Imagine paying a dirt-cheap price to see an A-list artist like Olivia Rodrigo, Coldplay, or Charli XCX. Then imagine that the ticket is for a front-row seat. All three artists are making that possibility a reality.
On their latest tours, they each offered tickets for the ultra-low price of $20-25. These tickets, however, came with a catch: rather than being for specific seats or sections, the actual seats buyers wind up in are random. Ticket holders can end up in the nosebleeds where such a price normally lands. Or they can end up in the pit, along with the fans who have been saving up for years.
Ticket holders can end up in the nosebleeds, or they can end up in the pit, along with the fans who have been saving up for years.
Rodrigo brought back her $20 ‘silver star’ tickets for The Unraveled Tour, which will play shows in Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto. Charli XCX offered $25 ‘angel tickets’ for her Music, Fashion, Film, Tour, ahead of her date at Toronto's Scotiabank Arena last month. Coldplay, as well, sold ‘infinity tickets’ to their Music Of The Spheres World Tour for $20.
From a purely commercial perspective, it’s a strange approach, especially given how much revenue each artist stands to lose from selling prime seats for nosebleed prices. But it's not so unusual, at least according to Toby Benson and Jace Cohen, co-founders of Versa, a talent-buying agency representing events. They’ve curated lineups for Unity Electro Fest in Quebec, and have worked on sold-out stadium tours for Imagine Dragons in China. When they come to the table with artists, they see them prioritizing their fans.
“The artists, the managers, and to a varying degree, the agents are very attuned to what they think their audience can afford,” Benson says. “These people really know what their demographic is.” With this adept knowledge of their fanbase, artists can make educated decisions about ticket pricing.
Who really pays?
Every dollar spent around a tour is a negotiation. Agents work with promoters (which, for these high-profile artists, are almost always either AEG Presents or Live Nation) to decide upon artists' fees. The promoter pays the artist to perform, and then seeks to earn its money from ticket sales, concessions, sponsorships, and other avenues.
So, if these artists and their teams come to Live Nation and say they want to sell a certain amount of tickets for $20, it’s feasible – so long as everyone works together to find room elsewhere in the budget. To make it work, the promoter could offer the artist a lower fee or raise prices at concession stands.
Cohen hasn’t personally encountered the cheap-and-random ticket practice in his work, so he can only speculate on how many of these tickets these artists are offering per show. For Olivia Rodrigo, her tour is 100% sold out, and it’s an arena tour. So, he loosely suggests a figure of 10%, which would be around 1,500-2,000 cheap tickets per show.
That’s a lot of lucky fans – and a lot of foregone revenue. And yet, A-list artists appear happy to take the hit. In the Wall Street Journal, Live Nation’s senior vice president of global touring Jared Braverman said Coldplay are selling their ‘infinity tickets’ to “make their show more accessible and more affordable.”
“The artists, the managers, and to a varying degree, the agents are very attuned to what they think their audience can afford."
When Benson and Cohen organized Imagine Dragons’ stadium tour in China, the venues had a capacity of 45,000, more than double Scotiabank’s 15,800–19,800. When they were able to give someone better seats, it was a completely different show. “With Imagine Dragons, we saw it firsthand. The seats in the back, maybe there's an obstructed view. If there are seats open, we can upgrade somebody. They never forget that for the rest of their life,” Cohen says.
For the lucky fans that score one such ticket, the results appear truly random. According to commenters in one Reddit thread, one Rodrigo fan’s ticket landed her in the lower bowl of Toronto Scotiabank Theatre for the artist’s Guts tour. Another’s gave them a side view of the stage, along with several other Silver Star ticket holders. They were the lucky ones: commenters from different cities describe getting “nosebleeds.”
This kind of social media buzz reveals a less philanthropic side to the ticketing strategy: cheap and random tickets have marketing value. Online chatter about them can boost the artist’s profile and generate a snowball effect. Benson says that artists can employ a variety of different mechanisms to raise awareness, like flash sales and bundles. “This, to me, is another one of those,” he says. “If that helps drive ticket sales either to a sellout or above the break-even point, great.”
This comes with the caveat that even if the artists’ profile is raised by the practice, promoters could end up facing the brunt of the lower revenue. “That nebulous value is mostly gained by the artist, but the lost money is typically shouldered by the promoter. It is important to align incentives,” Benson says.
"It puts people in the sales funnel. From a promoter's perspective, anything that drives somebody to the ticketing page is a win."
Down the funnel
That equation can work out in the promoter’s favour if the promise of cheap seats drives more people to the ticketing pages. Registration for Charli XCX’s Angel tickets ran from August 10-12. Anyone who found out they missed that brief window by searching for the page ended up on her Ticketmaster tour portal. Once they were there, they may have been so eager to attend the Scotiabank show that they justified spending $273.50 – the cheapest available seat at the time of writing, and a lot more than $25.00.
“It puts people in the sales funnel. From a promoter's perspective, anything that drives somebody to the ticketing page is a win. Then it's about how you convert them,” Benson says. Lower-value tickets can operate as a loss leader, which drives awareness for the show. From there, they potentially pay for themselves through increased ticket sales, VIP upgrades, and sales of concessions, merch, and ancillaries. “There is certainly a path for it to be potentially profitable,” says Benson.
Curtain call
Even if the artist’s intent in employing cheap random tickets is purely generous, their promoter still needs to turn a profit, and the hundreds of other staff involved in the tour need to get paid. For every cheap and random ticket holder given prime seats for $20, the promoter may be counting on another fan missing the draw, catching FOMO, and draining their bank account to see the show. These tickets aren’t a solution to the expensive ticket problem. They’re a business strategy that helps a certain few fans have an unforgettable experience, while acting to entice others. More power to any fans who end up with these tickets in hand.
