Fans Over Ticket Fees: Touring as a Band in the Age of Secondary Market Greed
>> Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. So, Andrew. Yes.
You and your team went to some pretty extraordinary lengths last year to keep your fans prices affordable. Um, but before we talk about what you did and whether it paid off, can you tell us about the moment that made you decide that you were going to put all your energy and resource into this? Was there? Did you wake up in a cold sweat thinking your tickets were spiraling out of control? >> I mean, it's happened multiple times throughout my career since StubHub kind of came onto the scene, started the first time was probably in 2012, the last Jack's Mannequin show, which was a charity gig for my My Cancer nonprofit, and tickets started to sell for 501,000 bucks. Of course, none of that money going back to the charity. And that was really the first time.
Um, and we have continuously sort of iterated as the, as the market has changed. But for for this most recent experience, it was something corporate. My band reunited after I got. It was the first time the lineup played together in maybe 15 years, and we went out to do a show in Las Vegas ahead of the We Were Young festival, and I was just kind of nervous whether or not we'd even sell out the show, you know? So we just kind of put the tickets on sale at the House of Blues there and within, you know, one minute of the on sale, there were hundreds of tickets available in the secondary market for 5 to 10 times what we were charging fans. And that was the moment where, knowing that we were going to step into doing more shows, that the goal was going to be to sort of throttle the secondary market and keep as many of the tickets in the hands of fans for the price that we charged.
You know, on our on our contract with the promoter. Got it. So something corporate released their debut album In, what, 23 years ago? Right? That sounds about right. So what did ticketing look like back then? I mean, it was it was you would go to I mean, gosh, probably back then go to like a warehouse records or something and, and pick up a concert ticket. I mean, especially in those early days we were playing punk rock shows and tickets could be, you know, as low as, you know, 10 or 15 bucks.
Uh, I think the yeah, I mean, there was there was always some level of, of, you know, scalpers on the, on the corner selling tickets. But I think because of the way it was, it was sort of there was no sort of centralized secondary market that really wasn't a factor in those early days. Right. So, so Live Nation's Ticketmaster and AEG access both offer tools for bands like yours that want to control ticket prices, like Ticketmaster has the Face value exchange, which allows you to cap resale prices and access has a similar option. So why wasn't it that simple? >> I can take this one. So just to start.
I mean, the face value exchange that we used on the something corporate tour, it's not designed to be the be all solution to the secondary market. Right. It's it's a it's a providing our fans, providing Andrews fans a safe and secure environment to offload their tickets at the price that the artist sets in the event that they can't go.
Some of the other things that we implemented along with that, and to protect the face value exchange where we could ticket transfer was turned off. We didn't do any platinum. We didn't do any dynamic pricing. Some of the things that we did run into are, were though, that, um, you know, there are some state laws that that hinder our ability when it comes to ticket transfer. And you know, the face value exchange is a Ticketmaster product.
So, you know, this tour was not all Ticketmaster dates. We had some access dates in there. We had some, you know, third party ticketing systems in there. So we were dealing with a split ticketing landscape. So those two things are primarily the biggest challenges that we saw.
So so explain ticket transfers so you can turn it off in some states but not not others. And that's the ability to. That's.
The ability of if I buy a ticket, my ability to transfer it within the ecosystem of the Ticketmaster, the access environment to a friend. So essentially what we did is if you bought the ticket, you're stuck with the ticket. You can't send it anywhere or transfer it to anybody unless you're listing it on that face value exchange to sell it at that face value price.
Right now, were you worried you were going to piss some of your fans off? Because that makes it a pain in the neck to buy tickets and go with a friend to a concert. I'm happy to take that. Look, any time we we do these sort of large measures to protect the price of the tickets, we're really transparent with fans. And we have I've had this amazing relationship with my fans over the years. You know, we know that none of this is perfect.
You know, like Brett said, from state to state, from promoter to promoter, from from ticketing platform to ticketing platform, there is a it requires a hodgepodge of, of sort of different approaches. But we're very up front with our fans. We really spell things out.
I'll shoot videos ahead of presales, ahead of the on sale and explain what we're doing and why we're doing it. And and my team at C3 has been so incredible in, in really sort of creating a white glove experience where if people are piping up on a, on a thread on Instagram, for instance, or in the fan club, I had this problem. Whatever. We will work Tirelessly to actually meet that fan where they're at and help them resolve that problem.
I don't think that that's scalable for most artists, but we've taken it on as our mission, and I think we've gotten a lot of goodwill from fans because they realize that in most cases, they're actually paying what the ticket price is that we set, and they're not having to go to the secondary as often because we protect the tickets going out in the early in the early pre-sales and on sales. I think that the average fan doesn't really understand ticketing in the way that we understand ticketing or, you know, so I think the fan communication and education that happened with something corporate campaign was critical because you guys had a coordinated social rollout, along with everything that we were doing that spelled it out to fans, what we were doing when we were canceling tickets, what state laws we couldn't, or what states we couldn't do this in. And I think that element sets how we did it apart from everybody else because of that fan communication and education campaign that you guys put together. And just quickly on the piss off factor, um, there's always going to be somebody who's upset with the way you do things. But what I will say is, in doing this, we're seeing way less angry fans because usually what I have been seeing when we are not doing this is people are really upset with the price of tickets that they're buying in the secondary market.
