Is It Time To Ditch The 'Face Value' On Concert Tickets? (Ticketing Feature)

You wake up bright and early, you log on to the page to buy your tickets and you nervously glance at the clock counting down the seconds until 9am.

Your heart is racing, you refresh the page and when you realise how much you are about to spend on tickets, not to mention the fees and delivery costs, your jaw drops.

£40 for Frank Ocean at Brixton Academy? Or £70 seats for Green Day at the Emirates? Perhaps it was those £80 seats for Robbie Williams at Wembley Stadium that stared back at you through the computer screen?

But by that point your mind is made up, time is running out and all sense of pragmatism is down the toilet. Your fingers sprint through typing the card details and phew! The booking confirmation comes in.

Moments later you’re either buzzing with excitement, or wallowing in doubt, “shit, I really shouldn’t have spent that much money”.

If you’re identifying with the latter, there’s one remaining scenario to really ruin your day that any seasoned ticket buyer will have faced.

What if the gig doesn’t sell out? You woke up early and filled yourself with anticipation and anxiety and spent all that money. Yet on the big night you pass through the venue doors, the venues only bloody half full. What a waste! And to make it worse, your friends found tickets selling on the ticket exchange sites, such as Viagogo or Stubhub, for less than half of what you paid. Damn.

Something’s gone wrong. Maybe the venue was too big for the band? Maybe the prices were too high? Maybe the demand just wasn’t there this time. Subsequently, you have a gig with half the atmosphere it should have, which sucks for both the bands playing and the fans attending.

In an age of free for all online piracy, artists rely on ticket sales to fund their careers, so naturally they’re pressuring promoters to charge more by charging more to perform. Anyone who has followed a band and seen them time and time again in the same venue, whenever they’re in town, will no doubt have noticed this pattern. In return for nicking tunes off the Internet, rather than the old days of £14 discs from the extinct Virgin Megastore or decaying HMV, we’re paying with our tickets instead. Fair enough really. But people are still innately allergic to paying more for products that they remember being cheaper.

So here perhaps is a little business remedy to the music industries ticket bothers.

Get rid of the face value prices printed on the ticket, they don’t mean much anymore. If supply overwhelms demand, shouldn’t promoters scrap the ‘set in stone’ sale price and lure extra fans in by dipping prices? If it sells more tickets in the long run, then yes. It’s simple economics that works in all forms of retail to discount excess stock. The industry calls it dynamic pricing. But is it something which would catch on?

It’s something that has already caught on in the US for sports events. Major League Baseball teams like the Chicago White Sox, Cincinati Reds and the Texas Ranger have already embraced dynamic pricings. The Pittsburgh Pirates simply explained the concept to their customers: “Initial ticket prices may then be adjusted -- lower or higher -- in real-time, based on ticket availability and other changing factors.”

You could imagine some ticket purchasers who were first to nab theirs on the release day getting peeved to find that more apprehensive fans were suddenly able to get a much better deal a few months down the line, but here is where a new dimension to the skill of ticket buying would come in. It would be down to the consumer to judge how quickly they think a gig will sell out, what the expected demand is, and to calculate the risk of when to buy their tickets.

Our deeply troubled, and increasingly competitive, festival industry could benefit here too. Take the infamous Reading and Leeds Festival, whose last two years of ticket selling has been precarious.  Around early August, some two weeks before the 2012 edition of the festival began, Festival Republic triumphantly announced the festival had sold out. Woo just in time! Well anyone who had been checking secondary ticket sites would have noticed the addition of several hundred new Reading and Leeds festival tickets for sale at a discounted price. Coincidence?

It appears that the festival had in fact arbitrarily decided to announce it had sold out so that it could sell on hundreds of unsold tickets through its official secondary partner, where they were instead being sold at hugely reduced prices.

Is this the way to go for promoters to shift unsold tickets without hurting their existing customers? Through the back door. Promoters partnering with secondary ticket exchanges, and sites like Groupon, appear to be a growing solution to shifting unsold tickets, without doing too much harm to the value their own tickets in the eyes of consumers.

Where does this leave official ticket agents, such as Ticketmaster, Eventim or Gigantic, that have been left holding tickets they can’t shift at this arbitrary “face value” while tickets are sold for below face value at 'unofficial' outlets?

Let’s ditch the romanticism. At the end of the day, anyone fulfilling a full time career as a touring and recording musician is a brand and a business, whereas a promoters job is simply to sell artists’  tickets and of course to make a profit. So when things get desperate, they should have all options open to them to sell as many tickets as they can – but at a price the majority of fans will bear.

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