Your favorite artiste will be in town and you want to buy tickets for his or her concert. You try getting the tickets online, but they’re sold out. Then you are told someone is selling tickets, but at a price more than 10 times the original amount. Seems like extortion, doesn’t it? The more “polite” term for it is actually scalping, and the notoriety of scalpers has grown in leaps and bounds over the years. In response, Ticketmaster has devised a strategy to stop scalping, which they call “dynamic pricing.”
Dynamic pricing, according to Ticketmaster, simply involves fluctuating ticket prices based on demand. The new strategy does achieve its hidden goal of increasing profits for the ticket-selling giant, but what it hasn’t achieved, and possibly never will, is its openly declared goals of stopping scalping and making tickets available to fans. Many fans have lamented and criticized the outrageous amount for which tickets to some performances in the past weeks have sold. And American singer-songwriter Garth Brooks has joined in the criticism of Ticketmaster.
On the afternoon before his show in Texas, Brooks had an interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram wherein he discussed, among other things, his reservations concerning dynamic ticket pricing, failing to hide his disdain for it and its impact on the fans, who appear to be his main concern.
“That’s a tough one. Springsteen is going through it right now. We’re all watching it. Here’s the bottom line for me, and I know this is silly, but I have screamed and screamed as long as you’ve known me: just knock out scalping. That’s it. Just make it illegal. That way, the price of the ticket is the price of the ticket. The same money is going to be exchanged when scalping tickets, it’s just now who gets the money, that’s the difference. The thing I hate about it, the hardest it’s on is the fan, the one who allows you to live your dream,” Brooks said.
Brooks is trying to lessen the ticket price burden on his fans by refusing to sell tickets for the two front rows at his concerts, reserving them for his most devoted followers.
And in speaking of the fans, it turns out he has a lot of them in Ireland, which he himself doesn’t really understand. In that interview with the Star-Telegram, he admitted, “I have no idea. Because as you could imagine, I stick out like a sore thumb there. But ever since Day 1, there was a gentleman named Jim Aiken, he was the promoter over there, [and] he said you’ve got to come over. ‘Does he have the right guy,’ I was asking my manager. He said you could do multiple nights here and I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ This was 1991 or ‘92. Went over to The Point Depot [Dublin] and did nine nights there and you couldn’t start a song without them singing it back to you in your accent. I wish I knew, I have no idea.”
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