And that's the kind of spam that we see in most of our social media platform now. It's been it's been a completely different thing, and there's way less of that, which is really appreciated. Right. So walk me through your whole tactical plan. You start communicating to your fan club, and then can you talk about the other steps you took in the States where you could transfer tickets, where you couldn't give me give me the rundown? I know you had like, dozens of people working on this.
>> Yeah. So I mean, it's a lot to try to fit everything we did into one initial message. So we knew that we were going to kind of like, try to lead some sort of an awareness and education campaign over the life of this thing. So we started out by talking to Andrews fan club and telling them the tools that we had and where we could use them and what we were going to do. And then the most importantly, I think to us, is offering them tickets before anybody else can get them, and making sure that the people who have identified themselves as super fans get a chance to get them.
So we did that, and we let them know that since we were expecting them to sell out quickly, that we were going to be essentially looking at ways that we could cancel tickets that we thought were bots or scalpers or anything. And structurally, it was just like any rollout where you have the fan club, presale, artist presale, all that. But we waited until, you know, luckily most of the shows sold out, which is amazing, and worked with the promoters to cancel the tickets and intentionally waited a couple of weeks so we could catch commenters that were saying, I got my tickets cancelled. What's going on? Um, why were you cancelling the tickets? What were the dead giveaways to you that these were bought? Yeah, that's an interesting question.
A lot of it is on the promoters end. They identify what IP addresses that are. Yeah.
So what what happens is when the show sells out, we'll ask our promoter to run what we call an OTL over the ticket limit sweep. This takes, you know, anywhere from 5 to 7 plus days. It's not an easy process. It takes it definitely takes manpower on the ticketing platforms.
And and they come back with a list of, you know, we look at the emails, we look at the at the names that people use to place the order, the number of tickets per order. But most commonly, how we identify suspicious actors is by the IP address. So we'll identify the same machine or set of machines placing bulk orders to get around our ticket limit, which I believe is for for something corporate and you know, but but sometimes you'll have some crazy outlandish names or like email addresses and those sometimes can be giveaways too. But primarily it's the IP address to how we identify. Okay. And we did an outreach to we put up just a basic Google form, you know, since so many people were commenting saying I got my tickets canceled while we were reaching out to them individually, we also invited people to reach out to us and let them know.
And maybe the first ten minutes that that form was up, everything seemed legitimate. But, you know, having the spreadsheet open, watching it fill as responses go, we got 8500 responses, and I think maybe 400 of them ended up being what we thought were real fans. Um, but. That's a lot to sort through.
Yeah. So who who are the people that you have working on this project and how much are you paying them? That's that's part of why it's tough to scale this is because a lot of this system operates on goodwill, and we had Brett and multiple people from his team, us, multiple people from our team. Every single promoter for 30 ish shows had at least two people working on it. Ticketmaster access had people. And you know, promoters are doing what, 200, 250 shows a year like they're busy.
So the fact that they took the time to join us, every single venue that we worked with, I just I think that says a lot because it's extra work that they don't really need to do, especially since the promoter is making their money. Whoever buys the ticket. Yeah.
So why do you think they're doing it? I think that seeing an artist want to treat their fans well and go out of their way to do it, was like a lightning rod of inspiration to people who, you know, you get lost in the humdrum of your job. Promoters are running Facebook ads. They're dealing with angry fans, you know, and the chance to do the right thing is not always. >> Promoters want to do the right thing, and others know that Andrew has a choice of promoter in a market, right.
And so if William Morris says, hey, this is what we want to do, you need to play ball. If you want Andrew's business on that show and in the future you're going to play ball to whatever degree you can. Yeah.
And you said that this would be hard to scale. Do you mean like, if it was a stadium tour, it would be too hard because of the sheer volume that you'd be dealing with. I think also when you when you get to a stadium, it's an entirely different economic animal. But but in terms of what we did specifically in scaling it to a stadium, I think the biggest issue is a logistical one, right. So when you restrict the transfer of tickets, a stadium, the ticket limit is going to be anywhere from 6 to 8, usually eight tickets. So you have one friend in the group that bought all eight tickets.
You have to kind of move as a unit at at entry. If they're checking tickets. When you come back from concession, you have to huddle up as a group and go. And it just when. When you. It has been done.
Don't get me wrong, at an arena and a stadium level, but most you'll mostly see the the promoters saying or the venues really saying we're turning transfer on the day of the show. Like we're not, we're not doing that. Well, I also think too, from the scalability standpoint, I think it's just from a management standpoint to like to to be able to say, and we've had people ask us, well, how did you do it? And the man hours that are required.
I mean, I tip my hat to everybody on this stage and all the people that we work with, because they took it up as, as my mantle and were willing to do it. But I think part of the reason that we're here today is because should it be so difficult for us to deliver fairly priced tickets to our fans? And isn't it wrong that we have allowed for this technology and for these companies to come in and basically reshape the entire economy of a show, despite the fact that the artist says, I'm okay with making this much money for this date, you know? I'll admit, I live a nice life. You know, when I book a show, I book it saying, okay, I can pay my crew. I can pay my band. I can pay for my production. My goal isn't to extract every dollar out of my fans pocket.
Humanly possible. My goal is to make shows affordable so that shows can be attended by people who are not wealthy, but that we can share music with everybody. And the reason that this isn't scalable is because it requires so much manpower to do this.
