A couple of weeks ago, we had fun with a story about $3,500 Van Morrison tickets at Jimmy’s Jazz & Blues Club in Portsmouth.
Here’s the other extreme: $25 all-in tickets for prime seating to see The National and two other indie rock bands at BankNH Pavilion in Gilford.
If my two brothers and I had waited until the day of the Sept. 11 show to pull the trigger, we could have scored those tickets for about 10 bucks a piece.
Even in the era of Ticketmaster’s much maligned “dynamic pricing,” supply and demand works both ways.
The average ticket price for Van Morrison’s Oct. 12 and 13 shows at Jimmy’s was $300, but a handful of seats were priced at $2,000 or more per the club’s deal with Morrison, according to Jimmy’s booking manager, Suzanne Bresette. Securing the Irish singer was a major coup for the club, which only holds 312 people.
By contrast, the 19-date tour featuring The National, The War on Drugs and Lucious that kicked off at the 9,000-seat venue in Gilford was booked to stop two days later at Xfinity Center in Mansfield, Mass., with a capacity of nearly 20,000.
Combined, that’s nearly 30,000 seats in the Greater Boston market, which drove down prices so low that lawn seats in Gilford were marked at “$0” before fees on StubHub as the show was about to begin.
That’s how I was able to convince my brothers to check out three bands they had never heard before I sent them some Spotify playlists. (For the uninitiated, all three of these acts blend melodic, artful rock music with intelligent lyrics, and for the latter two, killer lead guitar.)
The original Ticketmaster price for our ninth-row tickets plus fees was about $125 each. We paid a total of $125 for three tickets plus VIP parking. Not a bad score for an incredible night of music.
The crowd in the general admission standing-room only section at BankNH Pavillion was light for opening act Lucious but would be packed by the time headliner The National took the stage. (Mike Cote/NHBR)
And that ninth row ended up being the first row of seats: Several rows were removed for the evening to make way for the general admission “pit.”
My sons in Denver and Washington, D.C., both tour stops in the weeks ahead, might be a tad jealous; they paid full price for their tickets.
Young music fans are savvy to these shifts in pricing. Based on the sea of unsold tickets on Ticketmaster the week of the show, I expected a much smaller crowd than we witnessed once the second band hit the stage. The standingroom only section was tightly packed, and while there were visible rows of empty seats, the lower section filled up some. Pretty safe bet a lot of fans waited until the last minute to buy tickets.
However much they paid, they got a lot for their money: four hours of music and some rock ‘n’ roll theatrics. Check out the photo included below of The National singer Matt Berninger leaving the stage to mix with the crowd.
This was shot before Berninger started climbing over seats and people, all this while still tethered to a ridiculously long microphone cord. Crazy antics for a 53-year-old rock star who dresses for shows like he’s about to attend a business meeting.
Tupelo hits 20, no plans to go ‘dynamic’
Tupelo Music Hall in Derry celebrated its 20th anniversary Sept. 11. The independently owned music venue, while a for-profit business, shares a common practice with nonprofit theaters:
It handles its own ticketing rather than using Ticketmaster.
Matt Berninger, lead singer of The National, mixes with fans at BankNH Pavilion in Gilford, all while tethered to an overlong microphone chord that stretched out from the stage. (Mike Cote/NHBR)
In one of his regular email newsletters to patrons, owner Scott Hayward said Tupelo has promoted more than 3,500 rock and comedy shows at its current home, which has a capacity of nearly 700. (Tupelo debuted as a much smaller venue in neighboring Londonderry.)
Hayward also took aim at dynamic pricing, alluding to reports of crazy prices and ticketing chaos related to the upcoming Oasis reunion tour.
“This is also referred to as ‘surge demand’ and ‘variable pricing.’ The concept is for the venue to announce a new show and then, if the demand for the show is really strong, the ticketing algorithm continually raises the prices until the fans cry ‘uncle!’,” Hayward said.
A few artists requested Tupelo use such pricing, said Hayward, who would not name names, but he has continued to resist it.
“Please know that we will NEVER announce a show and then penalize you for showing support by jacking up the ticket price during the ticket purchase process,” he said. “This practice, in my opinion, is extremely unethical and amounts to nothing more than a bait-and-switch tactic. We can fight it because Tupelo Music Hall is an independent venue, and we decide how tickets are sold, not some giant corporation.”
Amen to that.
