'Dynamic pricing' artists can't hide behind Ticketmaster's awful reputation forever
Calling time on artists testing how high fans will jump to attend their shows
If I have a nemesis, it’s Ticketmaster. Being forced to use it for eternity is almost certainly one of Dante’s ten circles of Hell. I hate its fuck-you service fees, its shonky queue system, the way it logs you out right before you really need to be logged in. Everyone who’s ever been to a concert has Ticketmaster PTSD.
The cost of attending live shows has become increasingly inaccessible post-pandemic. At the time of writing, Sam Fender is getting it in the neck for charging £80 face-value for his arena tour. With a large working class fanbase, not to mention his own working class background, £80 feels like a betrayal.
But those prices are set by the promoters. They’d be roughly the same on Ticketweb, or See Tickets, or Tickets Scotland (my preference since they still sell physical tickets!). So it’s not Ticketmaster’s fault that Sam Fender’s forgotten where he comes from.
But they do have some culpability once dynamic pricing kicks in. If you haven’t had the displeasure of encountering dynamic pricing, you have my envy. It is when Ticketmaster raises the price of tickets in line with their market value. You might have seen this if, like me and millions of other people, you wasted a Saturday morning trying to get Oasis tickets. After spending hours in a queue tens-of-thousands of people long, we were hit with standing tickets that had been juiced from £148 face-value to more than £350. They were renamed ‘In Demand Standing’, as if the biggest reunion of the 21st century was ever in danger of underselling.
Fuck Ticketmaster, right?
Well, wait just a second. Although it is never entirely clear how artists and promoters decide on ticket prices, we are starting to understand how much influence they have over dynamic pricing. Ticketmaster’s website says, “Prices can be either fixed or market-based”. And it also says, “Promoters and artists set ticket prices”.
If the obscene costs associated with live music are ever to come down, we have to ask: is it Ticketmaster robbing us, or is it our favourite artists?
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Bruce Springsteen took it on the chin in 2022 when a significant chunk of his fanbase turned against him for using dynamic pricing. By his own admission, The Boss’s usual tactic for setting prices up until that point was to tell his promoters, “Go out and see what everybody else is doing. Let’s charge a little less.” After enjoying five decades of this altruistic approach from Springsteen, devoted fans were then asked to fork out more than $1,000 to continue supporting someone they’d backed their whole lives. In response to the criticism, he said, “You certainly don’t like to be the poster boy for high ticket prices. It’s the last thing you prefer to be. But that’s how it went.”
Like Sam Fender, Springsteen has blue-collar credentials. He stands up for and was held aloft by those who work hard day and night for little in return. He was their guy, whose marathon-length shows gave them an evening off from their troubles. But, by opting for dynamic pricing, he shut them out. Many won’t even have $1,000 in savings, never mind spare for a single ticket.
Ticketmaster allowed him to do this, but it was ultimately Springsteen’s choice. Elsewhere, if his fans are willing to pay touts lots of money, he argued, he should get that money instead. It’s a twisted logic. If an artist feels cheated by touts, why not make tickets less tout-able? His fans are being punished because he chose to compete with the resale market, when he could’ve introduced photo ID schemes so the name on the ticket matches the buyer.
The Poster Boy for High Ticket Prices did everything he could to earn that title. I wish he liked it less than he does. He wasn’t ashamed enough of it to change his mind. I’m sure it’s easier to deal with the criticism since his greed paid off. So…
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I have a plea, and you won’t like it: stop buying tickets to see artists who use dynamic pricing.
I’ve always thought of the relationship between artists and fans as democratic. We choose who to listen to, whose t-shirts we wear, whose shows we spend our money on. We throw our weight behind the bands we love, and enjoy a good moan online about the ones we don’t. Like politicians fighting for our votes, musicians vie for our attention. I only have so much money and so many hours, I can’t go to every show or listen to every record, in much the same way I can’t watch a forty-minute show on Netflix in the twenty minutes before I have to leave the house, no matter how hard I try.
When an artist starts out, they’re all about gratitude. They’re so glad you came to their little club show, and there is some merch up the back if you’re able to afford anything, thank you very much. If you could follow us on social media, it would mean the world to us. People like you, who take a chance on live music, are keeping the industry alive. We couldn’t do it without you.
