Every concert isn't a sell out? Spec Tickets can go bust?
194: June 30 2023
Hey y’all!
I’m off to Miami for the next few weeks so let me know if you are in Magic City and want to grab coffee or a drink.
Don’t miss out on my pricing session on July 15th!
To the Tickets!
I. Not all concerts are going to sell out these days?!
Mention me in your piece, you get a shoutout! I joke…or, do I?
Tim makes many astute observations about the success of the live events industry to come back from the COVID lockdowns.
I’ve been to more stuff than I would normally have been before COVID and, especially, since I had my health scare.
What’s going on here?
The toxic cocktail at the heart of the live entertainment industry:
One part oversupply mixed with some bad marketing, a touch of apathy about the customer, and a bin full of non-existent strategy in many cases.
The reality is that I spend a lot of time walking my partners through a look at the competitive landscape. The number of alternatives that people have is overwhelming.
Take a walk in the area around your building and most of the time you’ll see 100+ alternatives.
If you are a destination, that’s an obstacle because the alternative is not fighting traffic or transport to get to you.
Everything begins with the customer.
Another point:
Tim highlights some of the programs that are meant to stimulate demand that aren’t “discounts”.
Discounts and these price promotions don’t drive demand. At best, they pull demand forward. Again, look at the alternatives.
PS: I typically try to avoid averages, especially in a situation like this because the average ticket price is a stupid number to measure because I can have a premium price ticket that’s $300 and a seat upstairs that’s $20. The average ticket price is $160.
It means nothing.
II. Spec tickets for Taylor Swift get more coverage:
As I was writing this up, the story got an update with the family of 6 getting tickets in Ohio to see the show.
Spec tickets get a lot of coverage.
Why?
Because when a sale goes bust, it usually gets covered and the wand of “this is the secondary market” gets waved.
Why does this happen?
A few reasons:
Not everyone can own tickets, but there is a bit of industry knowledge in being able to understand the market data to understand when there is more inventory available on the secondary market than the prices will justify.
Some shows don’t sell well and a broker can list tickets in hopes that someone will buy the tickets and they can go right to the BO or the primary site and flip the ticket to the buyer on the secondary. (The secondary platform’s SEO and ad buying game is really strong.)
Brokers love to gamble! And, spec is a bit like gambling.
What’s the problem?
If an order goes bust, customers get coverage. This hurts everyone involved. Research has pointed to the current reality that customers don’t see primary and secondary, they see a ticket.
Customers get a bad experience and like we’ve seen above, the competition and alternatives are great.
It undermines trust in the experience. Which can make people do something else.
This is also why I talk with people about understanding their distribution decisions and being conscious of them.
The Cure has shown that you can definitely do that if you want to. But it is often hard work.
You’ll probably hear more about this topic in Nashville at the World Ticket Conference.
III. Tammi Gaw looks at the failure of the NCAA’s business model:
This is a really in-depth Twitter thread. It deserves a blog post or a feature length article of its very own.
The big idea: The business model that the NCAA has put together is a bust.
Is it?
Depends on where you sit.
For a lot of schools, I think that the way that things are going isn’t going to work much longer.
If you are Alabama, you are probably cool.
Why does this matter?
Tammi looks at a lot of the issues at the heart of these situations like the TV money driving a bubble in coaching salaries, AD salaries, and spending on facilities.
Where the money hasn’t been going?
Staffing below a certain level like coordinator levels in a lot of places.
Athletic department staffing. I know a lot of folks that are 10-15 years into their career making not nearly enough money for the work they do and eating crap sandwiches at the same time.
Until recently, the athletes.
This means it matters because we are seeing a reckoning happen around exploration in the economy and business models that don’t make a lot of sense.
More:
Tammi highlights the lack of investment in athletes at the grassroots level. This means that sports can be like a lot of other things in America: a crapshoot, only available to folks rich enough to pay, and the opposite of a meritocracy.
We also see mention of the quality of the product declining. This anecdotal thing is that I don’t know that I watched more than a half of Alabama football last season. It just wasn’t as much fun to watch the game.
Finally, the lack of funding, administration, and health care in the US harms the overall quality of sports. Tammi talks about declining international success…I like gold medals. I want to win a World Cup!
It is bigger than this:
No matter where you are in the world, this is a structural issue I’m discussing. What does success look like?
If you don’t introduce people to the arts, music, sports, theatre, etc. early, it becomes more difficult to get them to appreciate these things later.
We really need to think about how arts/sports/theatre is funded in the world because these things enhance our communities and our cultures. We are aided by more diversity in these experiences…so let’s get on with it.
IV. Savannah Bananas steal from Hollywood…because it works:
Approaching your on-sale like a summer blockbuster works!
Banana Ball Wins:
Jesse Cole was one of the first guests on the podcast back in 2018.
Jesse is a reader, a note-taker, and an idea generator. So seeing the Bananas develop a launch plan that has been so successful isn’t surprising.
Corey Leff writes about the plan being from the pages of Oversubscribed. Still, it actually strikes me as something we are all a lot more familiar with: the Hollywood blockbuster movie launch.
What’s this mean?
You give yourself a runway to launch. I did one with a nonprofit I am on the board of this year where we discussed 90 days.
You map out the stages of the launch—themes, actions, must-hit dates, etc.
Execute.
In the example set by the Bananas, you see 900%+.
Which may seem crazy to y’all. But in one year, I increased ticket sales on an account of 1800%+ and the non-profit’s launch grew signups by 40%+.
Why?
The theory of compressed attention. You don’t try to win people over forever, you just squeeze as much attention into a short period of time as possible. Then, like a bowl that has its lid pressed shut in the microwave…the pressure builds and pops at launch.
V. Links
“As an industry, we are afraid of change…”
Zoe could be talking about any industry, not just advertising.
Robert Smith has drawn lines in the sand all year long about ticket prices, fees, and more.
The t-shirts were $25 and the line was never shorter than 25 people at any point from the time I got into the show until the middle of the second encore.
Touts threaten ticket buyers in Brazil for…Taylor Swift:
Things hit differently in Brazil.
This isn’t the first time that the Brazilian government has had a big issue with the secondary market. I’ve heard some pretty good stories over the years.
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