Venues have gotten much more sophisticated in the last seven or eight years at creating and selling “premium” tickets and ticket packages. I was reading recently about the Seattle Mariners’ successful program to do this recently, and it made me give this issue some thought. As I’ve said many times on this issue, I’m for it. Provided you don’t punish people for not buying premium and you legitimately deliver a ‘premium’ value, this should be a sustainable and positive way...

Read More

You should know, I like selling tickets. I like seeing the venues of Goldstar’s partners packed to the rafters and their bank balances go up. I also like seeing a room full (as opposed to a room half full) of people having a great time at a live event. That’s just how I am. So I’m on record a bunch of times in support of things like premium pricing, even so-called “VIP” packages. As a rule, when a fan wants...

Read More

Years ago, I declared that food had become entertainment, but at that point it was still pretty crude. The occasional appearance by a celebrity chef, or a class on how to roll sushi, that kind of thing. We’re way past that now, and if you’re in the business of either producing or selling live entertainment, you need to pay attention to this. The All-Star Chef Classic is a weekend of events being held in Los Angeles in March that, despite being...

Read More

A few days ago, Ticketmaster announced that it’s working with a company called Experience to allow people to upgrade their seats shortly before or even during an event. Also, this app will allow you to buy certain kinds of things (one of the examples the press release gives is “having a mascot visit a seat at a ball game”) that normally you would either have had to buy as some kind of VIP package, or wouldn’t be able to...

Read More