A swift way to perform to empty seats
Published 8:30 am Saturday, November 26, 2022
A simple new rule has been established in the business world that also serves as a stark warning. Do not mess with the Swifties!
To be clear, the Switties are not a collective of thrift store shoppers elbowing other consumers out of the way for bargain basement deals in your favorite store.
No, Swifties are a hard core collective of teens, twenty-somethings and their moms who are intensely devoted to the songs, musings and other shenanigans of pop music superstar, Taylor Swift.
As event ticket sales company Ticketmaster recently learned, the Swifties are not to be crossed nor underestimated.
Taylor Swift recently announced the dates and venues of her next concert tour coming in 2023. Ticketmaster handled the sales of all Swift concert tickets and sent emails to Swift fans, among others, alerting them to pre-sale opportunities to buy tickets before the rest of humanity had its chance to buy. What a great opportunity for the Swifties to get in on her shows before scalpers and second party ticket exchange sites bought as many tickets as possible and raised the ticket price beyond original sales prices.
And, that’s where things got a little complicated and a lot more frustrating for the Swifties.
Ticketmaster, as a service to you, the ticket buyer, has created a method of selling tickets it calls dynamic pricing. Under dynamic pricing, Ticketmaster adjusts the price of tickets in real time based on the demand for the tickets. And, as you can guess, demand for Taylor Swift concert tickets is unmeasurable from the Swifties.
The problem hit when the demand was so intense (no surprise since Taylor Swift hasn’t had a concert tour since before the pandemic) that tickets prices to a Taylor Swift soared to heights as high as $5,000 a ticket.
No, that’s not a typo, $5,000 for a single ticket to the concert.
Now, it should be noted, not all tickets for Taylor Swift went for or are currently selling for $5,000. Just the best tickets are going for that price. And Ticketmaster would tell you it was only during the first rush of ticket buys did tickets reach that height. As I look today at ticket prices for Taylor Swift’s show in Houston on April 23, the ticket prices range from $446 for seats furthest from the stage to just over $4,600 on the concert floor. Tickets behind the stage are selling for an average of more than $600 a ticket.
To be fair to Taylor Swift, she isn’t the first artist this year to see their tickets soar to the $5,000 per ticket price. Bruce Springsteen fans were also victims of dynamic pricing that saw tickets to see The Boss reach $5,000.
Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen are certainly unusual in their immense popularity. I bought concert tickets on Day One for Ed Sheeran and ended up paying just over $200 total for my wife and I. So, Swift and Springsteen are certainly the exceptions, but P!nk is set to announce a concert tour coming up soon, too. You can bet a good number of her tickets will also be in the four figure range.
(Confession Time. The last time P!nk had a concert tour, I paid more than $800 so my wife and daughter could see her in concert. Seeing their reactions to the tickets (my daughter ugly-cried over it) and listening about their experience there made it worth it for me. So, the value is always in the mind of the buyer.
So how is it ticket prices can reach such heights that an overwhelming majority of an artist’s fans can’t possibly afford to go? On that point, you and all the Swifty fans can blame Congress.
In 2010, Ticketmaster merged with the concert venue company Live Nation which was running a majority of event venues throughout the country. Federal regulators gave some tepid resistance to the merger of the #1 ticket seller merging with the #1 event venue company, but consumer protection be damned, it passed through without much of a fight from those elected to protect us from such monopolies.
This is part of a still ongoing and troubling trend of Congress in neglecting its duty when it comes to fostering competition across industries. Congress is allowing these mergers to take place giving, in some cases, single companies the approval to dictate almost all aspects of the marketplace to the detriment of consumers.
You can squawk all you want about inflation, I get it, but when there are fewer and fewer companies across a great number of industries, prices such as those for concert tickets are going to skyrocket without much of anything anyone can do about it. There is formal inflation, we’re going through it now, but there is also a secondary inflation continually taking place in the U.S. that these mergers bring on.
Going back to the Swifties, they have taken their anger and channeled it into action and raised quite the ruckus at Congress. The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights has announced its plans to hold a hearing on Ticketmaster (although it has not set a date, hmmm) and the Justice Department is also known to be on the case in a separate investigation of the ticket sales giant according to Forbes.
So where does this leave the Swifties with Taylor Swift’s tour ready to roll next year? Probably paying through the nose at each stop on the tour. Maybe over time the ticket prices will start to come down, but I wouldn’t count on it.
Most likely, those who can stomach the costs will pay the price and Taylor Swift will perform to a number of empty seats as did Garth Brooks when I went to his final concert of his U.S. tour in Houston.
For Garth’s show, I paid $100 a ticket for four of us and it was worth it. However, without Swift and significant action from Congress, price gouging shows are sure to go on.
MICHAEL D. MESSERLY is the Publisher of The Daily Iberian and Acadiana Lifestyle