggered:

City economies bending around the shows.
Hotels and airlines spiking prices.
Entire wardrobes planned months in advance.

A multi-hour show with elaborate staging, LED bracelets, floating platforms, dozens of dancers—the kind of logistical footprint once reserved for Olympic ceremonies.

Taylor Swift’s ethos, in practice, says:
“My life is a serialized story; you are invited inside; we will fill a stadium and make it shake.”

Joan Baez’s ethos, much earlier, said:
“The world is on fire; I will walk onto this stage with a guitar and ask what you’re going to do about it.”

Both are serious. Both are intentional. Both speak to power—just very different currencies.

Both musicians are, in their own ways, about power:

Baez: spiritual, ethical, collective power.

Swift: economic, narrative, and fan-mobilizing power.

And that leads straight back into the ticket price conversation.

You see, when I saw Joan Baez at Catholic University, five dollars bought you a seat and a sense that art and conscience were meant for everybody. Adjust that for inflation and you’re still talking maybe the cost of a modest dinner, not a major utility bill.

Look back at the mid-60s: a Joan Baez/Bob Dylan ticket in 1965 Philadelphia could be $2.50. 

Even by the 1970s, many Baez shows were still in that reachable range for regular people. The technology was simple, the middlemen were fewer, and the folk ethos pushed against turning a protest singer into a luxury experience.

Now place that beside Taylor Swift.

Face-value tickets for the Eras Tour in the U.S. often started under $100 and ran up to several hundred dollars for premium seats. But the real story is the secondary market and dynamic pricing: in 2023, average resale prices for some Eras shows hovered around or above $1,000 per ticket; in some 2025 European dates, averages in key markets approached or exceeded the same four-figure neighborhood. 

So you have:

Joan Baez: $5 to be in the room with a leading voice of moral dissent.

Taylor Swift: in practice, often hundreds to thousands of dollars once fees and resale kick in, to be one of 60–70,000 people in a technologically overwhelming, three-hour career retrospective.

When you remember a concert with Joan Baez, you remember one guitar, minimal crew, and the voice of an angel.

Baez’s production costs were modest:

One or two musicians.
Basic sound system.
Maybe a tour manager and a car, not 18 trucks.
Have I said that she had the voice of an angel?

Her political stance also shaped expectations. A singer who marched in Selma and went to jail for protesting the draft could hardly turn around and defend pricing her regular audiences out of the room. Keeping things reachable wasn’t just economic—it was ethical.

And when I think about Joan Baez, I don’t just remember the voice—though that voice could stop time.

You see, when I saw Joan Baez, I was a student
I could count that ticket on one hand. Five dollars. You paid your five, walked into a hall that felt human-sized, and you heard songs about Selma, about prisoners of conscience, about the fragile dignity of people you would never meet. You didn’t need a payment plan to stand inside that kind of beauty. And for the last song of the concert Joan Baez sang Swing Low Sweet Chariot and you realized you were in the presence of greatness

That five-dollar ticket said something very simple and very radical:
“This belongs to you, too.” You didn’t have to agree with every cause. You didn’t have to sign a petition on the way in. But you knew, instinctively, that the distance between the woman onstage and the people in the cheap seats was not very wide—financially or spiritually.

Fast-forward to today -  a fan today trying to see Taylor Swift faces:

Pre-sales, verified fan systems, digital queues.

Dynamic pricing where the “official” cost shifts toward what the market can stand.
Resale sites where tickets frequently list at hundreds or thousands of dollars, sometimes never dropping below $1,000 in certain cities.
Some fans get lucky and pay something close to face value. Many don’t.
Dozens of trucks, buses, and crews.
Massive staging that must be assembled and moved like a traveling city.
Sophisticated lighting, sound, camera rigs, wristband tech, custom visuals.

In that system, a concert ticket is no longer just “a night of songs.” It’s:
A souvenir of having been inside a global event.
A social media credential.
A slice of a billion-dollar touring narrative.

The official starting prices for many Eras Tour seats were already substantial. Then came the surge—the algorithms, the fees, the resale listings climbing into the stratosphere. Some fans saved for months. Others simply bowed out. Parents were doing household-budget triage over whether a teenager’s night with their favorite artist was worth three figures, four figures, maybe more.

And it raises a question I can’t quite shake:
When does a ticket stop being a door, and start being a wall?

With Taylor Swift you might remember armies of dancers, musicians, trucks, LED walls, stage mechanics, pyrotechnics, custom wardrobes, film crews, and thousands of screaming audience members.That scale does cost money, and some of that is baked into prices.

Joan Baez’s era had ticketing companies, but nothing like today’s algorithmic dynamic pricing plus a hyper-profitable resale ecosystem.
Taylor Swift’s “astronomical” prices are driven by:

demand wildly exceeding supply,
dynamic pricing pushing “what the market will bear,”
scalpers and resale platforms extracting value,
service fees that can feel like tickets-on-top-of-tickets.

It’s not that she personally sets every $1,500 nosebleed; it’s that the whole system is engineered to treat a hugely popular concert as a luxury scarce good.

A Joan Baez concert, in memory and mythology, says:
“Come as you are. Bring your conscience. This is a town hall with music.”
A Taylor Swift stadium show says:

“This is an immersive universe. Save up. Dress for your Era. Join something enormous.”

One isn’t simply “good” and the other “bad,” but they answer very different questions and even needs:

Is music a public square, or a premium immersive event?

Is the artist’s power measured in movements supported, or economies stimulated?

When I handed over five crumpled dollars to see Joan Baez, I walked into a room where the distance between singer and seat was close — almost intimate - morally and financially.

When I look at Taylor Swift ticket prices today, I see undeniable talent, historic success, and a system that tells millions of young fans: you can belong to this story if you can afford the ticket.

Same art form. Different eras. Joan Baez’s voice of an angel floating through a $5 hall, and Taylor Swift commanding a billion-dollar pop empire. And both artists are incredibly creative. But the contrast isn’t just about two singers; it’s about how we’ve chosen to look at the world.

To summarize, I once paid five dollars to hear Joan Baez in a campus hall, and it felt like more than a ticket—it felt like buying a small share in courage, conscience, and resistance. Today, a Taylor Swift ticket can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and what you’re buying is not a movement but a luxury product. At the risk of sounding simplistic, Joan Baez treated the concert ticket as a tool for conscience; Taylor Swift treats it as a tollbooth into a corporate fairy tale. Both Joan Baez and Taylor Swift definitely fill seats. But only one can honestly claim you left a concert having funded something larger than the star herself.

This is George Bartley, and thank you for listening to Celebrate Creativity. Join this podcast for episode 506, and a pairing of the Beach Boys and the Grateful Dead.