MR. TITO: Does WWE Have “Blue Dot Fever” from Declined Attendance Versus Higher Prices Like the Music Industry?

If you’ve been following the music industry lately, maybe you’ve heard about the “blue dot fever” that various artists have been catching lately. No, it’s not an illness… Rather, it’s a phrase used when there are so many UNSOLD tickets on Ticketmaster (shown as BLUE DOTS for open seats for sale) for a particular artist and that’s usually followed by a tour being cancelled. We’ll hear reasons such as “working on a new album”, “spend time with my family”, or other excuses to cover up poor ticket sales. Meanwhile, they LACK a mirror to look into as to why nobody wants to spend their hard-earned money on them.

And if you’ll notice, the artists NEVER and I repeat NEVER blame higher ticket prices for poor ticket sales. They aren’t going to bite the Live Nation hand that feed them. You know, the Live Nation corporation, who manages most top musical acts for touring while freakin’ owning Ticketmaster, that was recently found to be in violation of anti-trust laws for the strong-armed control they have over larger arenas. I’d also argue they price gouge, but I also think that the artists give them the green light to do so. As loyal as Taylor Swift acts towards her Swifties, I didn’t quite see her telling Ticketmaster to stop their dynamic pricing from price gouging her fans.

What I always go back to is the simple laws of Economics, you know, that class that some of you slept through as a requirement for degree in college. Law of Demand states that price and quantity demanded have an inverse relationship… When prices go up, quantity demanded should go down (vice versa when prices go down, quantity demanded should go up). Now, if you would have woke up from your beauty sleep during the class, you’d later hear about “determinants of demand” such as income, tastes & preferences, confidence about the economy, and prices of related goods (substitutes and complements) causing a consumer to be willing to pay more.

Well, have you been the gas station lately? According to GasBuddy.com, gas prices are around $4.56 per gallon and both CPI and PPI inflation numbers from April 2026 were significantly high. This is on top of the inflation from 2022-2023 that never went away following the excessive printing and borrowing of money in response to the 2020 COVID-19 recession. Real or inflation-adjusted incomes haven’t kept pace for years, and 2025 and 2026 have seen companies scaling back jobs due to the implementation of more automation or artificial intelligence (AI). In the case of TKO, they just have greedy executives and tell Triple H to release wrestlers to avoid giving away pennies form that $546.2 million net income earned during 2025.

“Blue dot fever” has already hit other sports for years… Prices went up excessively for various MLB, NHL, NBA, and UFC events… BUT, I’d argue that quality went down for much of those leagues or at least things didn’t change enough to justify the high price.

And that’s the thing… The price. Take Wendy’s and McDonald’s right now. Both are getting CRUSHED financially right now with same store sales seeing massive declines. Why? Because their lousy fast food doesn’t taste as good with higher prices. Period!

Sorry, but Jennifer Lopez and Meghan Trainor’s music isn’t that good to justify those prices. They might struggle to sell out a big arena with lower prices. Lack of quality music + lack of good recent music equates to LOW SALES in 2025-2026. I figured that the Post Malone and Jelly Roll concert would sell well, as both guys are well liked and have crossover appeal in different genres of music. Nope, Post announced that he had to cancel multiple shows to “devote more time to his next album” but the Ticketmaster seating chart showed blue dots (or unsold seats) everywhere. In that case, the prices were just too elevated.

Yes, inflation has been way up for the past 5 years… With that, costs of hosting venue prices have gone up whether that is a stadium, arena, or a hotel with a conference center attached. Despite TAX MONEY funding and often fully paying for said venues, those venues will claim that the higher prices are there to cover their expenses of buying food from wholesalers, paying employees, paying utilities, etc. Yet for those arenas and stadiums, aren’t there ads plastered everywhere? Don’t they have the ability to host multiple revenue generating events per year besides the sports teams that they host? Just a complete scam.

More dollars chasing fewer number of goods/services isn’t the only reason why inflation is up. For one, Live Nation just got busted in court for being a monopoly. The department of justice is actually challenging the NFL for price gouging their fans by placing NFL games exclusively on streaming services like Peacock, Netflix, Paramount, and Amazon Prime. Then, in the food industry, the Kroger CEO actually admitted to price gouging on groceries when he was under oath and testifying why his company should acquire the next largest grocery chain in Albertsons.

