Comment by csb6
3 days ago
If you want view ticket pricing as a pure economics problem (it is not), consider that live shows are also a way to build up and expand a fanbase. If only a handful of rich people (or people who bought tickets the second they went on sale) are at your show, you are not expanding your audience. Since streaming has decimated most artists' income from record sales, it makes sense to try and build a large fanbase who will regularly come to shows as well as buy merchandise. Tours often have exclusive merchandise than fans will want to buy, so all the more reason to attract more people.
As a side note, this notion that a phenomenon being the result of market forces means it is fair and has no issues seems to be a blinkered view of the world. Surely enjoying high quality art should be possible for a broad section of society?
Why would "only a handful" of rich people show up? If I'm a scalper, and demand is lower than expected, I'm incentivised to resell at any price, even at a 90% discount, because I can't just sit on my stock hoping for demand to pick up later.
If anything, as an artist, I'm incentivised to seek out the whales that can absorb ridiculous prices, because they are the ones that will buy the 25 limited editions of my album.
It's not necessarily a choice between the 1000 genuine fans vs the 10 posers. If the artist is popular enough, it's between the 1000 rich genuine fans, and the 1000 broke genuine fans, so might as well please the rich. It's a selection that already happens when picking the venues. It's always London, NYC, Paris, Tokyo, and never Skopje or Pine Bluff, AK.
I'd also like the news to talk about the show "so popular people are willing to pay a fortune to see" rather than the one with plenty of cheap seats still available.
I was reading an article earlier this week about "blue dot fever". Promoters like ticketmaster show the available seats as blue dots on a plan of the venue. The more blue dots, the more seats available, which seems to lower the demand even more, by signalling that the show is not popular, which drives the status-seekers away.
I understand what you're saying but it still mostly an issue for the artist - building a fan base. Otherwise if you have X amount of tickets to be distributed, you'll get X people at the venue, at most. Since the same number of people will show up, it's a matter of distribution. What should the distribution be? You, and many others, say it shouldn't be the richest people, or more accurately those who'd pay the highest price for the ticket. What about the poorest people, if we're talking about fairness? Should we have a quota for homeless people, too? For people of certain ethnicities, political views, sexualities, etc.? That's what I see when you talk about fairness outside of market forces - we should try to include "everyone", whatever that means. Maybe it's the most hardcore fans? So first allow people with tattoos of the artist on their chest? Yes, it's a ridiculous example, but what is fair to you? What makes a fan that will only be able to pay 10 $ not less worthy than a fan who will pay 1000 $? Will they be more worthy to attend than a fan who can only afford 0.01 $?
To me it seems it IS an economics problem - the artist needs to make money and they need to decide whether they want to optimize for the profit from ticket sales or for the profit from merch or from a broader fan base. But it's an economic problem for the artist, it's not really a societal problem or anything more major.
As a disclaimer, I'm not rich and I don't care for concerts anyway. It just doesn't make sense to single out tickets for concerts as some special thing. As an example, I'm OK with not being able to buy some fancy ethically sourced gourmet food yet I still support the company that makes it. Or maybe I won't buy it often, but I'll save up and buy it once in a while. Many parallels to be made, but of course not perfect. Still, it's not a necessity, so it's strictly an economic problem (not a moral one), mainly for the artist. Whether they want to solve it and how they want to solve it is their issue. Whether it's non-transferable tickets or ID-bound tickets with a strict policy on how they're transferred or an auction or a lottery or whatever.
> What should the distribution be? You, and many others, say it shouldn't be the richest people, or more accurately those who'd pay the highest price for the ticket. What about the poorest people, if we're talking about fairness? Should we have a quota for homeless people, too? For people of certain ethnicities, political views, sexualities, etc.?
Geez. It is really not that hard to imagine a better outcome here.
A reasonable distribution distribution could be whatever is the result of the following: (a) each seat is priced by the artist/venue/whatever however they wish, and (b) everyone who genuinely intends to attend the concert themselves and/or is purchasing on behalf of another known person whom they believe would genuinely attend the concert themselves gets an equal opportunity to purchase the tickets at the time of release.
How you achieve such an outcome is an interesting question with lots of possible approaches, but what outcome would be adequate to achieve than the status quo really isn't some sort of unanswerable question.
People leave out that the first selection has already happened before the tickets are even on sale, by picking the cities where the tours will stop. The new trend is for artists to stay for longer, in fewer cities, which saves them a ton of money. Like mini-residencies.
Harry Styles is giving more than 20 concerts in Europe, but only in Wembley or Amsterdam.
Is that bad? It's economics. The artist likely decided they'll make more money that way. Hardcore or richer fans will be able to travel to Wembley or Amsterdam. Less enthusiastic and poorer fans won't.
I can't attend most of the concerts I would go to if they were in my city and cost nothing because they're far away from where I live org because they cost a lot. I still enjoy the recordings I can download. I treat concerts as a luxury, not a necessity or a right.