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Ticketmaster "drop" "convenience" charges
Ticketmaster are thinking about dropping the convenience charge by flogging tickets where the price you see is the price you pay.
Obviously, they're going to achieve this aim by making the prices knock up to absorb the fee rather than, you know, abolishing them altogether. And, Sean Moriarty seems to be suggesting it's going to make them money:
The new all-in pricing model, however, does not lower the price of a ticket - the face values of tickets throughout the popular Eagles tour are all about the same - but it does potentially open up a new revenue stream for Ticketmaster, according to Moriarty. Currently, Ticketmaster does not typically earn fees for tickets sold at a venue's box office, but with all-in pricing, there will be one standard price for a ticket "across all channels, including the box office, which will create new revenue streams for artists and Ticketmaster," he said.
I might be a little bit dense, but how does charging a price for tickets without mark-ups create "a new revenue stream"? Isn't selling tickets already a revenue stream? Unless they mean that they'll be expecting to get a kickback from the box offices that they're not seeing now... oh. Right. They are, aren't they?
"We've been advocating for some time that the industry make the fan-friendly move to no-fee or all-in pricing, eliminating add-on fees," Moriarty told a group of financial analysts and investors. "The reaction of fans has been overwhelmingly positive."
Is it really "fan-friendly" to effectively levy a hidden charge that doesn't currently exist on box office sales by wrapping it into a single fee? Or is that simply, ooh, greedy and evil?
2 comments:
So let me see if I've got this straight... At the moment, you can buy a ticket from the box office, which usually involves a trip to town (or possibly halfway across the country, depending on who you want to see) and all the fuss that comes with that. Or you can pay Ticketmaster a Convenience Fee for them to post you the ticket, saving you a trip (hence the name). However, under this new scheme, if I go to the trouble of travelling to the venue to buy the ticket, Ticketmaster will charge me for that too. I'll be paying the same Convenience Charge, even though it's me doing the work, voluntarily foregoing the convenience.
Why stop there, Moriarty? Why not charge me an extra fifty and I'll pop round and decorate your office too?
Damnit, it's not easy being angry with someone called Moriarty.
"will create new revenue streams for artists and Ticketmaster"
Besides the old "it's all about the artists" lie, where's the incentive for venues? I mean won't they get a little peeved when customers stop attending because Ticketmaster have upped the prices. What's to stop them going with another ticket distributor or oh maybe printing the tickets themselves? That being said I've never quite understood why there were extra fees, besides delivery, on top of the ticket price. I can't think of any other type of business doing that. Can you imagine going to tesco then getting charged for going for through the checkout?
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