If you’re not careful about the way you evaluate the price at which you need to sell tickets in order to break even, you could be setting yourself up for some big losses.Here’s how a "break-even" price gets established a lot of the time: somebody, somewhere takes the total cost of delivering a show and divides it by the number of tickets they believe, based on experience, intuition data or whatever, they will likely sell.For example, the total costs...

Read More

Here are the top 10 Broadway shows last week, ranked by Revenue Per Seat, and with grosses to the right:Revenue Per Seat reflects the efficiency of a show’s marketing and the strength of its appeal, where Gross Sales reflects the effectiveness of the show as a money-making entity. Both are important to understand.

Read More

The 2013-2014 Broadway season has just ended and the numbers are looking great. Broadway.com is reporting that shows grossed $1.27 billion during the period and total attendances reached 12.21 million. The reason for the more than 11 percent increase in grosses? A combination of more running weeks (the previous season was impacted by Hurricane Sandy), big shows like Aladdin and Les Miserables and big stars like Daniel Craig, Neil Patrick Harris and Denzel Washington.For the rest of the good...

Read More

Disneyland’s increase to its prices and its reduction of the availability of passes for locals got a lot of attention last week.While most of the attention was of the "greedy bastards!" variety, I was thinking about the move from my own, strange perspective. First, since I think quite a lot about pricing tickets to things, I looked at it from that perspective, and second, since I really despise the crowds at theme parks, I looked at it from that...

Read More

Terence McFarland, his team, and volunteers did a great job with LA Stage Day on Saturday.I had a group of eight or 10 very enthusiastic listeners for my discussion of pricing. It was late in the day and there was math involved, so given that, the energy was great. I talked about Revenue Per Seat and the potential dangers in managing by Average Ticket Price. We also had time to open the discussion up to any and all questions...

Read More

The price of a ticket is much more than just the amount of money they give you to be allowed in the venue.I don’t just mean parking or the babysitter or the other legitimate hard costs that might come with a trip to see an event, though those are very real too.Recently, we talked about realizing that we are, as an industry, on the wrong side of the Convenience Gap compared to other forms of live entertainment, and I...

Read More

Do you have one of those friends who can’t resist correcting people on the proper use of “who” versus “whom”?  Perhaps you don’t because you are that person. Regardless, you’re all welcome here.Personally, I let the who/whom thing go because I’ve never misunderstood anything said to me because of it.Other frequently mistaken words though aren’t as harmless. They have the potential to get you all mixed up, crazy, and worse still, losing out on money from ticket sales.So we’re...

Read More

Each week we're sharing a few stories we found interesting and worth a read. And now, in case you missed them ...Goldstar CEO Jim McCarthy illustrates how live entertainment is on the wrong side of the convenience gap -- and how that doesn't have to be a bad thing.Over on Top Rank Blog, Lee Odden got some of the top marketing professionals around to share their marketing predictions for 2015.We had a chat with the incredibly talented and successful...

Read More

Let’s start answering that question by asking a different one.How much does it cost to make a sandwich?Let’s say that you buy bread, condiments, meat and cheese for about $2 and each time you turn on your sandwich press, it costs you $.50. Ignoring labor costs for a moment, it costs you $2.50 to make a sandwich. If you sell it for $6, you’ll probably end up with a profit after you pay for everything else a business needs...

Read More

It’s simple, really. Build a good email list for your venue/show/organization and send them discounts to your own show.If you want to Turbo-devalue your tickets, always follow the same or a similar cadence in how you do this. I know of a major organization (that I’m not even going to name or say the genre but trust me when I say that everyone who will ever possibly read this is familiar with them) that at one point had a...

Read More