And these guys have to manage my career on top of it, you know? And so our hope is through having these conversations, we find a way to to, you know, intercept the secondary market and say it's it's okay if you exist, but it should be my right as an artist to say, I don't want to play in this in this field with you. I want my fans to get the their tickets at the price that I set, and I don't need you to come in and intercept my, my, the economy and reshape it around the show. Yeah, But Morgan and Ryan, you guys are managers, and your job is to help Andrew and his band make a living at a time when touring is more expensive than ever. I mean, were you worried at all about keeping ticket prices lower than they needed to be? Meaning you would. You were leaving money that you might need on the table? Yeah, no. From the standpoint that, you know, Andrew's made a really a career on treating his fans well and having an ongoing relationship with them.
And for that relationship to continue with trust, you have to, you know, be forthright and set it up the way you want to. You know, we we do look at ticket prices and say, okay, can we go from 50 to 55? Because, you know, that will put X number of dollars more in Andrew's price in his pocket. But we've made those decisions before confirming the dates. And so after that it's really about protecting our community our business our business includes the fans and and making sure that, you know, as much of that money stays within our their pockets as well.
Right. And so, you know, when a ticket that's 50 bucks goes up for 400, Andrew's taking home 20 of that 50. And then a promoter StubHub takes home 350. This is not right. Right.
It's just clearly I think we can all agree that's that's a problem, right? Right. So Andrew, one key it sounds like to making this work is the strength of your fan club. Can you talk about how big that fan club is, how how you monetize your fan club in other ways.
Yeah. So we have like a just a classic subscription based fan club. I think it's maybe ten bucks a month or, you know, discounted if you sign up for the year. Um, and it was like a hard thing to make that decision. Uh, like I said, like my goal is not to just, like, keep constantly reaching to fans pockets, but, um, we realized there was a way for one me to be able to interact in a more personal way.
I'm not like a social media, like I'm not a dude who lives on TikTok. It's just I didn't grow up in that generation. I have a lot of respect for people who do, but it's not a it's not a reflex or an impulse. So this is like a little bit of a siloed space where I can share more things. And and we have about 3000 people ish, I want to say, in the fan club.
And we do things in the club, like obviously like we have tons and tons of live audio in there, bootlegs that, that live on the site. They get exclusive access to all of our to all of our pre-sales. They have exclusive merchandise and discounted merchandise prices. So the goal is for what they pay. We want that to actually appear back as savings and as benefits for being a part of the fan club. Um, and it's been it's been incredible.
You know, I do like I did a book club the last month with my fans, you know, and we do zoom. We do zoom check ins and hang outs online and, uh, The and it's created a chance, I think for people who are who are in this community to also get to know one another. And that has been a really powerful tool. Even when we roll things like this out, we have fans in that fan club who really have locked into the messaging and are going out into the wider world of social media and telling other fans what's going on. You know, the comment sections are amazing on all these social media platforms for me, because if there's a question, we have an answer. There's regularly a fan who's a part of Camp Wilderness that's out there going, no, this is actually what's going on with the tickets in this state.
Don't buy it off the secondary market because you won't be able you won't be able to get in. It's non-transferable. This is a speculative ticket or something to that effect. And it's, it's a it's something I take really seriously. I'm like, I know so many of them by name, and many of them have been with me since I was 18 years old, starting to tour in a van back in 2001. Yeah.
And have you guys crunched the numbers? Does the lifetime value of a fan exceed the potential revenue you could get from jacking up the ticket prices as much as possible for one tour? Well, I. >> Don't, yeah, and. It's not just the the lifetime value of an individual. I mean, there's 3000 members of this fan club, and yet we sold out 30 dates at in 3 to 6000 cap rooms. So they're a mouthpiece. So you can't.
That would be immeasurable, right. You know, because they're they're spreading the word of Andrew in addition to what money they are spending and they're repeat buyers. Right. I mean, they've been here since oh, one and beyond. And we don't look, I mean, I just don't think we look at it cynically either. You know, it's not like I don't look at a fan and go like, how can I monetize them over the course of the next.
For your managers? Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. Fair enough. Yeah, yeah. Well, well I hope they don't either, to be honest, you know.
Um, but but I think it's like, I just want to have a career. I just want to be able to do this until the day that I die, you know, like, I want to be able to sing on stages, and we just look at fans as a, as a part of a community and super serving them, you know, is good in the long run and has been and proven to be. But yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to. I mean, I think there's an argument to be said about the fan club itself and cultivating a strong one and loyal one as an anti one of our anti-scalping tools in and of itself.
I mean, these guys were critical in helping us spread the word like there are police, you know, if if an artwork leaks, they're like take that down. Like that's not supposed to be out there. Like I've never seen a fan club as dedicated as Andrew's. And they were they were absolutely integral in all of this process of rolling all of this out.
Yeah. What were some of the lessons you learned in doing this? Like, if you do it again, what would you do differently or. Well, I take it I mean, we would have to do it differently because things change. That's the other thing that I would say is like, you know, for an independent manager or even even us as a, as a full team, the rules change every time. Right? And so, you know, having to have a conversation with the agent. Like as shows are confirming what can we do this time around? Because Jack's Mannequin was different this year than something corporate was last year.
But go ahead. No, I mean. What are the rules that change? I mean, it's exactly that. It's the ticketing landscape is ever evolving.
