Comment by Aboutplants
3 days ago
Auction. Auction is the answer.
Or, when a tour is announced, start tickets at 10X the regular price and have it drop down to the regular price over the course of a couple of weeks in a simple time based mechanism. After that, if tickets are not sold out it continues to drop until sold or it hits a reserve price for Door tickets.
Good for artists, fair from a market perspective and gets rid of scalpers
You are overlooking the secondary effect — what happens if you, a musician, a person who lives off having a positive public image, becomes known as the kind of musician who uses free market forces to effectively price fans out? Fans will not like it. It is not rational but nothing in music is. You win the pricing battle but lose the PR war. It's bad for your business and the entire business of concerts in the long run.
And with your particular pricing scheme, there is arguably still nothing stopping scalpers from scooping up the tickets after the price drops to a level likely to be profitable for them but before fans had the time to react. In fact it would probably benefit the scalpers even more because they will have more time to track price drops than your average fan!
What about both? Artists want money, fans want entry, reserve a portion for hardcore fans and the remainder by auction. Artists get to sell their $10k seats to the rich while looking like they’re giving an amazing discount to their fans.
This is a better idea, but you run into the problem of determining who are the more deserving fans, and you circle back to what Spotify is planning to do.
If you're selling out venues at 5x a normal ticket price you will quickly be playing in much larger venues until you can't sell them out except at face value
The people whose tickets get scalped are already playing in sports stadiums. There aren’t bigger venues.
The average event either doesn’t sell out or takes a while to sell out.
Are the people who pay lots of money not fans?
Get a ticket to a premium area and count the "influencers" who are there just to produce content, instead of enjoying the show
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> Good for artists, fair from a market perspective
Bad for fans,
just because you can pick a solution that can extract the most amount of money from the thing, doesn't mean you're required to do so, (nor are you required to suggest it.)
Didn't you ever wonder why artists don't do that? Because they don't - at least not openly.
I think it's because extracting maximum value from your fans in the short term is not great if you want to have a musical career. The ones ending up with tickets will ideally, for themselves at least, be more or less indifferent to going to the concert: yes, they may get a lot out of it, but they also paid so much it was barely worth it.
Worst case, they will suffer from winner's curse, like auction winners often do: they won the auction because they were the ones who, more than everyone else, overestimated how much they'd get out of the concert.
Can you imagine the crowd mood if half the audience regrets spending so much money, and the other half is largely indifferent?
It's because artists dread this outcome that they hate scalpers, rather than becoming scalpers themselves.
Not good for fans. And happy fans are good for artist. So not good for artist.
This is basically what is already happening with dynamic pricing. Tickets are now most expensive at the original sale and get cheaper over time until sold
Good for artist, bad for those fans who have shallow pocket.
Terrible idea. The venues would taking on all the risk and could even cancel a show if there are not enough ticket purchases because its steepest discount is only the day before the show.
A person purchasing a ticket a month or two in advance prior to the show off loads the risk from the venue. They purchase the ticket thinking they can make the show in two months because the event is a long ways away. People know what they are going to do a week advanced most of the time and therefore might just forego purchasing the ticket a that point in time, because there it has instant depreciating value at the point of sale.
The answer to what question?
The fact there are more people want X than the total number of X.
That’s not a question, that’s just a situation.
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The live music experience would be terrible if only the richest fans can get in. Every crowd would be old and square.
Not really. The vast majority of live music isn't even able to sell tickets as nobody would pay a penny, let alone a fortune. Getting in isn't much of a problem.
Only the megastars that can command high-priced tickets would attract the old and square, which is okay because the megastars are old and square themselves by the time they've built that old and square audience. The hip and with it music fans have already moved on to seeing the next up-and-comers that play for free.