This evening, in Cardiff, the British leg of Madonna’s 56-date Confessions world tour begins. The cheapest ticket for tonight’s show costs £55 — for a vertiginous, crow’s-nest vantage point, way up in what Americans call the “nosebleed” seats. When the most expensive tickets went on sale at a whopping £150, the complaints were like faint squeals compared with the howls of protest that greeted a similar price structure when Madonna last toured Britain. That’s the thing about shock. Survive the initial impact — to your reputation, if you’re Madonna; to your wallet, if you’re a fan — and you’ll ride the subsequent blows with ease.
Those blows are now landing thick and fast. The Rolling Stones’ current tour is also charging £150 for the best seats. In America, where Barbra Streisand is about to embark on her latest “farewell” tour, a “hot-seat package” in LA costs $1,800. (That should perhaps be termed “paying through the nose”.) Yet the Madonna concert I saw last month in LA lasted a value-for-money two and a half hours and was a rollercoaster ride from start to finish. The Stones usually play for at least that long; ditto the Eagles, on their recent UK dates.
Leaving aside for now the question of why these acts’ prices are so high, and who is to blame, let’s instead alight on what might be called the cultural high ground. We come, naturally, to opera. At Glyndebourne, a top ticket for Beethoven’s Fidelio will cost you £160 (the same as a premium list-price Madonna seat at Wembley). At Covent Garden, the best seats for this autumn’s Bohème will set you back £170.
Cultural snobs — that breed of silly ass who still insists that, say, the Kinks can never be a match for Schubert — will argue that any of the above is likely to be a more civilising experience than 150 minutes in a glorified aircraft hangar with Madonna. Who in their right mind would want to listen to Madge when they could enjoy a bit of Mozart and gaze out across Glyndebourne’s ha-ha, a glass of chilled champagne in their hand? Hundreds of thousands of people in Britain, is the answer. Can they all be wrong, or deluded? No, of course not. But are they being fleeced for the privilege? Yes. And here’s how — and why.
Let’s take as our case study a fictional sports arena, playing host to a fictional band of the status of, say, U2 or the Stones. The arena usually holds 25,000. Knock out 3,000 seats to make way for the band’s set, lighting and sound system. At Madonna’s Wembley price levels, that should leave 22,000 seats available to purchase on a first come, first served basis at £80-£160, right? Wrong.
Knock out a further 2,000 seats for the act’s priority-purchase fan club, and 2,000 for the band, the promoters, the venue staff and the band’s label (these reserves are known in the trade as “ticket holds” or “pulls”). As this is a sports stadium, take 2,000 more for its season-ticket holders. Last, slice off 3,000 for the tour’s sponsors, who will take along employees who work in that area, plus the corporate contacts they want to continue doing business with. An impregnable code of omerta means you will never drag out of promoters the precise percentage pull for a particular concert, but the figure of 50% is far from exceptional. So that leaves 11,000 list-price tickets available to the public, doesn’t it? Wrong again.
Into the equation now come the ticket agencies, the venues and the touts — or, as the last group are more evocatively known in the States, the scalpers. This is the secondary market, a grey area that often operates only millimetres inside the law. The print adverts for the concert fail to list the ticket prices but provide a number to phone and a website to log on to. Both stipulate a maximum number of tickets for each buyer. Or you can go along in person to the venue.
Online, you click to buy and are led at once to the website of a handling agency. The problem is, there are scarcely any tickets left. That will be because the scalpers have paid some tech-savvy students — or “pullers” — to sit at their keyboard, bypass the security system and vacuum up the tickets. And down at the venue, the 48th place you had in the overnight queue has suddenly become the 180th, as a marauding pack of low-paid “diggers”, employed by the touts, jump the queue and are first in when the doors open. If there are any list-price tickets left, some may then disappear via a trade between touts and box-office employees in exchange for a payoff, or, in US parlance, “ice”. The few remaining will be sold to the lucky survivors of the process, who will then face any number of add-ons or “facility fees”.
All of those secondary tickets purloined by pullers and diggers then go on the market at vastly inflated prices. People who pay them are derided by many commentators — and, indeed, bands — as “fake” fans. But what is fake, one wonders, about shelling out more than £400 for a £160 seat to see Madonna? Surely that makes you a die-hard.
An American professor has labelled the system “rockonomics”. Another has described the situation wherein the cash-rich are prepared to pay over the odds for a ticket, in exchange for the time they save by not having to hunt one down, as the “cost opportunity”. Either way, the tickets are bought. Some call it a return to old-fashioned bartering. Others are less sanguine.
Watching those developments as keenly as anyone are the bands themselves, already, thanks to sponsorship and economies of scale, enjoying huge profit margins. Research in the USA discovered that in 1982, the top 1% of acts snaffled 26% of concert revenue: that had leapt to 56% of revenue by 2003. Many of them are at the stage in their career (the Stones are a prime example) when album sales are negligible and concert revenue represents the biggest part of their income. Hang on, they think, all these third parties are raking it in: where’s our cut? So, first, they increase their ticket hold and auction the pull to the highest bidder. Second, they put up their prices. (What is that if not naked greed? Kylie and Robbie Williams, great entertainers both, are charging a mere £50 and £49 tops, respectively, for their coming British shows.) Third — doh! — the touts put up theirs. Fourth, consumers swallow hard, but keep paying.
Or do they? Tickets for Streisand’s American dates are rumoured to be slow movers. (Delightfully, there is also talk of disgruntled fans taking legal action because they paid a king’s ransom for her previous tour on the understanding that it would be her last.) On a quite different scale, but nonetheless for a similar, cost-based reason, poor Bob Geldof was forced to cancel his Italian dates nine days ago when only 45 fans turned up to see him at a Milan venue with a reported capacity of 12,000. Tickets were apparently deemed, at £27, too pricey. No eBay auction for him.
But those are blips. The show goes on — or, as PJ Harvey put it: “The whores hustle, and the hustlers whore” — in art forms that people persist in calling high-, middle- and lowbrow. You can, if you’re so inclined, buy a £160 ticket for Glyndebourne’s Fidelio for £425. Is that more acceptable — or, rather, less unacceptable — because it’s an opera? Surely the “cost opportunity” should knock for everyone or nobody at all?
In America, a tradition of tough regulation means such matters are endlessly looked into. In Britain, the culture secretary recently gave a closing speech at the third “ticket touting summit” she has held in eight months. Toothless Tessa muttered about regulation. Don’t watch this space. But do look out for diggers.
