What You May Be Missing When Trying to Buy Those Concert Tickets

By Seth A. Schachner,

Managing Director, Strat Americas

Lately, there’s more noise on how challenging buying concert tickets is than virtually any other event. While everyone from Morgan Wallen to Coldplay to the Stones hit the road this past summer, there were seemingly shows for all.??Social media and ticketing apps have wired up the connections between artists, fans and tours like never before.???With fan apps and alerts, buying concert tickets should be as smooth as possible, right??

Think again.??There may be at least one unintended consequence of how wired up the ticket buying experience has become: overwhelming, rapid demand, occasionally so much that even the country’s largest ticketer struggles to manage it.???Taylor Swift, for example, could have sold enough tickets for 900 shows to her US Eras tour.

Oasis recently announced plans to regroup in 2025, with initial shows announced in the UK and Ireland. Demand for these stadium gigs has been overwhelming, and the band has resorted to a variety of tactics to manage the demand—like consolation “ballots” for those who missed out on the first round of sales. The focus in the UK has been on “dynamic pricing,” which some might say the artist’s management might have opted into without deep thought, and perhaps missed grasping its consequences for virtually every fan. (Or maybe not.)

But in the US, virtually everyone’s still mad, and a lot of folks—including the US Government—are pointing fingers at a culprit – Live Nation and its division Ticketmaster-- as the problem.??The Justice Department has even gone so far to sue them, threatening a breakup, and pointing to their behavior pushing back against competitors and artists.

The suit misses the point in my view, and won’t do much to help consumers.???In many senses, concert tours are actually controlled by artists, not by anyone else.?

They’re making most of the key decisions when they hit the road—how much to price tickets, what venues to play, how much of that ticketing money they’ll share in, even whether or not to allow the re-sale of their tickets.???And no matter how expensive the ticket, there’s always someone willing to pay that price, so an artist doesn’t want to underprice a ticket.

It’s a real balancing act.

That’s actually the key consideration with dynamic pricing. An artist like Oasis earns nothing from ticket re-sellers who offer tickets on resale markets for inflated prices. So it makes sense to keep an eye on the market and dynamic pricing is one tool to do so, no matter how painful and irritating it is to virtually every fan.

Remember that artists don’t make very much from their music on streamers like Spotify, so when they look at touring, they do so opportunistically, and of course will push prices higher.(One nice development is that this past summer, US ticket prices were actually lower, as artists like Beyonce took some time off and Taylor Swift hit Europe.)

And what about Live Nation and promoters???Artists need them, and venues need to stay in business also.?

So as artists take much more of the money from ticket sales, inevitably there will be higher prices and fees tacked on elsewhere, from “venue fees” to overpriced popcorn and parking.??Believe it or not, there might even be a few artists who participate in those strange fees.?

There?are?steps that can help improve ticketing. For one, get rid of the bots.?There’s actually a US?law in place targeted at this issue--the "BOTS" act (for "Better Online Ticket Sales:). Rarely enforced, the BOTS act could be used to reduce or even potentially rid bots from the process of buying tickets.??Bots are one of the biggest culprits distorting ticket pricing and causing massive delays.??

Second, the resale or "secondary" market cries out.??The UK has strong consumer laws when it comes to reselling tickets, and we in the US might benefit from trying a few.??Try banning “speculative sales” from folks who try to sell tickets to an event they don’t have tickets for! ??Reports of ticket barcodes being hacked this past summer only amplified this need.

Third, a concept called “All in Pricing” eliminates those obnoxious fees that arise after you’ve selected tickets.??(Dynamic pricing, in the headlines given the recent Oasis reunion announcement, seems like an issue that’s a bit separate. I believe it is likely best left in the hands of an artist manager to decide whether to use it. Perhaps the current UK inquiry will offer insights that change my thinking.)

Finally, it’s not a bad idea to get rid of exclusive deals between ticketers and venues. Some smaller venues may not want to spend to retrain staff and operations on a new ticketing software, but opening up this area can’t hurt either.

None of these are perfect, and they won't all apply to every artist's ticket sale or presale.? But in practice, even a few of these will help consumers more than a lawsuit.