Stadium Ticket Pricing

[Greenelk]

Looks like Madge tickets are £45-£430 for seats, with VIP stuff going up to £1300

[Greenelk]

No sign of the £47 tickets 

[stanh]

4 hours ago, Greenelk said:

No sign of the £47 tickets 

Saw that this morning, absolute insanity. I certainly can find myself spending a lot for concerts, but £150 for nosebleeds is a joke

[charlierc]

12 hours ago, a6l6e6x said:

I'll photoshop you arm in arm with Madonna for £20

Sounds like less a gig and more the keepsake you get at the end of a rollercoaster ride.

[Suprefan]

Lets see what happens next week

 

 

[gfa]

Ticketmaster lobbying efforts going into overdrive

[moogster]

Ha! 10 mn into the sales of the Madonna tickets, new show added... Predictable. Lovely system: it's my turn until... I have to join the queue again... And then it bugs. Seetickets ain't that bad after all... (more for the curiosity than me really wanting tickets, I know, not nice for people who really want tickets) 

[kingcrawler]

3 minutes ago, moogster said:

Ha! 10 mn into the sales of the Madonna tickets, new show added... Predictable. Lovely system: it's my turn until... I have to join the queue again... And then it bugs. Seetickets ain't that bad after all... (more for the curiosity than me really wanting tickets, I know, not nice for people who really want tickets) 

Every big Ticketmaster sale I try for makes me appreciate the manic F5 approach to Seetickets even more.

[moogster]

1 minute ago, kingcrawler said:

Every big Ticketmaster sale I try for makes me appreciate the manic F5 approach to Seetickets even more.

And then I get through, select the cheapo 50 quid tickets and then it says "sorry not available after all but lucky you you can have some at 300 a piece !🤣

[stanh]

Latest update, with Wizkid's show added.

[Pipine]

Can someone explain the ticketmaster platinum ticket thing for me.. will all remaining Madonna tickets stay at the massively inflated platinum prices now?   When do they start / end dynamic pricing?

[gfa]

32 minutes ago, Pipine said:

Can someone explain the ticketmaster platinum ticket thing for me.. will all remaining Madonna tickets stay at the massively inflated platinum prices now?   When do they start / end dynamic pricing?

will go down closer to the event if they can't flog them for £££ basically

[incident]

8 hours ago, Pipine said:

Can someone explain the ticketmaster platinum ticket thing for me.. will all remaining Madonna tickets stay at the massively inflated platinum prices now?   When do they start / end dynamic pricing?

The idea of dynamic pricing is that there is no start or end - basically between now and the concert they'll periodically adjust the prices up and down (though probably more up than down) depending on current supply and demand levels and any other factors they can think of in order to gouge as much cash as they can.

In the unlikely event that say there's thousands of unsold tickets for a show a few days before, then dynamically priced tickets could drop well below "face value" in order to try and shift them - but obviously that's rare and isn't going to happen in this case.

[MrZigster]

Relevant article:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-64372274

Edit : Beaten to it by @dondo in the most you've paid thread.

Edited January 26, 2023 by MrZigster

[Pipine]

So my previous tactic of waiting til just before the gig to pick up a last minute seat right by the stage probably wouldn’t work now, closer to the gig the dynamic pricing is going to just make it ridiculously expensive.  You’d have to rely on something good coming up on twickets.  Madonna has announced a 5th date at the O2 so I might see what I can get when that goes on sale. 

[incident]

9 minutes ago, Pipine said:

So my previous tactic of waiting til just before the gig to pick up a last minute seat right by the stage probably wouldn’t work now, closer to the gig the dynamic pricing is going to just make it ridiculously expensive.  You’d have to rely on something good coming up on twickets.  Madonna has announced a 5th date at the O2 so I might see what I can get when that goes on sale. 

That might still work, but I don't know if anyone can say with confidence. The UK implementation of dynamic pricing is too new to predict how things are going to end up.

It seems that - so far at least - at any given show only a certain percentage of seats are being included in the dynamic pricing scam. Currently only Ticketmaster and AXS are doing it, so if production holds get released via a different ticket agent then those should definitely be at face value, and even if it's via those touting scumbags it's still possible it's at face value but that remains to be seen.