Of course, we know that TKO doesn’t hesitate when tasked with price gouging WWE fans. Fanatics is overcharging WWE fans for WWE merchandise. If you want to watch RAW or PLEs, enjoy Netflix and ESPN raising streaming prices on you with both services being over $20 or more per month. If you watch Smackdown on Cable/Satellite, your Cable/Satellite package has natural monopoly powers granted to them to overcharge you. Then, we have the greedy TKO led by the greedy Endeavor executives who raised prices on UFC stuff (but not on fighter pay) working with Live Nation (a known monopoly now) to place higher prices on WWE live events. This is on top of TKO/WWE auctioning their events to the biggest cities (Las Vegas) or countries (Saudi Arabia) who are willing to pay extra for their cities or countries to host top WWE events. TKO has adds all over WWE rings, too… All of that revenue coming in ($1.7 billion during 2025), and yet TKO feels the need to price gouge and screw longtime WWE fans.

Yeah, in case you haven’t noticed a theme with my columns, I think TKO sucks and the Endeavor folks + Nick Khan are merchants from hell. They can all suck it.

TKO hate aside, let’s review if WWE is having “blue dot fever” yet or not.

First and foremost, let’s compare Wrestlemania 41 versus Wrestlemania 42. WM 41 had just over 60,000 in attendance while WM 42 had just over 50,000. You could argue that WWE “killed the town” by being there twice in a row, but WWE significantly raised prices year over year. Plus, Las Vegas’s prices have been through the roof lately since Wrestlemania 41 and they literally paid $6 million to the WWE for Wrestlemania 42 as an economic boost to their city.

Again, being in the same host city for twice in a row could see marginal returns setting in… So, let’s analyze the other WWE shows for the past few years.

Before I go further, I want to credit Wrestlenomics.com’s WrestleTix site for the data. If these numbers are wrong, blame Brandon Thurston.

WrestleTix’s most incomplete data is the WWE houseshow data, as it’s missing data for the 2nd quarter last year and so far this year. Going by the data available, it appears that houseshows went from 5-6 thousand for much of 2021-2023 and the first half of 2024, but then surged to over 8,000 attendees by the end of 2024 and the start of 2025.

Since early 2025, WWE houseshow attendance appears to be averaging between 6,000 to 7,500. Honestly, those are decent numbers considering how BAD houseshow attendance became during the 2010s, especially after John Cena stopped having a full-time schedule (i.e. babyface and overpushed Roman Reigns was NOT drawing), but the sporadic houseshow data that Wrestlenomics has shows a decrease since an early 2025 peak.

How about Monday Night RAW? RAW is showing the same exact trend… Peaked in attendance with 13,600 on average, which is freakin’ amazing, but has since cooled to be between 10,000 and 12,000. While this is lower, it’s still above WWE RAW’s attendance numbers from 2021 through 2023.

What about WWE Smackdown? I’d argue this one should be more impacted, given the shift in talent from being the brand with the Bloodline storyline to Cody and friends. This one is different from the others and as I expected, the Bloodline cooling down may have driven fans away. Peak Smackdown attendance was during the 2nd quarter 2024 where possibly the greatest Wrestlemania existed and may have helped viewership for the start of that quarter. Smackdown had 12,400 in average attendance but has since settled between 8,000 and 11,000. Like RAW’s numbers, that is better than 2021-2023.

But I’d argue that 2021-2023 were rebuilding years after the terrible decade that was during the 2010s (RAW lost over 2 million viewers between 2015 and 2020) and the awful COVID-19 year where WWE became really bad in front of no crowd. However, looking at the data, you can see attendance metrics surging form 2021 to 2022, 2022 to 2023, and then 2023 to 2024. WWE was rapidly improving, hence why Endeavor bought them and why ESPN/Netflix threw so many at the WWE.

Since early 2025, or maybe since the second quarter of 2024, statistically speaking, there is a decline in WWE attendance at least for RAW, Smackdown, and houseshows. The numbers, or at least Brandon’s, don’t lie.

I wonder how the Premium Live Events (PLE) are drawing with live attendance?