Somewhere along the way, they earn the right to stop grafting. Their shows sell out based on reputation alone, and they’ve enough fans to bump the price of t-shirts up a bit (except £40 for a Gildan tee with a basic print should see some artists tried at The Hague). They say thank you to huge crowds every night, and although it feels a bit less personal, you hope they still mean it.
Those early shows are precarious. Every attendee counts. But once you become a name and you’ve got some classics under your belt, when the culture hangs on your every word, the relationship flips. The artist who couldn’t live without the support of their fans becomes a figure of worship whose fans couldn’t live without.
It stings the most when pop acts take advantage of their young and devoted, and usually female, fanbase. Artists like Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, and Sabrina Carpenter have all used dynamic pricing, and all have found success by simulating the feeling of friendship with their fans. But friends don’t steal from you. Families had to fork out silly money because it was the most important thing in the world their daughters saw their idols. But the most important thing to their idols was working out just how much of that young girl’s money they could take. Hell, they weren’t cheap at face value either.
Dynamic pricing turns everyone in need of a community away from the live music scene. Teenagers depend on music for company while their hormones scramble their sense of self. I’m 33, and I spend money on tickets the way others spend it on going to the football. It’s where I see my friends and let my emotions soar and feel part of something much bigger than myself. It’s why, I imagine, people went to church for hundreds of years, except my church is a bit gothier. Without sounding like music fans are owed anything, they are the people keeping the industry alive, and it’ll quickly become a death spiral if they can only afford a couple of shows per year.
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The power I have as a fan diminishes the bigger an artist gets. Liam Gallagher doesn’t give a shit that I missed out on Murrayfield tickets. I’m sure it matters very little to him that working class fans who dreamt of one day seeing Oasis have to accept the band aren’t for them anymore.
For what it’s worth, Liam and Noel said they ‘leave decisions on ticketing and pricing entirely to their promoters or management’. Not long after, Robert Smith of The Cure gave an interview where he said artists are either ‘fucking stupid or lying’ when it comes to inflated ticket prices. Oasis have since confirmed they didn’t use dynamic pricing for their North America tour.
Some artists have come out and said they won’t use dynamic pricing. Iron Maiden tweeted it out ahead of their 2025 arena tour going on sale. Pale Waves purposefully capped their tickets at £30 because they know times are hard. Maybe it’s just good PR. But hey, it worked! I felt respected by their assurances that they won’t take my admiration and test to see just how much it’s worth.
So it’s kind of up to you, us, me. Solidarity is saying we understand tours are expensive and artists deserve a livelihood, but we refuse to buy tickets from anyone who uses dynamic pricing. In recent memory, artists would work out how much money they needed to make per show and priced tickets accordingly. This new practice of telling fans to jump when artists know they’ll ask how high is an affront to the personal relationship fans have with artists.
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Other opinions are available. Harvard Business Review took a look at Springsteen’s dynamic pricing brouhaha from a capitalist point of view. Maybe artists are underselling themselves, they suggest, and dynamic pricing is a way of discovering their true monetary value.
That’s been the niggling voice in my head while writing this. If an artist can charge hundreds or thousands of pounds for their show, why wouldn’t they? I’m approaching this from a morality POV - it’s just wrong - when, from a business standpoint, they could be making serious bank.
Artists don’t have an obligation to make spaces financially accessible. As a fan, it sucks to be surrounded by the kind of people who can afford to book a train in the UK without opening ten tabs and as many comparison websites. I want to be beside a cross-section of society, brought together by music. But I’m just a paying punter to the people on stage, along with the rest of the crowd. What do they care who leaves the TV on when a guest comes over or not.
I just don’t think it’s too much to ask that the people I support say ‘thank you’ rather than ‘what else you got there?’ Which is why blaming Ticketmaster for dynamic pricing sidesteps the issue. They’re just the platform for artists to decide whether they value me for my love or my money. I think the artists I want to do well are the ones who build a community on some shared notion, of artistic joy, catharsis, escapism, confession. The ones who make me feel alive.
If success instead is measured by who can drain fans of the most money, I want no part of it. I hope we can all decide we’re worth more than that. We feel more deeply bonded with some artists than we do the people in our lives. We don’t deserve to be exploited in return, and the artists who choose to do so should feel shamed into apologising. I believe music is for everyone; I just wish my favourite artists did too. It’s time we shut them out, like they’ve shut out so many of us, until they ditch dynamic pricing. It’s on us to tell them we’re done with being taken for granted.