It's ever changing. You know, some of the things that were available to us, like, for example, the hotel suites on something corporate, some promoters this time around have have started to move away from running them altogether. So that's a tool in our tool kit that's no longer available to us. Something we didn't do on Soco that we did do on Jack's Mannequin was using unique codes.
So that's another level lever that you can pull to kind of further protect the inventory when it comes to, you know, something corporate. I think we use generic codes. That's a lot easier to be spread on Reddit or wherever, easier for brokers to bulk buy. When you use unique codes, you can get really fancy with it the settings of them and say this one code is good for four tickets across the entire tour. Four tickets for one date.
Then it turns off. You can get really granular with it. And I think, you know, and also going back to your earlier question about what did we do in states that, you know, that didn't allow us to restrict the transfer? Which which states were those? I think on something corporate, it was New York, Utah, Colorado and Utah. Jack's mannequin, we had a couple others. But, you know, implementing those other levers when you can't restrict transfer like unique codes.
We did an artist presale sign up this time, like with a seated or a laylo tool, that they have their own ways to kind of make sure that brokers and bots aren't signing up. So there's other things you can do. And I think when you have legislation in your way that's restricting transfer, you have to pull all those other measures to try and protect the inventory. Yeah. And I feel like the big lesson that we have learned over just trying all the tools that have been available since we started trying this is that there is no way to get it 100% right.
And I think that is, you know, just is what it is. But that's why, like Andrew said, if it was on the artist to be able to choose what mechanisms they could use, you know, if some people want to turn on platinum and allow resale, it's tough to make a living as an artist. So it's hard to knock them specifically. But like, we just don't want to do that and we don't have the option to control it, and that's why we can't get it right.
It's a little like whack a mole. I feel like, you know, like trying going from last year to this year, from something corporate to Jack's mannequin even being a part of these conversations, it's like, oh, now the ticketing companies are not going to let you do or use this tool. Like so we, we used this, this seated tool so that we could do pre-sales artist presale signups with unique codes. But it does seem like and I could, you know, correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not suggesting a grand conspiracy, but it does seem like the the energy in the marketplace is really trying very hard to protect the secondary market and its existence and its ability to extract money from fans, because even with our partners who we trust, um, they're starting to pull back the tools that we've been using to protect fans and keep ticket prices low.
Yeah. So there's legislation now making its way through Congress that would address some of these issues, but critics feel like it doesn't go far enough and has some big loopholes. What do you guys think about the current ticket act? That's that's in. I mean, I think it's it's a step in the right direction, right? I mean, all of those things like all in pricing, those are fan friendly things.
But my biggest question with with that is who is responsible for the enforcement of it? You know, you have states that have passed laws that mandate all in pricing to be displayed to the customer. You know, at the front end. But even now you have secondary sites that are not in line with that.
And the question is who's enforcing that? So I think with any legislation that we could pass legislation all we want, but I think it comes down to how are we enforcing it? That's the biggest question for me at least. Right. And with all these state laws being the patchwork that they are, are you worried at all about treating your fans differently in different states? I mean, you kind of have to have a different standard and different pricing based on where your fans are. How do you work around that? I mean, we're able. To really have a pretty close relationship with 3000 people, right? If it was 100,000, it might be different.
But we know the names of all 3000, right? And we've built this trust up. So we're kind of in it together. If there were really an issue with a ticket in New York or someone got bought a speculative ticket, that didn't happen. Like we're going to take direct care of them. They know how to reach out.
Um, and the ticket act is it is a good step in the right direction, but it doesn't. You know, it's great that it's a bipartisan thing. It's the the purpose of us being here today. And the good part about it is that there's this awareness happening. I think that legislation is going to pass. And but they're going to miss some things that are not going to really actually, uh, protect consumers.
Um, and so it's good, but not, not great. I think so. But one other part of that too, is in those states, when we don't have control that we have in other states, I think one important thing that we try to do is even if we can't help, we just let the fans know that we hear what they're saying and we feel the same, and we utilize whatever we can to help them if we can, whether it's reaching out just to say like, hey, I saw your comment, I found your email address.
You know, Andrew wants to let you know that, like, yeah. I'm curious to with the ticket act as Audrey is actually you part part of the ticket act. I know you did the first version in the state. Um, but one thing we were talking about today, which is huge and I'm whether everybody in this room knows it or not.
Right. One of the biggest ways that the market has, has sort of like, you know, changed how people buy tickets is just search engine optimization. So most people who don't know about these topics, they click one of the first 2 or 3 links when they type in, I want to go see, you know, I want I saw Kacey Musgraves a couple weeks ago. I want to go see Kacey Musgraves. I type this in the first. It's getting to the point where the first whole page is just ticket scalpers.
And if you are not smart enough to know to like in this case, I bought Simon and Garfunkel ticket or Simon Paul Simon tickets this week. I had to go to the second page to actually go to the venue to to find tickets that were the actual fair priced tickets that they were selling. So I can you.
That the trick? Go to the venue site. Go to the venue site. Always go to the venue.
Where the artist. If you're going. To buy the artist directly. Most of the time it'll look like oh, there's only tickets available on the secondary market. Go to the venue site.
