The punk rock economist: why the founder of Vans Warped Tour refuses to gouge fans

In an era where concert tickets often rival the cost of a mortgage payment, Kevin Lyman stands as a defiant anomaly. Thirty-one years after founding the Vans Warped Tour, the pop-punk patriarch is looking at the modern music industry with a mixture of confusion and frustration. And he’s excited that his Warped Tour, on the comeback trail for a second straight year, is staying true to its values.

“Ticket prices have gotten so out of hand,” Lyman told Fortune over a Zoom call, luxuriating in the California Sun over Zoom as New York shivered under a brutal winter. A lot has changed since he first sunset Warped Tour before bringing it back over the last two years, said Lyman, who has been teaching a music industry program at the University of Southern California for eight years.

“I don’t think you’ll ever see a touring festival the size of Warped Tour [again],” Lyman told Fortune about returning to the mallpunk heyday of the mid-’90s, when a ticket only ran $18, as one Reddit poster related a year ago on the r/nostalgia thread.

In 1997, the Warped Tour boasted a killer pop-punk lineup: Pennywise, The Descendents, Limp Bizkit, Social Distortion, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and Blink-182 were all on the bill. The poster on Reddit said they were “incredibly nostalgic for these prices.” (The first-ever tour was no slouch, with Sublime and No Doubt, among others.)

A nationwide touring festival just isn’t feasible in the same way in the 2020s, given logistics and costs involved, Lyman said. Instead, the new iteration focuses on destination weekends and expanding into Mexico and Canada. “I think it’s a statement that, ‘Hey, we’re all human beings and we all can connect through things like music and culture. You know, it’s horrible living in Southern California right now, how people are being treated and, and, you know, it’s frustrating on a daily level to just see the inhumanity that’s treat taking over. And, you know, Warped has always been a place for humanity.”

In 2026, Warped Tour will deliver five two-day U.S. festivals returning to Washington, D.C., Long Beach, and Orlando alongside the launch of new international editions in Montreal. and Mexico City. Warped Tour has been dropping names of acts one by one on its Instagram page, largely new brands plus older, nostalgic acts such as Phantom Planet and The Used. It’s part of a wave of similar nostalgia tours for the ‘90s and early 2000s, as the When We Were Young festival in Las Vegas and tours celebrating the 20th anniversary of seminal emo albums by My Chemical Romance, for instance. Mark Cuban has invested in Burwoodland, which hosts “emo night” singalongs featuring DJs, surprise cameos and a heavy dose of cheap nostalgia.

Lyman argued that $150 for a two-day festival, fees included, is more than fair in this day and age. Lyman said he priced the Warped comeback this way so fans could “get their big dose of music over two days at the Warped Tour for the price of what half of another show’s ticket could be, you know, for 150 bands.” To Lyman’s point, this would put Warped Tour below even the low end of ticket prices for multiday festivals, which can go as high as $600, per SoFi estimates, although prices do increase closer to the day of the show.

They are also doing as many free events as they can to offer fans a fun day out, holding one recently in Long Beach. Lyman said he was stunned by the turnout. “We just said Warped Gathering and 1,500 people came, [we did] not even know what was going to happen. And we had some bands play.”

It may be a radical proposition in the current live music economy, but for Lyman, it is a matter of sustainability over greed. “Everyone has to work together. The bands have to understand that they can’t take too big of a piece of the pie, the vendors, to be able to make this price work,” Lyman explained. He said it’s hard work, but sustainable. He’s proud that a lot of people he still works with on festivals came up through the ranks, such as Maureen Valker-Barlow, who began her career working the catering side at Warped.

An OG (re)takes the stage

Lyman acknowledged that the days of industry excesses are over, or at least they should be. “Not everyone is getting super-rich, maybe like they did in the ’90s, the ’80s, but you can make a good living doing this by hard, honest work,” he said. (Lyman later clarified to Fortune this is a personal belief that he has, and it’s a bit speculative without hard data.)

This grounding philosophy stems from Lyman’s unexpected path to music mogul status. He never intended to run a global festival brand; originally, he thought he would be “running summer and youth camps my whole life.” In a way, he still is. Observers often describe Warped Tour as a “pop punk punk rock summer camp,” a description that Lyman accepts.

He said he views his role less as a promoter and more as a “curator of a culture.” The magic of Warped Tour wasn’t just the bands on stage—Sublime, NoFX, Pennywise—but what happened “between the stages.” It was a place where kids could discover non-profits, skate ramps, and a sense of belonging. Warped Tour brought wallet chains worldwide, he notes proudly.

That sense of community is the driving force behind Warped Tour’s return. After ending the cross-country run in 2019, Lyman said felt a void and a big influence came from his teaching career. “I talked to my students, and I [felt] they were lacking community post-pandemic,” and he felt it was the right time to return.

Despite the changes, the vibe remains distinctly Warped. Lyman described the atmosphere of the festival simply as “freedom,” saying that he sees it as a crowd of “thinkers” who police themselves better than any security team could. Lyman recalled a massive weekend in Long Beach with 80,000 attendees that resulted in only one arrest—a drunk fan who took Ice-T’s lyrics too literally and started shouting at the police. Lyman said he asked the fan directly, “please don’t say it one more time,” but he thinks it was relatively harmless, a night in the drunk tank. “Warped has always been a place for humanity,” Lyman observed, saying it has always been a self-regulating community, unlike most other festivals.

Guided by the Japanese philosophy of “Ikigai”—another thing he teaches his students, about finding the intersection of what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for—Lyman seems content. He said he isn’t chasing the highest profit margin necessarily; he’s chasing the perfect summer camp. And in a music industry that often feels broken, a fair ticket price might be the most punk rock statement of all. “Being fiscally responsible is a key,” he said, but it’s also crucial to remember that most of the work you do every day should be about supporting your community.

Warped Tour means “freedom,” he added. “You know, it’s like you go into the parking lots and everyone kind of feels freedom. We don’t tell them what time the bands are playing. They’re thinkers that go to Warped Tour. They know to bring their three cans of food to donate at the front gates for the food banks.” (Over 25 non-profits are involve in Warped’s return, with Feed the Children helping distribute canned food to local food banks.) Lyman said fans stay involved year-round. “Now we’re trying to do more and more during these weekends during the offseason to keep that community together.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com