Which area of Amsterdam to stay in, considering.

You are already late to the game if Taylor Swift is in town. This has the effect of raising prices and reducing inventory quickly. I stayed in the museum district and it worked for me.

Anywhere within the canal belts is fine, as well as the area around the two art museums. Take a look, also look at Booking.com a good variety of types of lodging, a handy map function, and easy search options. Centraal would be the main station for this area.

Another area to consider is near Sloterdijk train station, a number of chain hotels and B&Bs.

If prices and availability are tight (still looked OK for the time period) then a third option would be to stay in one of the outlying towns, Haarlem and Leiden are the handiest, but any number of towns are within 30 minutes train travel.

I did a quick dummy Booking.com search for six nights, four people, and it shows 75% of their properties are already sold out in central Amsterdam for that early July time period and the prices are pretty wow level. Even my reasonably priced hotel (Hotel des Artes) is close to 900 euro per night for two rooms (!!!).

The central station is going to be the handiest for your day trips, but honestly anywhere on a tram or rail line is going to be fine, it just might take you a bit longer to get where you're going (the transit is great). Since you're going at a time that, well, about a zillion people are also going, if you also want to see Anne Frank House, Van Gogh Museum, etc. make sure you reserve those tickets just as soon as you can. Plenty of advice in the forum for how to do that. Best of luck to you!

Normally, I avoid chain hotels in Europe, but the holiday inn near Amsterdam city hall has rooms available at 391 USD per night. This is above your stated budget, but is a fantastic location (I've stayed there before for business travel).

In terms of neighborhoods, the Jordaan is the absolute best. De Pijp is great, too. Both offer a more intimate look at Amsterdam that the other neighborhoods in the Centrum may not offer.

If you’re not spending all your time in Amsterdam you could also look at Utrecht. Utrecht is the central hub for trains in the Netherlands and has very good connections with other places in the Netherlands. The trainride from Utrecht centraal to Amsterdam Arena (where the concert will be) is a 16 minute trainride. Amsterdam Centraal is 26 minutes by train, Rotterdam is 37 minutes and Delft 56 minutes. Utrecht has a nice city centre.

Take a look at the Hotel Estheréa. My daughter and I just got back last week from a trip and we stayed there for 6 nights and absolutely loved it! When I was booking, at first glance it seemed a tad higher priced than what I wanted, but my daughter found a promo code on their instagram page that included breakfast, so with that factored in it was a huge savings. Their breakfast is very good! The hotel is central enough that we walked everywhere and never needed the tram, and best of all it was in a quiet area, so we could sleep with the French door open and have no noise whatsoever.