That's where you're going to get tickets. But is that a part of this legislation trying to eliminate the search engine optimization? >> No, I'm not a very loud talker, but one of the challenges is, is that people are fooled into thinking they're buying because they're very clever in how they write. It's deceptive. It. So is this in the ticket act that they're going to try and fix that? Some of the things I'm with neither. But I'm also with the 930 club in DC, and we've been working really hard on the federal and the state level to try to make it fair for consumers, because we want people to come back ten times a year, not just one, because you get hit by someone who's just taking advantage of you.
But one of the things that we're really working on is to try to get it so they can't use our intellectual property in the name of our. Right. To a sense of great significance.
And that's great. So yes. So yeah, one of the things that she's working on with Niva is, is preventing these resale sites from using the name of the venue in their URL, because that's deceptive. And that. I mean, it's.
My buying from the venue. It's my job to look at venue pages all the time, and I will come across so many that I'm like, sometimes we'll have to ask the promoter and be like, is this your legitimate site? Because we can't tell. Yeah. So that's really that's a really it's a really important I think that would. But then the big question becomes if they pass this into law, right.
And they say, well, this is this is illegal now to use somebody else's IP to present what, what you're, to make it look like you're the website for the venue, who is going to enforce it. Right. And so this becomes a huge question, right. That's still being decided. Yeah, it could be the Federal Trade Commission, most likely. So she's saying that the Federal Trade Commission would probably be in charge of enforcing this.
If we still have one. Yeah. Whether it's at the federal level. Well, there's a box law that went into effect in 2016. So the box law went into effect in 2016. One time.
And it's only been enforced one time. So that's here's the law. So we can pass these laws. But if nobody enforces them. Yeah. And they'll also find ways to just rebrand what they do.
Right. I mean like StubHub scalper, they are the top page. They have a lot of money invested in it. We've created a $1 billion business around live events there. And you know, the overhead for them versus owning the 930 club or renting a bus and going on tour is nothing.
So there's a tremendous incentive for them. But, you know, the concierge, they'll just call it concierge Ticketing vivid, which is often the second one you see. It brands itself as a concierge service, and the legislation is not trying to stop concierge service. And I don't think we're necessarily trying to stop. If someone really wants to be a concierge and say, hey, I'm going to be, you can hire me to go have a great night in D.C.
and it will include a ticket to the 930 club. That's not our problem. The problem is that they will do it. That will be separate from the legislation and that if I say, hey, I'm going to sell you an experience in D.C. that night, it's going to include the 930 club. I might not even own that ticket.
And so you're selling a speculative ticket. It's not going to be in the legislation. So it's a step in the right direction. But if we can even enforce it. But they're going to miss a bunch of the stuff.
Yeah. Have you as an artist representatives had to tried to have any direct conversations with these secondary sites? StubHub. Not really. You know, I think we know where their their bread is buttered and we've got our hands full just trying to keep our community in the loop. Yeah.
In the event of a full, full, hands on sale, there's an opportunity for the parties to communicate. You know, usually the ticketing, the ticketing access or Ticketmaster will handle those comms for us. Like just telling the the secondary, here's what we're doing. Like it would be in good faith if you can, you know, help us enforce this. And as soon as they find a way to get around it, the listings will go up, like, right.
Um, so Live Nation's face value exchange. They estimate that saved consumers $50 million over the past two years. It's become increasingly popular, like 25 artists used it last year, including Billie Eilish and Fred. Again this year. 11 artists have used it so far.
Um, do you? Because legislation seems like it's a ways off. How would you like to see Live Nation and Ticketmaster improve the tool as it is? Like, do you think there are ways they could improve it to make it more effective? Sorry. Real quick. Do you say 11 artists this year have used it? Yeah. That's crazy.
It should be way more. Just saying. Yeah. I mean, for me, I think the one thing that would be huge with the face value exchange is not double charging fans for transferring the tickets because it isn't.
Actually, it doesn't actually end up being a face value exchange. Fans are forced to absorb the ticketing fee twice and the ticketing fee. From what I understand, doesn't change. Despite the fact that this is a low to no overhead exchange yet you know, a $50 ticket, they might end up making another $50 in fees on them just going into somebody else's hands. So I think that would be the biggest thing in my opinion, is actually make it fair so that if a fan has to exchange their ticket for face value, that they don't lose money, that is a proper fair exchange. Um, but I would be very satisfied if we were able to globally, across the board, across all ticketing platforms, only have a face value exchange.
That transfer is limited completely to face value exchange. If you buy a ticket to the show, you can get rid of it. You can get your money back by giving it to a fan or a friend that wants to go to the show instead. I think that is simple and it would solve this problem, and artists could choose to opt into it, or they could choose to allow the secondary market to do what they do if they're if they're comfortable with it. Yeah. Exactly that.
What I think is missing with the current face value exchange technology is the ability for a fan to sell 1 to 1 to their friend. Right? If they if they get sick, they can't go. They have to list it on the exchange and hope somebody buys it.
Right. I think there needs to be the ability to, hey, if I want to sell it to Hannah, there's an option to do that. So.
Um, good question from the audience here. Can tickets created on the blockchain help with tracking secondary actors and prevent unethical behaviors? And do you think that that is a solution? Um, that may come back. That's way above my pay grade.
I don't know anything about the blockchain. I wish I knew more. You must have explored this in your. I wish I knew more about about crypto.
I mean, we we we use from my understanding, you know, we have some artists that, you know, have their fan club on the blockchain, their membership, however that works. I just think it's not it's not I think there's promise for sure. But I don't think it's used. You know, it's not mainstream and. We're not.