We know that both Netflix and USA Networks numbers since the start of 2025 are both down… Fewer viewers, even when live attendance is over priced.

So that could mean that maybe the quality isn’t there, anymore, for the WWE too? Like the music industry?

While I think that WWE is MILES AHEAD of the utter creative trash of the 2010s, WWE’s recent creative hasn’t been as good as it was through 2023 and then the involvement of the Rock through early 2024. After Wrestlemania 40, a shine came off of Roman Reigns when you stripped away Paul Heyman, the Bloodline, and the heel persona. Roman just isn’t the same after losing to Cody at WM 40, but is made to look even weaker without ever wrestling or defeating The Rock in a match. John Cena returning for his retirement tour showed how many MILES AHEAD he was versus most of the WWE roster. Being totally honest for 2026, I really miss having John Cena around. He felt larger-than-life during 2025, even with that botched heel turn holding him back. I like CM Punk, but he’s an older version of CM Punk and a corporate version as well. I think we’ve already seen the best out of Brock Lesnar and Seth Rollins, but WWE keeps going to the well with both of them.

Wrestlemania 42 lacked excitement with many fans, though I think that CM Punk’s superhuman efforts to sell essentially saved WM 42 with his match with Roman. But even then, what are we left with? Roman Reigns vaguely reuniting the Bloodline and easily dispatching Jacob Fatu within 1 Pay Per View? And Roman is reportedly going to miss the entire month of June, as his usual “summer vacation” happens once again. Then, on RAW during Monday, Brock Lesnar unretires and attacks Oba Femi to erase the accomplishments Femi had for defeating Lesnar at Wrestlemania and then retiring afterward. That match feels cheaper now and Lesnar’s true exit will feel diminished, too.

What about for future events? Can you see the “blue dot fever” happening for upcoming WWE events? Well, let’s just take a peak at the next WWE PLE, shall we?

Well, here’s the problem… WWE is going to be in Italy and Saudi Arabia for their next PLEs. The next North American PLE event is SummerSlam 2026 in Minneapolis, MN at the U.S. Bank Stadium on August 2nd.

And guess what? 2/3 of the stadium on the seating chart are shown as “No Seats Available”. Two-Thirds!!! Depending on how stadium is shaped for the event, it can hold between 50,000 and 73,000. Doing the math, they’ve only made around 16,000 to 24,000 seats available thus far by closing off much of the stadium!

And if you go to Ticketmaster.com for SummerSlam 2026 tickets, there are MANY blue dots for tickets available for BOTH nights of SummerSlam!

And prices are actually lower for SummerSlam compared to other PLEs… $90 for upper deck isn’t bad, $300 for lower bowl is reasonable compared to other 2025-2026 big WWE events.

In summary, WWE’s got the BLUE DOT FEVER!!! SummerSlam is NOT moving tickets! 2/3 of the stadium is sectioned off and there are plenty of seats available. While WWE has more than 2 months to move tickets, these big events should sell more tickets. WWE sold over 50,000 on Night 1 and over 60,000 on Night 2 last year for SummerSlam 2025.

Gee, I wonder why Brock Lesnar unretired? Expect him to HEADLINE SummerSlam 2026 in a retirement match against Gunther.

Higher prices + lower quality = UNSOLD quantity. Music industry and now the wrestling industry is seeing that.

Then you have All Elite Wrestling (AEW), who has lower ticket prices for their events. Yes, some of their Pay Per View events do sell slightly over 10,000, to their credit, they are still struggling to get above 4,000 average tickets sold for AEW Dynamite. For Dynamite in particular, AEW attendance has been cut almost in half since 2021. That is WITH a lower price model than the WWE, and yet fans won’t attend.

AEW is returning to Wembley Stadium for their All In Event and they’ve got the “Blue Dot Fever” for their show during August. They drew 53,000 during 2024 (which was way down from 2023) and so far, they’ve only sold just over 24,000. Yikes, and that’s on top of last year’s big 2025 drop with the event in Texas.

It’s a good thing that desperate Cable/Satellite and Streaming channels are willing to overpay for content right now to potentially offset the symptoms of the “blue dot fever”.

Mr. Tito Column Archive @ NoDQ