From 6 to 1: The Top 10 Ticket Moments of 2024!
See you in 2025!
Hi!
The countdown continues.
To the Tickets!
Number 6: Caitlin Clark drives record attention to women’s basketball.
I don’t think it is Caitlin Clark alone.
But she is the focal point.
Without all of the women that have come before such as Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi, and Cheryl Miller, this moment wouldn’t be happening.
Caitlin Clark is lucky that she has great rivals to compete against like Angel Reese, Sabrina Ionescu, and, JuJu Watkins, on the way.
The numbers are pretty amazing:
20,711 showed up to see Caitlin Clark against the Mystics.
Almost 10M fan votes for the WNBA all-star game.
Attendance up 48%!
Also, look who was ahead of the curve here.
3 things for you to know:
Consistency matters.
Don’t make assumptions like no one likes women’s sports.
You need to be ready when your moment comes.
Number 5: Spring Football Sees Success.
The St. Louis Battlehawks set spring football records.
I’ll draw one conclusion from this: the Battlehawks did a nice job averaging over 30,000 fans two years in a row.
Other teams didn’t have the same success.
I put the Battlehawks’ success down to a willingness to test assumptions and apply lessons from the best sales and marketing businesses…period!
Number 4: Dynamic Pricing gets a lot of attention.
Dynamic pricing and pricing came up in so many places this year:
Folks called the pricing practices on the West End “licensed touting”.
Robert Smith called Ticketmaster’s pricing practices a “scam”.
The practice made it to rent, groceries, and more.
What do you need to know about dynamic pricing?
It can maximize your revenue.
It can also have negative brand implications.
Good pricing demands research.
Number 3: The government gets into the game of regulating tickets.
The Department of Justice sues Live Nation. I broke the whole thing down in the most widely read ‘Talking Tickets’ issue of 2024.
Joe Biden signed a law banning “junk fees”.
Ted Cruz talked about “spec” tickets.
What do you need to know?
Who in the world knows what the next four years of antitrust policy will look like, but the door for stronger enforcement of competition law is bipartisan.
So pay attention to the work that our government officials are doing.
Number 2: People wait later and later to buy tickets.
Since shows opened up after COVID, we’ve seen a real change in buying patterns.
Historically, you’d see a pop at on-sale, a pop a week before, and a final pop starting 72 hours out.
Now, people are comfortable waiting until right before the start time to buy.
This can cause problems.
You can’t tell what demand is.
You must discount at the last minute, reinforcing the #PaysToWait mindset.
What can you do?
Incentives. You have to change the incentives to buying early.
We will talk about incentives in 2025.
Number 1: Taylor Swift, obviously.
Here are some highlights:
$2B in tickets sold
149 shows
10M tickets sold
96,000 + in Melbourne
753,000 at 8 shows in Wembley
$1M in bonuses for her crew
What more can you say about the tour?
There have only been two tours that have broken $1B in sales: Taylor and Coldplay.
I don’t know when we will see another tour like this.
That’s the top 10.
Let me take a second to thank you for being here this year.
Hit reply and tell me what you want to learn about in 2025.
Stop by the Slack Channel and say “hey”.
Here are a few pictures from the year that sum up some of the cool experiences and things from 2024.
Until next year, take it easy!
The first picture is a really cool subway bar in NYC that I found last night.