Using the tools we have currently effectively. And so yes, blockchain, the blockchain ticketing systems could dramatically lock this down. But you would have state legislations that would be in blocking it. New York being the biggest one. Um, but yeah, there's promise.
And I think that you will see some products start to come up that will do it. But the artists have to opt in. Promoters have to opt in.
You got a bunch of players who have to agree to use a new tech like that. But but yeah. Sure. Right.
Um, and just a reminder, if you guys have questions, send them in and I'll grab them on the screen. Um. What else? Any questions out there? I see this one right here. Oh, here. Yeah.
Ticketing platforms bear most of the blame for price gouging, but should artists be held just as, if not more accountable by fans for allowing this to continue? I mean, look, I think I think the reality as an artist, I am fighting tooth and nail to keep tickets off the secondary market, and they're still there, you know, and but I but I do think that it is the responsibility Ability of artists to speak out against this practice and to work to do what they can, to advocate for their fans so that we can. Because I think if we were able to band together and it's been it's been beautiful seeing certain artists step up and do this. I also just think some of them aren't aware. You know, I think there's you know, I know that this is awful because I've been doing this for 25 years, and I see its impact in, in growing increasingly insidious in our business. But I certainly think it is the responsibility of artists to stand up and say, I know what I'm charging for my ticket.
I'm comfortable with that being the the price of my ticket. I know what I'll make if I sell my show out. I know what my guarantee is. I booked the show accordingly.
And yes, stand up and protect your fans. I wish it was easier to do it, but. But some.
But some artists are reselling their own tickets, right? Like, not all artists are against this. Totally. And you have to. Know what your community is, right? And if you're if your community is so large and you're not needing to super serve them individually or you're choosing not to, and you say, hey, you know, I on a if you put in dynamic pricing on a show or some platinum, you know, you could take a $200,000 gross and make it 300,000.
And that's selling through the same inventory of tickets. And so there is an incentive for the artists and the ones who are aware of it. Some of them choose to say yes, because the argument that that promoters and ticketing companies make is that by allowing the dynamic tickets native to the on sale or the platinum tickets, that it's keeping some of that out of the scalpers hands. And that might be true, assuming that the fans know where to buy the legitimate tickets, right? I mean, am I buying dynamic tickets correctly or am I buying them at StubHub? Um, but yeah, artists have a lot of power.
I mean, if you really break it down, the artist could choose to not play within any of the ecosystem and play for independent promoters that will let them have whatever ticketing system they want. Blockchain, whatever. It's just you're not going to play the garden. You're going to have to go find a place to play. Right.
And so we have a lot of control as the artist. However, you would be limited to say, hey, I really want 100% of the control because you might be playing the VFW or or whatever else and not the Fillmore. Yeah. Let's talk more about dynamic pricing.
What's your view on that? And, you know, how did you think? Did you consider using dynamic pricing? Not for this tour because Andrew has his own philosophy on it. You know, there are tours where, you know, if the margin is it needs to be a little bit higher. And we want to say, hey, we're going to allow 10% to go dynamic. And we know and we've looked at a seating map and we say the dynamic pricing is going to happen in this zone. Because the issue with dynamic is you could have two people sitting next to each other, one who paid $40 for a ticket and one who paid $100 for a ticket.
That doesn't sit right. And so, you know, look at a seating map. Again, all of this becomes very labor intensive. Could it put some more money in artists pockets? Yep.
But, uh, and we have there's clients that, you know, to say, hey, we want to put 10% into dynamic or platinum. Platinum being maybe a little nicer because it's a set price. Then you can really look at a seating map and say, these are X price, and it's going to go down from here. For these reasons, some fans have money and want to be in the front row. And we would like to super serve their needs as well. Right.
For me, I'm not a dynamic pricing guy. Knew that. Is there ever a reality where we go back to, um, prior to the internet era and we have fans lined up to buy physical tickets? I don't I mean, I think the beauty of technology is that we don't have to do that. I mean, I loved that. I thought that was a beautiful part of being a fan and, you know, waiting in line and doing the thing. I, you know, I love that, but it seems it seems antiquated and like you'd have to create, you know, entirely, you know, new new systems and put, put, you know, put like we had in warehouse records where the guy was behind the counter.
And I think Maggie Rogers tried that last year. There are a few examples of that working. And I mean. You. Get to really community. Standing in line buying those tickets, you know, knowing you're all in line for Aerosmith like, that was a thing.
It was great. Yeah. The other part of that, though, is it would open you up to not really being able to track what's going on, if there's any, you know, bad practices going on with the tickets. And now everybody's got an inkjet printer in their house that they didn't necessarily have in 1995. So.
Right. But I do like the idea of making the scalpers wait in line if they're going to, if they're going to get the if they're going to get the benefit of reselling the ticket, at least make them stand with all my fans and, you know, like so I mean, it would be fun to do like on a, you know, a one off on a tour. But for the scalpers tour. Yeah. Come wait in line. You know, they'll just hire somebody to do it for them.
But but something, something adjacent to that too is also and and what we did for Andrew's underplay for Jack's Mannequin at Venice West is we we all tickets had to be picked up at the box office day of show and with your ID, so that's just kind of one of the tools that we've used to kind of also try and combat. For the small special shows or even, you know, club and theater tours. There are some things we can do. I mean, yeah, the Venezuela's 250 tickets, it went on sale that day. You really had to be that person.
