Are bands just greedy these days?

[Bustop20]

Presale for take that today. People bought the album in the belief they could get tickets this morning using the special code, many found the ticket site crashed or couldn’t cope with demand.

The tickets from the presale this morning are already being advertised in places online for three times their face value.

It’s the same story for every major band

Are bands like Take That just greedy and using the idea of a presale to boost album sales?

AIBU to wonder why we can’t ban the resale of concert tickets? Instead, introduce the concept of taking out insurance incase you miss the gig? You can’t resell your aeroplane tickets nor your train tickets, why can you sell on your concert tickets?! Obviously this wouldn’t work in the favour of big ticket resellers online or the bands getting extra publicity and album sales from fans going to any length to get tickets but it make sense to me.

You don't have mandatory photo ID in the UK so how would you do that.

There should be no way to resell tickets unless it is via the venue, at the cover price. If people would stop buying from touts it would be a start.

It really falls to the government to stop this chaos. But for some reason they won’t. It’s a shame all round

its not even the massive rip off, but the fact many tickets are sold multiple times. So only the first person scanned into the venue gets to use it. It’s fraud and it then falls to the venue to explain to upset people that they have been scammed.

Oh average only been id checked at 1 gig despite many claiming they would. It meant 1.5hr queue to get in, so you can see why it isn't enforced at many big gigs,

Oh average = I have

most venues scan tickets these days anyway, they don’t even read the text it’s all a barcode

Yep. Lots of PP calling for laws to be put in place, but why should the government ban people from freely buying and selling goods to each other at a mutually agreed price? It's not an essential like food or shelter.

I met a couple at BSB who paid £175 each, mine for the same seats was £55!
I just won't pay anything silly.

In the US ticketmaster have ‘dynamic pricing’ where the ticket prices are hiked up as demand is raised and they can drop prices when demand eases. So you might have seats right next to each other where one person has paid 4x what the other has.

http://fanfairalliance.org/faqs/

this is a helpful explainer.

Instead of blaming ‘greedy bands’ I’d suggest people lobby their MP for change

I have a limit that i won't go over - i got flippin' close to it for Springsteen but i was prepared to give even him a miss.

I do a mix of "big" gigs (this year, Springsteen, Muse, Peter Gabriel) and smaller ones. And a whole lot of pub rock bands and tribute bands (seeing a U2 one soon, which is great: all the U2 none of the Bono)

I thought gig tickets were now higher because the revenue streams for musicians had changed since streaming. Caveat I’m not that clued up, just repeating how someone explained it to me!

Because it causes a lot of problems and too many of the people doing it are unethically scamming consumers.

Yes that is absolutely the case for why ticket prices are higher.

less record sales = less record label funding for touring available (for smaller acts)

For larger acts it’s more about the cost of touring and staging the kind of shows you need to put on. Plus their lack of income from record sales.

but the prices when sold on the secondary market, the band doesn’t see any of that. Not one penny.

Yes indeed. I'm over huge gigs.
Local bands, local musicians etc.
That's how I got to see U2 with 2000 others etc. Back in the day of course.

Blame the places that sell the tickets. They're who set the prices.

Also not true. The promoters and the artist set the prices

And still causes issues because those tickets could still have been sold elsewhere and then you have to disappoint customers...

Trust me, as someone who works in live venues, we HATE reselling sites.

Yes, Take That are definitely trying to boost their album sales by offering a presale code for concert tickets. Not sure I'd say it was 'greedy', particularly - they're entitled to try and make as a good a living as possible from releasing music and it's up to their fans to decide whether to spend the money or not. Personally, I find that kind of thing really corporate and cringe, and I have no interest in the kind of bands that do that type of thing - but it's exactly what I'd expect from a band like Take That which is effectively more of a brand than a band and has always been very corporate and business-focused.

Resale of tickets is an entirely separate issue and has nothing to do with bands - they don't benefit in any way from tickets being resold. They don't make money on resales. I suspect most bands would much rather their tickets weren't resold.

I'm not sure how it would be possible to ban resales entirely, because of course a lot of people do have a genuine reason for needing to resell tickets (eg they can't go to the gig because of illness or travel issues or whatever). But it would be good to see some measures put in place to stop people buying tickets in bulk - although I suspect there are already measures in place that the touts are able to get around by using lots of different people to buy from different sources, maybe?

Every venue has to be licensed to hold events, as has been exemplified by the tragic deaths at Brixton Academy.

I am sure that the method of ticket sales to reduce touting could be a condition of the venue licence.

As for websites crashing, given how long in advance such gigs go on sale, you could have a ballot, as happens with the Vienna New Year's Day concerts or cricket test matches at Lords.

But you maybe missed the point we made earlier. Venues and artists want to ban touting. They continue to lobby the government to do so, but the government won’t make it illegal.

so the authorities who issue the licences, don’t care.

Nope
Venues Make precious little from the ticket sales. They add on their booking fee and venue fee and what not to make some. Ever think drinks at a venue are expensive? That's what they make their money on

And only on their allocation of course :)

It's not greedy, it's just how the market works. If enough people are willing to pay high prices for tickets, the tickets are worth those prices by definition. And in this day and age there's bugger all money in album sales (because of streaming) so it's natural that musicians are more inclined to milk their tours as much as possible.

Touts are dodgy but out of a band's control.

Howard Donald does.

It's not just the bands, but also the hotel costs associated with going to rock concerts or other major events. A bog standard Premier Inn or Travelodge used to be like £50 in a convenient city location during a big event. Post-covid times, 2021, so covid probably isn't relevant. Fast forward to now and the same rooms for the same big events are asking for £200 or just shy of £200 per night. Are the bands and the hotels in it together to empty our bank accounts? I know we don't HAVE to go to these concerts, but it's the principle. We went to these concerts a few years ago, but we're now being made not go to, not out of choice.