Truly, these are wonderful times: never in human history have there been so many places to pay ridiculously inflated prices for tickets.
…is your favourite artist ripping you off?
9 thoughts on “Sky-high ticket prices: there’s no shortage of bad guys”
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Why don’t the bands just put their tickets straight on ebay?
Image. David Hepworth – Q co-creator and publisher of Word magazine – wrote a bit about it last month:
http://whatsheonaboutnow.blogspot.com/2012/02/why-true-fans-might-not-want-to-know.html
I had this not long ago and it’s all tickets… I wanted to go and see a comedian. Online (£22 face value x 2 plus £12 card charge + £3 per ticket postage – they would post them out individually right?), In the theatre box office (£22 face value x 2 + £10 card charge – for a DEBIT card!) or in the box office £22 for cash.
Who says cash isn’t king? lol
You have no idea how apopleptic I was under the veneer of incredulity.
People regularly accuse me of being an evil profit-driven capitalist bastard, but, had SQPI ever made it (ha!), we would have taken the ten minutes necessary to figure out half a dozen different ways to avoid screwing our fans. These days, the obvious answer is to link tickets to mobile phones. Allowing these practices is simple contempt for the fans.
On the subject of image, I always remember the re-release of Born Slippy. By the time the song got big off the back of Trainspotting, it was a bit old and Underworld had moved on. They initially resisted the pressure to re-release it just cause it was suddenly popular, preferring to be cool. Then it dawned on them that all their new fans were buying the record anyway, but were having to buy it on import at grossly inflated import prices, so the band’s decision to be aloof to popular success was actually screwing their fans. Kudos to them for (albeit belatedly) noticing this obvious fact and re-releasing the thing.
Bands have more power to affect these things than they’d have you believe. Bob Geldof didn’t want Live 8 tickets sold on so figured out a way to stop it. It just takes will.
> Bands have more power to affect these things than they’d have you believe.
Oh, indeed. For all I’m taking the piss out of Radiohead (and moaning about the ticket prices), they’re in a position where they can do something, and they’re doing something. But I suspect that a very large number of bands are complicit in the touting thing.
My favourite is the postage charge for print-your-own tickets.
That’s a labour charge – someone has to scan the ticket to send it to you then shred it.
And someone has to put it in the internet pipe.
Since broadband, that’s not anywhere near as hard as it used to be, as the pipe is much wider, so all you need is a funnel. With dial-up it was a bastard.