But I mean, we've seen situations where, you know, someone will buy four tickets, even if that person has to walk in the door with them, they'll walk in. Three people kill one because the vig on the other three still makes it profitable. Um, and listen, if the the the scalper who does that, kudos. But you know. When that came up, I was like, you know what if that if you're that committed like, and you're going to walk people in the door, that's some concierge service right there. You know what I mean? Like, like and I think again, like, there's going to be some level of this no matter what.
I don't think that we are under any false notion that we're going to be able to eradicate this, this concept. I just think it's about the fact that it's becoming a large percentage of tickets to every in demand show. I mean, could we be talking as much as 30 or 40% of the tickets in a house are actually being resold? That, to me is like, that's where it's like we have a real problem that needs to a solution. Yeah.
There's legislation against predatory lending. This is the same thing. It's predatory ticketing. Yeah. This is a good question from the audience. Um.
Oh, but it just disappeared. Uh, but I thought it was good. How do you price the tickets at the level that you want? How do you survey your fans and figure out what's affordable? What's realistic? I mean, look, we have years and years of history in markets. So we know generally what what the ticket price. You know, the window of pricing is that that works for my fan base.
Um, and then it's sort of a process of reverse engineering. You know, if we're playing larger theaters, well, am I going to take a semi out instead of having a trailer behind a bus? Are they going to do we have to take two buses? How big is the crew. So you kind of look at it from a holistic here's the production that's going out, here's the salaries.
And then you have to sort of look at okay, well what venues do we need to play at. What ticket prices to make it possible to support the tour, to pay the huge amount of staff that that we have on the road with us, and to come home and take care of my family and pay my mortgage and all those things. So it's sort of like a you do it from a budgeting standpoint, backwards. But the goal is always for us is yes, we want to take home some good money, but the goal is not to stretch so far and so hard that we don't feel like it's a fair price for the fans.
Yeah. Do you think the amount of money that fans have to spend on tickets or on your tickets is being impacted by the higher and higher prices they're paying to go to other shows? 100%, yeah. I mean, if I was talking to my barber about this and she said I spent X number of dollars on on a certain arena show and, you know, it was an $800 for this ticket and it was in the nosebleeds. And she said, so I won't be able to go to this next show that I want to go to, you know. And so it's absolutely what's happening. And some of the bigger stadium tours and in demand tours, that is the equivalent of a family vacation.
Right. And so they're or they're traveling for it, which is awesome in theory. But yeah, it takes money. There's only so much people are going to spend on tickets.
Like like Aubrey said, you know, she would rather someone come ten times to the 930 club instead of once for ten times the price. Right. Um, another one from the audience. Um, what are ways to appeal to other artists in order to get them to join this journey to protect fans? I think conversations like this, you know, I think I've tried to be outspoken on social media. I talk about these things with other acts that tour with us. Um, I think that, you know, look, there's a there's a part of me that wants to just go like rah rah and start calling, calling people on the phone and trying to put together a coalition of artists that say, this is our mission.
And and together we'll be stronger. And I think there's there's room for that conversation to grow out of this last couple years of, of of working on it. But I think that's the I think that would be the, the best way forward to try and turn the tide.
Yeah. Have you ever thought about lottery systems for discounted tickets for those who can't afford the standard price? I like that idea. I haven't I can't say that we've we've kicked that around. But I do think that there's, there's something great about that. I would also probably say if we do that, we'd have to make that a non-transferable ticket because, you know, the first people that are going to get in that frequent lottery are going to be the scalpers. Um, but but I do like that idea a lot.
Whoever who who put it up there, raise your hand. That's a that's a great idea. We'll, we'll we'll put. That a little bit of a. Slippery slope though, to say, you know, what can I afford. Who are the people that qualify for this lottery? Right.
So it's a slippery slope. And then you get in the same situation where someone's paid 40 bucks and another pays 100. Right. And so that's a slippery slope.
Yeah. Um, another question from the crowd. With all the misconceptions out there about ticketing generally. Who's responsible for educating fans in the general public? I mean, obviously you are doing your best to do the education, but and manage that. But who do you think should be responsible? I mean, I think I think we're the only I mean, it's whoever's going to just step up and do it. So I think I think it, it does fall on the artist, honestly.
You know, and I think the more of these, the more of this that goes on, the more we're going to have to speak out about it. Um, but I don't know if we if we don't do it, I don't know who else will, because it certainly doesn't seem like, you know, our our lawmakers really truthfully care about the consumer of of concert tickets. You know, and I think it is incumbent upon us in this industry to, to to speak out. Yeah.
Um, what control does the artist have over which ticketing platform you use? Is that does that depend on the venue you want to play or are there? Do you get to. Primarily event the venue contracts with the ticketing system, so it's usually via the venue. But you know, when you're putting your routing together, you can say, I want to play, you know, mostly Ticketmaster rooms or access rooms or what have you. You know, that can be a conversation, but obviously it's limited, you know.
Right. As a fan, how can we show or pressure artists into taking action against scalpers? How can fans get involved? I think, you know, by going online and going into into the comments and social media, if you if you're finding that you can't get tickets for a show anywhere but in the secondary market, I think, you know, respectfully reaching out to the artists and their managers and saying like, you know, can you, can. You. Work on a solution? Yeah, I. Think the key is respectfully right.
