Saturday, November 10, 2012
Get me away from Get Me In!
The Stage: There comes a point in every jukebox musical where the audience is encouraged to their feet, sometimes sooner rather than later, to dance, sway or sing along with the music. It always strikes me as not only as a deeply fraudulent way to guarantee a standing ovation, but a cheap device, too: the audience are effectively paying good money to entertain themselves.
And nowadays, with a majority of theatre tickets being sold online, too, audiences are often paying a big service charge for doing exactly the same thing: making the transaction themselves. Of course, there’s a back office cost of supporting the online infrastructure, but it’s surely nothing like the inflated transaction and handling fees that are added to the top of the ticket price. It is, literally, a licence to print money.
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4 comments:
Even though I work as a box office assistant, the charging of exorbitant fees is one of the things that really drives me nuts. There are a lot of costs that are associated with getting your ticket to you - the server and website running the sale, the secure ordering process (likely the license for the box office/Customer Relationship Management software, a charge for transfer of credit card information to the CC company, the physical ticket stock and machinery to print it, the envelopes and postage, and, of course, the lovely box office employees and manager). However, I believe some of these (the ticket stock and machinery and delivery method, for instance) should be inherent in the purchase of a ticket. With these large ticket companies, the inflated "Convenience Fee" can amount to as much as 25% of the ticket face price, and that's insane. It's all going to the middleman and angering patrons.
On the Get Me In side of this article, it's really hard to discourage the resale market unless the ticket prints with your name on it. Where the problem is is that the artists are losing out on that extra money that may have been collected for premium tickets. I have two solutions: (1) use dynamic ticketing strategies, which will price higher at the start of sales and will steadily adjust to whatever the market will bear, and (2) if you're going to directly run resales on a site you own, charge a percentage fee on the upsell that goes back to the artists (and really, the goverment should ask to take tax on that sale). I think it would be really hard to stop the resale market in full, but you can mitigate its effects.
This is disgusting. Ive always kind of wondered why the prices for tickets on websites like that are so expensive. I had assumed there was a reason though, not just ticketing companies suck. I can't even imagine someone getting away with selling a ticket to the Rolling Stones for 20,000 dollars (the 15,400 euros). That is insane! If it was comign from the band that would be a little mroe reasonable, but in this case the artist and whoever else they artist pays is only making 2.5% of the profit. Meanwhile the ticket company gets the other 97.5. The ticketing company who as the article says does absolutely nothing. There has to be a better way. I see the convenience of having all the tickets on only a few sites but cmon, Im sure that the ridiculousness of the situation would make it worth it for theaters and musicians to have tickets on their own websites.
This has always been something that's angered me--both a ticketing company's ability to charge me huge "convenience fees" and "printing fees" and the deregulation of ticket resale websites. Yes, I understand supply and demand. I took economics freshman year. But it's discouraging that the demand for high profile events causes ticket brokers to receive a high paycheck instead of the artists themselves. In both of these situations, people who do barely anything are the ones getting a large chunk of money from this. It's a little bit insulting to those who have worked so hard to put a production up.
Well, One has to agree that all the extra ticket charges are rediculous to say the least! I think it definitely discourages certain people from buying them at all. You would think if enough people just stopped buying them then the sellers would go down, but unfortunately there are enough people out there with plenty of money that don't care about the extra fees and so they will usually still sell. It's kind of a do it yourself world now with online ticket sales. Part of me likes that I can do it myself, at my leisure, but I guess I am paying for that too!
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