PreferredSeat.com Blog

Live Nation is introducing a new way to price concert tickets called “dynamic pricing” and it’s already in place in some venues. The idea is to raise or lower the price of tickets depending on the demand for tickets for the event. Live Nation and Ticketmaster say it is a way to take the money from the secondary market to the promoters and artists but it is really a way to maximise profits by jacking up the price of tickets for hot selling concerts.

Sure, Live Nation may drop the price of the slow selling shows, but that’s only to compete with ticket brokers who routinely sell tickets below face value for already overpriced concerts. They also plan to raise the prices of tickets if fans are buying them up too quickly.

What this really means is there will be no real face value for tickets. Some fans will pay more for the same seats and they may be buying them only minutes apart. It also gives the promoters incentive to pull seats to see how the market is going, then release them later at a higher price.

In the long run the fans will be paying much more for a good seat and in some cases less for a lousy seat. It changes the dynamics of going to a concert completely. Those with money will be sitting up front, those without a lot of money will sit in the back. But at least the artist and the promoter will get their fair share.

Concert ticket buyers have known for years that Ticketmaster has lost touch or were never in touch with their customer’s concerns and that is no more evident then when Live Nation CEO Irving Azoff proudly touted Ticketmaster’s 180 million name database. Azoff brought in up in defense of the competition from Outbox Technology which looks to put the ticketing back with the venue and out of Ticketmaster’s hands.

And Azoff couldn’t be more wrong. Instead of millions of satisfied customers Ticketmaster has fans looking to buy directly from the venue and avoid the middle man. As long as Ticketmaster has been a monopoly they have not cared what the customer thought or what they went through to get a ticket as long as they made their service charges.

And it’s too late now. They still make it impossible for the average fan to get a good ticket with all the pre-sales and lousy seats that seem to be sold first. This has forced fans looking for the best concert tickets to turn to ticket brokers if for no other reason than because it is easier than trying to get them from Ticketmaster.

So the fans are looking forward to Ticketmaster having competition and Live Nation better start working on the cost of tickets and service fees before they count on their database of customers.

Twitter is now the stage for Irving Azoff, the “Executive Chairman of Live Nation Entertainment and Chairman and CEO of the Front Line Management Group, the world’s largest music management firm” to show he is not all serious and that he has a funny side to him.

After all, his very first tweet was to slam his customers, every one of them for stealing music  “so if you want ticket prices to go down stop stealing music”.

Never mind that there are only a small percentage of music fans stealing music, mostly youngsters. And for his acts such as The Eagles, very few are stealing the music that has been out for decades. Have you heard a recent Eagles song you wanted to steal? Yet Azoff holds this as the reason he has jacked up the prices of all concert tickets, including the Eagles.

But back to the comedy because his tweets must be a joke. The head of a company trying to get your business just wouldn’t come out and call his customers crooks unless he was trying to be funny, right? But this isn’t the first time he has called his customers crooks .

Irving goes on to explain that touring is the only way artists can pay their bills these days as he tweets again to Perez Hilton  ”_not blaming. Justpointing out that it’s theonly way an artist can pay their bills anymore”

 Well why don’t the artists downgrade their livestyles like most of their fans have had to? Don’t theygive a damn about their fans? Cut down to just a couple of mansions instead of 4 or 5 maybe?

Azoff goes on to Tweet about Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks “ what a class act. need people like him in the music business” . This is after Mark Cuban just jacked up the Nolan Ryan group by jumping into the bidding for the Texas Rangers and jacking up the price by $100 million before backing out. Now the Texas Rangers fans will have to pay for Cuban’s bidding when the ticket prices go up to pay the bill.

Does the music industry need an NBA owner like Mark Cuban? After his attempts to build an NBA winner by throwing money at top players and never getting far in the playoffs? Azoff admires Mark Cuban for his ability to make money for shareholders, not for runnning a buisness for the fans. These guys are great examples of corporate America today that can be summed up in one word.

Greed!