[gfa]

58 minutes ago, Pipine said:

So my previous tactic of waiting til just before the gig to pick up a last minute seat right by the stage probably wouldn’t work now, closer to the gig the dynamic pricing is going to just make it ridiculously expensive.  You’d have to rely on something good coming up on twickets.  Madonna has announced a 5th date at the O2 so I might see what I can get when that goes on sale. 

Shows with 10s of thousands of seats consistently seem to be dipping below face value to be honest even if sold out and £100s over after going on sale. Maybe not madonna but lots of stadium tours have

[Pipine]

Interesting… it’s all a bit of a gamble really, could go either way.  

I think I’m going to see what seats (if any) I can get tomorrow for the new date if there’s nothing great available I’ll take my chances picking up a last minute ticket from somewhere for face value. 

[Suprefan]

On 1/25/2023 at 1:57 PM, Pipine said:

Can someone explain the ticketmaster platinum ticket thing for me.. will all remaining Madonna tickets stay at the massively inflated platinum prices now?   When do they start / end dynamic pricing?

Platinum is different than dynamic. There is an actual cap of when a ticket becomes platinum to when its being controlled by the increase of what dynamic does. I saw madonna dates in the u.s go through this last week during the sales. I saw the $40 tickets and all that with the highest price ticket being $350. After the first fan club sales the face values rose of these and got up to $80 for the cheap ones and $410 for the high ones. There were tix that I saw at $175 face which then started at $225 in the following sale. The additional shows didnt start at the low base cost either, they changed them to the higher figure and most people werent going to notice that cause they wouldnt have checked a couple days earlier. Platinum is essentially when a ticket at least triples from its face value and then it receives the labelling. You can see that with The O2 gig ticket price if you compare what it should cost to what theyre charging now. The algorithm will adjust to demand and the price will go down, but thats pretty rare. I saw that happen during covid cause nobody looked at gig tickets for a year so it had to adjust to demand. But the thing is it calculates demand as people just searching for the event. If people stop browsing, itll go down. But with people currently still looking its gonna stay the same for a while. There will always be tickets floating around and market saturation can make that happen. But its a matter of the aftermarket demand too. If people are willing to pay the high price then no deals are coming.

 

 

This guy is a machine

 

Edited January 27, 2023 by Suprefan

[Suprefan]

nice read. Newest Bob Lefsetz email. Theyre an industry person who has a podcast and writes and such about things happening in music. Of course right now ticketing is the thing so there have been a couple of emails already with that. Tonights is good.

 

Quote

Let's start with the fees. Everybody wants them baked in, except for the acts. Ironically, even those acts complaining about the fees!

 

Everybody on the inside knows the real price of the ticket is the face price plus the fees, otherwise the whole concert promotion paradigm doesn't work. The promoter needs those fees to make a profit.

 

But here's where Ticketmaster takes the blame once again. The hate is focused on the ticketing company when it's really the fault of the act! The act can ask for an all-in price, Ticketmaster has no problem with this, but so many acts don't want this.

 

Let's use an example. A club show. $25 face value plus $25 in fees. The act can side with the fan, you're getting ripped-off! But the truth is the ticket really costs $50. It's just by making half of it fees, the act looks like it's not overcharging, that it's on the fans' side, when this is not the truth.

 

Of course there are acts that would go to all-in pricing, but unless there's uniformity, there is no solution, no happiness.

 

Never mind all the other industries, like hospitality, that survive on fees.

 

So let's move on to the bots.

 

Do you still get spam e-mail? Even worse, do you get spam texts? OF COURSE YOU DO! We've been doing this internet thing for decades but spam hasn't been eradicated yet. Talk about money... Google provides Gmail, the number one e-mail service, the company has tons of money, but even Google can't solve the problem!

 

So if you think you can legislate bots away...

 

And even if you have a law, without manpower, without enforcement, the law is toothless. Think about the IRS... The Republicans want funding removed, saying that the IRS targets small businesses. Don't you  see there's going to be the same argument when it comes to anti-bot enforcement? Even if there's a law, if it's enforced, the blowback will be loud.

