In summary, the Children's Museum of Tacoma moved to a "Pay As You Will" model a few years ago and saw BOTH attendance and revenue go up. Attendance has tripled, but, if you do the math, revenue has increased by only 50%. "Only."That's interesting enough, but let's look at it differently. In a way, it's dynamic pricing taken to the individual level. Dynamic pricing is an attempt to change a price to reflect the level of supply and demand...

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Don't punish buyers who have come to your venue on a discount ticket.The fourth way that you shouldn’t do discounting is to do it in such a way that it’s designed to punish the people buying your discount tickets. This is done by, for example, putting them in the last row of the house when other sections are available, making them wait to be seated after the "regular" patrons have been seated or otherwise creating a little reminder that...

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The name of this site is Selling Out, but the goal of Selling Out is achieving success with your marketing.So how do you measure success? You can sell out by having a great show; or you can sell out by putting a show in a house that’s way too small for the act; or you can sell out by dramatically underpricing the tickets.If there’s one thing I wish I could teach the world of live entertainment marketers about pricing,...

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When I talk about this, people look at me puzzled. A couple years ago, Michael Kaiser, smart guy and Big Chief of the Kennedy Center, wrote an article on Huffington Post that gives me a starting point for what I want you to understand about prices:“The central challenge facing arts managers is to fill the ever-widening gap between rapidly increasing expenses and earned income, primarily from ticket sales. This gap continues to grow each year since the number of seats...

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Tonight, the Boston Red Sox play the St. Louis Cardinals at Boston’s Fenway Park, and some of the people I trust to evaluate the true value of the tickets in the secondary market are suggesting that it’s getting pretty crazy. Jeff Passan at Yahoo brings it together here.Here’s the key tidbit:“By early afternoon, the average resale price for tickets sold stood at $1,024 per ticket, according to SeatGeek. Remaining ticket inventory on Internet sites was even heftier: an average...

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Don't discount at the last minute only.This one’s pretty simple. The second bad way to discount is to wait until the last minute, and then do it in a panic.Why is this a bad idea? First, you’ve narrowed your options considerably. When venues come to us the day or two before a show and say they’d like to discount, we typically can’t help them, and we’re fast! But the fact is that we, like every big website, have a...

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Don't discount to your full-price channel too much.At Goldstar, we believe strongly that when done well, discounting (not just through Goldstar) is highly beneficial for venues. I’m going to talk about several ways you should not discount and why. Here’s the first way you shouldn’t discount, and it’s a doozy.When you make your full-price buyers the primary target of your discount promotions, you’re making a big mistake. I’m not saying you should never put a discount out to your...

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Here’s a joke for you: What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?I don’t know, and I don’t care.No, really, that’s the answer. Seth Godin once said that booksellers shouldn’t be worried about piracy robbing them of riches, but instead wishing people cared enough about their products to try to pirate them.That reminded me of something I say to entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs all the time: If you work from the assumption that no one knows or cares about your product or...

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Live Nation wins a lawsuit that was, frankly, a little nutty to begin with. The plaintiff’s claim is that, as a monopolist, Live Nation charged service fees that caused him damages and, therefore, LN should be forced to have an ‘all-in’ pricing model. The judge said, rightly, that the claim of a monopoly was irrelevant, and that whether the fees are added or part of the ‘all-in’ price, the plaintiff would be paying the same and, therefore, there were...

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Both Louis C.K. and Kid Rock have gotten attention in the last year for charging much less than market value for tickets to their shows. In Kid Rock’s case, tickets are just $20 for this summer’s tour, and in both cases, shows sold out extremely quickly as a result of the pricing, and, I would add, the massive publicity about the pricing.So, are they being “generous” to their fans with these low prices, as some feel, or do they,...

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