How Gen Z is hacking the costs of live events

For Gen Z and millennials trying to socialize in an era of high rents, student debt, and stubborn inflation, that fantasy rarely fits their wallets. Now, many are reinventing the experience economy on their own terms, finding ways to get the big-festival fun without dipping into retirement. 

Enter Breakaway: a growing dance-music festival brand built on the premise of making concerts and festivals accessible and affordable again. Founded by promoters Adam Lynn and Zach Ruben in 2016, Breakaway has built a touring festival model around one core premise: bring the Coachella-style spectacle to driveable, mid-tier markets, and make the entry point cheap enough that a college kid or a young professional could actually afford to go. (They told Fortune the average age of their festival goers is 26). In 2025, more than 300,000 fans attended a Breakaway event.

Accessibility is the key pillar to their business, Ruben told Fortune. They’ve created what Lynn calls “a price point for every consumer,” including a college-student ticket that starts at around $40 a day. They’re careful to call these tickets “affordable” and not “cheap,” to pull in students and early-twentysomethings who might otherwise be stuck watching clips on their phones. Other passes, including those for two days, can range from roughly $150 to $300, depending on the city and ticket tier they purchase. 

To put that cost in perspective, the median price for tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras concert in 2023-2024 was more than $1,550, and that doesn’t include any other travel expenses incurred by concert goers (plus, that was just for one day). And a survey of 1,000 Gen Z respondents by Merge in 2024 showed 86% of them admitted to overspending on live events. As noted by Melissa Rohman of The New York Times: “The live music industry has put today’s young adults in an impossibly expensive position.” So, having festival tickets at one-tenth of the cost of just a single-day event could be welcome news for some Gen Zers and millennials (of course, if they like dance music).

To the Breakaway founders, accessibility also means being close enough to downtown metros where they’re hosting to be able to take just a 15-to-20-minute Uber ride to the venue. Plus, once festival goers are on site, they have access to brand partnerships, activations, and even access to talent. So the idea is that Breakaway goers aren’t shelling out all of this extra money just to get to the concert and stay in town. Rather, about 60% to 70% of their attendees live within about 60 miles from the venue, Ruben said, meaning they wouldn’t have to pay for a flight or even a hotel, in some cases.

This year, Breakaway is hosting in 12 cities, including Dallas, Tampa, Grand Rapids, and Worcester, Mass.—all cities that are decently large, but typically aren’t on rotation for bigger artists. Still, Breakaway clinches big-deal lineups in the dance music world: This year, some headliners include Marshmello, Kygo, Tiesto, Fisher, Disclosure, John Summit, and more.

Breakaway’s background and success

In their early days, Lynn and Ruben tried to solve a similar accessibility problem on their own college campuses. They saw “white space” in the fact that emerging artists would hit major markets, but skip college towns, Lynn said. 

So they each launched scrappy concert companies (Social Studiez for Lynn, Prime Productions for Ruben), booking acts like Wiz Khalifa, Steve Aoki, Kid Cudi, and LMFAO into small markets that major promoters overlooked. The two eventually merged into Prime Social Group, and later formed Breakaway in 2016 with a Chance the Rapper-headlined event that sold about 16,000 tickets in Columbus, Ohio. From there, they grew the festival lineup to include Grand Rapids, Charlotte, Nashville, and more. 

What’s been special about Breakaway, too, is seeing return customers from when Lynn and Ruben first launched their business 10 years ago.

“People that attended when they were in college are now close to 30 or even in their 30s,” Lynn said. “So what we’ve done a really good job of—and I think sort of the success of our business model—is we have a price point for every consumer, and we try to make it a very inclusive event.”

“It’s been fun to kind of see our audience grow up a little bit,” he added.

When Breakaway started in 2016, Lynn estimates the festival brought in just tens of thousands of dollars in sponsorship—a figure that’s grown “almost 20 times” today, thanks to adding a title partner in energy drink brand Celsius. That sponsorship cushion, combined with outside investment rounds, helps keep ticket prices from rising as fast as the cost of talent and production. According to CB Insights, Breakaway has raised nearly $50 million over a few investment rounds. 

Behind the scenes, Breakaway’s success is also propped up by the fact Gen Z craves more in-person experiences, and have opted out of spending as much time on their phones. That’s evident in dating apps becoming a downer for Gen Z, who would rather meet people in real life, and studies showing the generation actually does like to work in person after all. Plus, many Gen Zers are opting for more analog activities and purchasing items like DVDs because they’re sick of being on their phones all the time. 

And music festivals are “one grand experience,” Ruben said. “Part of these dance music festivals is the community of everyone being there.”