[jwl868]

I glanced through the article when I saw it and there seems to be a “Mr. Obvious” quality to it: it seems to me that its intuitive that if you lower prices you will sell more tickets (whether you are operating at a loss or not is a separate issue).

I think that for a given show, there is a fraction of the audience that really wants to see it regardless of price and they don’t to get frozen out, so they will pay full price. Now, what happens to the rest of the tickets? There is another fraction of people who will take a chance and just purchase them on the day of the show, or just wait for a discounted ticket, like NYC’s TKTS. And there’s another potential fraction of the audience that for what ever reason (economic or otherwise) just won’t pay full price.

As someone mentioned, an empty seat isn’t making any revenue.

Any discount will help, but I think there is a threshold where it becomes meaningful to a buyer, and varies from place to place. (Also varies from person to person, but with a large population, that probably doesn’t matter and “averages out” in the end.) For example, cutting prices in half may not mean much if the price is still, say 3 times a movie ticket.


[On the other hand, I’ve seen the promoters/venue shoot themselves in the foot. When Spamalot came through here last year, there was a rush for tickets (perhaps generated by the memory of the rush for Wicked which sold out in a day). I tried to get mid-priced tickets (middle of the mezzanine), but they were not available, so we ended up getting the cheapest seats, up and off to the side of the mezzanine. When we got to the show, there was a massive block of empty seats in the middle! As far as I can tell, they held those back for package deals, group sales, etc that never materialized. Most of us moved down to them at intermission.]


Joe