I mean, like, you know, management teams and particularly artists are reading a lot of these comments. And so for a comment to be particularly negative about how an artist handled a ticketing situation is not the solution. Right. But going into a comment section and say, hey, I saw this other tour, do this, would you consider doing it that way? That would be a way to foster a positive change. Yeah. Secondary ticketing is fueled by scarcity and generally demand exceeding supply.
So why not just play bigger rooms and accommodate more fans? Well, I think that is a little bit of a misconception, I think. Honestly, a lot of the secondary ticketing there, there are many shows that wouldn't even sell out that have a huge percentage of their tickets on the secondary market. It's not about scarcity.
What the secondary market is, is doing is going in and buying up tickets and then using search engine optimization to make it appear that there is scarcity and trick people into paying more for tickets. Yes, certainly there are certain shows that would sell out. We try to play the we try when we're planning a tour, to play the biggest rooms that we feel that we can fill. Sometimes, though, you you bet wrong.
So you have to be conservative. You know, we can't say, oh, I'm going to go play 7000 seats in New York when I've never played 7000 seats. You know, sometimes, even though that room in New York sold out quickly. At 5000 seats, there may really only be an extra 1000 people there. Like, we might have actually built really close to what the demand was.
Um, but the, the the short answer is I don't think it should be incumbent upon the artist to say, well, I'm only going to ever play the biggest show in every market because there's demand. And I need to like, you know, you know, I need to to thwart the secondary market. Sometimes we want to go as an artist and play in a in a 500 cap room, because it's exciting to play there. It doesn't mean that we want people to pay $1,000 for their tickets, you know, and I think to respect your fans, you should be able to give 500 people in a market a rare experience without them losing their shirt to go to go do it.
You know, I mean, that's I mean. Yeah, you also. The, you know, we're spending time looking at how the tours histories have performed.
Right. We know we sold, you know, 500, then 1000, then 1500. If all of a sudden you go to 4000 to try and keep the scalpers down, the scalpers might buy all 4000 of those tickets. And. Yes.
And then and then you're going to have a reverse problem where someone's bought the ticket for 40 bucks in advance. Someone buys it on StubHub for 15 on the day of the show, and then all of a sudden the artist and the promoter don't know how many tickets the artist is worth coming back into the market. So then you have a real problem. Right.
And so then you've got a confidence issue with the promoter. Hey, I don't know what offer to make to you guys. And so it becomes a real problem to play the inappropriate rooms. And until things change, there's no way to know if the scarcity is simulated or real. So we just don't know. Wow.
Um. Another one. Um, as a fan, I enjoy being surrounded by other fans at shows. How important is accessibility and pricing in And ensuring true fans get to attend shows.
I mean, I think it's it's the most important thing. You know, we I don't want to play a show knowing that the only people that came were people that are of a single socioeconomic class, because they're the only ones who can afford to see my music. So having fairly priced tickets and and having accessibility for people from all walks of life, like that's why we make art, is to share art with the people, you know. And, you know, if you're immediately keeping an entire group of people out of the market because it's so overpriced, then, then that's not a true fan experience.
It becomes this, you know, you know, it becomes a dangerous, I think, cultural touchstone when all of a sudden only the wealthy can afford to go see live music. Yeah. Here's an interesting one. As you rise in popularity as an artist, how do you balance your worth as an artist with being fair to fans like, is it fair to kind of increase the ticket prices a little as you become more popular? Do you do you make that calculation? I think actually we would do the opposite. It would be more about going into larger venues at similar ticket prices, rather than staying in the same size venues and raising the prices.
There are certain tours that are more expensive, you know, going out with something corporate, for instance, that's that's a five guys splitting money five ways. And we have to figure out and dudes who have to take their day jobs off, you know, like so. So that changed the calculation on that ticket a little bit. Um, but, you know, in my career, I think, you know, my, my ticket price has probably lagged, maybe like 100% behind inflation. You know, I think I think, you know, probably at the peak of something corporate, our tickets were maybe 30, $35, I think, you know, for the most part, like my tickets hover around a general price of 40 ish to $50 max.
There are certain shows or rooms or sections that will be more expensive. But yeah, we're we're I just I just how much money does a person need? Like, you know I make a good living. I'm not trying to extract every dollar from people. It's also not uncommon sometimes to get two offers from the same promoter at different ticket prices.
You know, here's how much I'll give you if you do $50 tickets. Here it is at 65, and I'm pretty sure 100% of the time when we've presented that situation to Andrew, he's chosen the lower ticket price, you know, because, yeah. I mean, I grew up going to shows paying 12 or $15 to see my favorite bands, and I do what I do now because I got to see them. Yeah. Like people don't get as a young person, don't get to go see the bands they love.
How are we going to create a a new culture of great live musicians, Right? Um, any hints or teasers on the lineup from the next holiday? For real. Cruise? Can we can we name some? I mean, you are going to anyway, so. So we have the main is going to come out starting line Michigander Annika Bennett Ivory Lane petty is coming out. Um, and then I think we have stuff there.
What's that? Let's stop there. It's going to be sick. Well, thank you guys so much. It was a great conversation. Remember to go to the venue for your tickets. Venue.
Site first. Thanks all for joining us. Thank you so much, Hannah, for hosting us.
Yeah. Appreciate you all. Thank you. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
>> Oh, yeah.
2025-04-07 22:24