 

As for the scalpers utilizing these bots... The truth is both promoters and fans like scalpers. On risky shows, promoters sell directly to scalpers, to take some of the risk off the table. Especially in sports. And the public likes to know that a ticket is always available if they're willing to pay. And, the public wants to be able to resell/scalp its own tickets. So tying the ticket to the individual and disallowing resale, the fans are not happy with this.

 

Okay, how do we address the evil Ticketmaster?

 

Forget the merger with Live Nation, that ship has sailed. How can Ticketmaster be hobbled?

 

The only way is by declaring it a monopoly. On the surface, this appears to be the case, with even Ticketmaster saying it has 60% of the market, others saying as much as 80%.

 

Easy to throw the m-word around, but proving a monopoly? Much harder. Now under previous administrations antitrust laws have not been strictly enforced. This has changed under Lina Khan, who is experienced and knows the landscape. This is important, unlike previous heads of the Federal Trade Commission, Khan has worked in the field and understands it. Whereas the public and congresspeople don't understand ticketing.

 

So, one way of proving a monopoly is harm to the consumer. Just raw market share is not enough to take action.

 

But let's say Khan takes action.

 

Now let's just focus on ticketing, not the consent decree, whether Live Nation uses Ticketmaster as a pawn for concerts.

 

So, jumping to the end here, let's just say the FTC says Ticketmaster is a monopoly. Now if this happens, the FTC must come up with a solution, THAT OBVIATES THE MONOPOLY! In other words, when the decision is dealt, the resulting company or companies must not have a monopoly.

 

Well everybody inside knows that as much as it's a national punching bag, Ticketmaster is the best ticketing company. Sure, use someone else for a club, but if you want scale, Ticketmaster is the only choice. As for someone rising up and competing? Why invest all that money if Ticketmaster has exclusive deals.

 

But let's say we get rid of exclusive deals. Let's use the English model.

 

In the English model, the arena controls 60% of the ticket inventory, and the promoter 40%. So the building still gets fees, and the remaining pool of tickets is open to other companies. Yes, the promoter picks. So there is competition. Maybe it's price, maybe it's efficiency. But at scale, no one is close to Ticketmaster's efficiency. Is a company going to invest to compete with Ticketmaster? That's a big ask. All that money with no guarantee. But it could happen. Or it could turn out that Ticketmaster does all of the ticketing anyway, and you end up with a monopoly.

 

The dreaded monopoly... The only real solution is to break up Ticketmaster into smaller companies, a la the breakup of AT&T. This could be done in theory, but it wouldn't be easy. Maybe everybody gets the underlying tech and...

 

Now with AT&T, we saw the smaller companies ended up merging and the result was there were few companies left. Right now, really only three, Verizon, T-Mobile and a company that uses the original AT&T moniker. T-Mobile merged with Sprint and it still offers deals, but not as good, but...

 

We're talking about ticketing.

 

Yes, if Ticketmaster is a monopoly it must be broken up, otherwise it ends up with most of the market share anyway.

 

So, the resulting companies, along with theoretical newbies, all compete. Will ticketing be improved? Possibly. Ticketmaster is built on legacy spaghetti code, just like Windows. But it's a big risk, investing all that money, will you end up being able to sell tickets?

 

But here's the dirty little secret, even if you break up Ticketmaster, ticket prices will not go down, they could even go up, as a result of needing to compensate the ticketing companies for all that investment to compete! There'd still be the fee problem, and the bot problem and...

 

As for the Taylor Swift on-sale "debacle"... Remove all the bots and I bet you'd still have a problem, or a close facsimile thereto. Because you get in and you want to choose your ticket. Remember the old days, when you had to go to Sears or wherever to get tickets? There might be someone in front of you, not even buying a concert ticket, but a ticket for another event, spending ten minutes nailing down what they wanted. Ticketmaster delivered choice, choose your seat, unlike Ticketron, but this inherently adds friction. Oh, we could go to a model where you take what we give you, but how many people would end up complaining about that?

 

Here's the bottom line. When people rail against Ticketmaster it's because supply exceeds demand. People are inherently left out. And unhappy. And, inherently those tickets that are available will either be worth more than the face price or end up being very expensive.

 

And you know who is responsible for that? THE ACTS! They want you to blame Ticketmaster as opposed to themselves. Oh, they could price the tickets at what they're worth, but you'd call them greedy, and they are uber-protective of their image. The Stones price their tickets at what they're worth, but there's not a lot of runway left in their concert career, and they are the STONES!

 

Which brings me back to the fact that the fans are delusional. They believe they are entitled to be in the building, in a good seat at a low price. And oftentimes that's literally impossible!

 

And, of course, there are all those shows that aren't instant sellouts, where the promoter is at risk... So it's not hard to get a ticket and people don't complain, except for the fees. And, once again, the fee problem was generated by the acts!

 

I'm not saying Ticketmaster has perfectly clean hands, but I will say both the acts and the fans are responsible for ticketing hiccups, but just like seemingly everyone else in America today they won't accept responsibility, it must be somebody else's fault.

 

That's assuming you can get the FTC to declare Ticketmaster a monopoly to begin with. Which is a big lift in itself.

 

And, once again, if Ticketmaster is a monopoly, the solution must ensure that that monopoly is broken and won't reappear. Which means you've got to take drastic action against Ticketmaster, a breakup, and not allow the resulting companies to ever merge to the point where the result is a monopoly. And with smaller companies will there be as much investment? Unclear. But one thing is clear, ticket prices will not go down, as I stated earlier, there's a good chance they'll go up! Maybe someone will invest enough that a national stadium tour can go on sale all at once... But why do we need that anyway? Breaking it up by gig solves so much of this problem.

 

So, if you want to fix ticketing...

 

You must sacrifice. And you still might not end up with the result you desired.

 

We test drove an electric Hyundai Ioniq after Felice's car got totalled. A great automobile. But the only one you could buy had four wheel drive, which we didn't want, and was ten grand over sticker. What did we do? Moved on and bought something else. Oh, Hyundai can sell every one they build, with a markup over list price, and you can buy it at that price, or not.

 

The law of supply and demand affects everything. Why should it not apply to ticketing? IT DOES!

 

 

[gfa]

6 hours ago, Suprefan said:

nice read. Newest Bob Lefsetz email. Theyre an industry person who has a podcast and writes and such about things happening in music. Of course right now ticketing is the thing so there have been a couple of emails already with that. Tonights is good.

 

 

Most suprefan article i've ever read

Our system is a million times better with proper competition between ticket providers - i'm sure the biggest economy in the world can figure it out (like heathcare... oh wait!).

Ban touts, ban viagogo, ban dynamic pricing. happened elsewhere and has worked, its a no brainer.

I reckon supre is secretly a ticketmaster boardmember sent here to push dynamic pricing on us

[Suprefan]

6 hours ago, gfa said:

Most suprefan article i've ever read

Our system is a million times better with proper competition between ticket providers - i'm sure the biggest economy in the world can figure it out (like heathcare... oh wait!).

Ban touts, ban viagogo, ban dynamic pricing. happened elsewhere and has worked, its a no brainer.

I reckon supre is secretly a ticketmaster boardmember sent here to push dynamic pricing on us

The consumer protection laws in this country are the other hurdle and theyll never change. Remember states rights are a thing. Thus why a place like NY is one of the most difficult cities to get a ticket for a big show. But I mean is that the only good thing the House of Commons/Lords have done for you lot in a long while? Guess your internet,water, electricity bills are nice and pricey now and the Nhs is in shambles. 

[philipsteak]

Weird

[jannybruck]

Beyoncé's tour is coming next week, so that ticketing experience will no doubt be an entire shitshow.

[Suprefan]

3 hours ago, jannybruck said:

Beyoncé's tour is coming next week, so that ticketing experience will no doubt be an entire shitshow.

Gotta fight fire with fire. Just a matter of if youre willing and ready to do so.