Are bands who give pre-sales to paid fan club members = Sellouts?

Cafe Society
1

It seems the new thing these days to charge fans $30 to $100 for a year-long membership to a band’s fan club in order to gain presale opportunities for the band.

Aren’t concert tickets expensive enough already?

Now I find that Chickenfoot (Joe Satriani, Chad Smith, Michael Anthony, and Sammy Hagar!) is doing the same thing. Many bands I would love to see do it.

I paid $121 (with Ticketmaster charges and all) for my U2 ticket, but could have paid $100 more and gotten in the pre-sale opportunity, which might have made my U2 ticket a bit better. Or might not. How do you know?

2

Since people are stealing their music online, I have no problem with artists trying to make up the difference by other means. Plus, reserving the best tickets for actual fans rather than resellers is a good thing, IMHO.

But if you think that shelling out this much money to see commercial artists is unreasonable, there are likely dozens of talented and interesting acts you could see in your town for literally a fraction of the cost.

3

As long as they are setting aside decent tickets for stuff like that, I agree that I’d rather the tickets go to fans than to scalpers. It’s stuff like this that annoys me more. It’s bad enough when you get scalpers in the mix, but when the artists themselves get into the game it gets even harder to get decent tickets without shelling out hundreds of dollars. Oh well, I guess if someone is willing to pay it…

4

I don’t think much of it as a way to make money - as indicated in the OP, you pay a bunch and aren’t guaranteed much - but I’ve lost track of what selling out means, and concert tickets are a luxury item.

5

An Arky - interesting point, but what if I pay for all of my music? I download it all legally from Amazon.com or buy CDs. So other people rip off music, so I should have to pay more to see the band in concert? I’m also the guy who buys concert t-shirts, band posters, etc. I also post concert reviews for the bands, convince other friends to buy the band’s albums and go to the shows, etc. I’m a huge band supporter.

I agree that the bands are being hurt by other people, but not by me, so why should I have to pay more?

interface2x If it’s just a way to make sure fans get tickets, that’s great. But what’s to stop scalpers from paying $100 for a fan membership, buying 4 tickets with the membership, the marking up each ticket an extra $25 when they resell those to the fans later? That just hurts the fan more, and puts more money in the band’s pocket. At the expense of the fan, not the ticket broker. So resold tickets just cost more.

Marley23 - you got the point about not being promised much. All you get is a presale “opportunity.” What happens if I shell out $100 to be a fan of U2, and you don’t. Then I buy tickets during the presale, and you get them when they regularly go on sale. Let’s pretend our tickets are equivalent at the venue - what have I gained? If my only goal was to upgrade my ticket opportunity, as eluded to in the many e-mails they sent me, I may have gained nothing, and just given the band $100 of my money.

When I said I spent $120 on my U2 tickets … those aren’t the most expensive ones. They were the $95 tickets, plus Ticketmaster charges. There were $55 and also $250 tickets. With Ticketma$ter charges, I assume the $250 tickets would run about $300.

Then there’s this auction you could get in to on ticket day for even better seats. You bid on tickets that (as per the seat location) is the “place to see and be seen at the U2 concert.” There’s two levels of these tickets, one of which gets you back stage 2 hours before the show for a 5 star catered buffet, open bar, and stage tour. Then you get your bonus location.

Wonder what THOSE will run, and how many are being resold by scalpers??

6

Yeah. It’s a sucker’s bet, in my opinion, but I guess you get a guarantee you’ll get any ticket at all, which is not necessarily the case otherwise.

7

It’s not fair to you or I or others that don’t do that, but that’s how they’re making up the revenue, along with merchandising/soundtracks/commercials/game music, etc. At least the ones who actually need the money; the ones who don’t, well, they might just be greedy.

8

A pre-sale is not a guarantee. I got to 3-5 concerts a month (my main luxury in life, I still live in an apartment) and pre-sales can sell out in moments, too.

9

They could always be like Nine Inch Nails (who does this for free, but bands could follow their lead):

Link.

Of course, most bands don’t do this, but hopefully it will become more common in the near future.

10

Everyone who is paid, from a famous rock band to the guy who makes the burgers in a McDonalds, is a sellout. :slight_smile:

That is my gut reaction to the vast majority of sellout arguments. I’m by no means a libertarian, but when it comes to small unnecessary luxury goods like concert tickets I feel they can sell to whomever they please, at whatever price they want, as long as they are honest about what they are selling.

11

I’m not sure what specifically was advertised as a benefit for joining the fan club, but as long as they provide what they advertised I do not see any issue. If one of the benefits is “guaranteed availability” then you have gained something: the other guy risked not being able to get a ticket, you bore no such risk. If his gamble paid off and he managed to get a ticket anyway that should be irrelevant to you. If the reason you signed up was the “guaranteed availability” you have been given what you signed up for.

12

A lot of them phrase it as a “pre-sale opportunity.” That’s what was exactly listed in the e-mail I got from Joe Satriani last night - it even explicitly says that it does not guarantee a ticket purchase, just an opportunity to participate in the presale.

I’m glad it’s explicitly spelled out from him, but in many cases it’s not. There’s a lot of fine print to read through when you’re buying something like this.

Here’s the explicit text from U2:

(Bolding theirs)

It is $50 to join U2.com as a paid subscriber. You do get a CD with some music, but I’d just download that for free from the Internet anyhow.*

*Just kidding. I not only own every U2 album on CD, but all of the singles, too.

13

Thanks so much for posting that.

I’m not into his music, but my respect for Trent Reznor just increased an order of magnitude. I love this sort of thing. Not only is it better for fans, it’s better for the artists. Having been on stage (as a sound man, not a performer) I can assure you that the performers usually can’t see beyond the first three rows. And if those first three rows are nothing by rich kids, coke dealers, guys spending a huge amount of money to impress young girls and record company executives the artist doesn’t have a decent audience to react to. In the Madonna movie “Truth or Dare” (I know, bear with me) she came off stage in LA absolutely livid, ranting and screaming “The whole front row was nothing but fucking industry!”

Metallica used to do the same thing. There was a “pit”, and you could buy a ticket, but come the day of the show you’d have to pass a quiz administered by a person who worked for the band to actually get in the pit. This gave them a pit filled with their most devoted fans.

The Grateful Dead used an even better system to enable the Deadheads to follow a tour. They would buy every single ticket for every show on the tour from the promoter. Then they’d assemble the tickets into books and sell them to the Deadheads. It took an insane amount of money and a band that knew that every single show on their tour would be a sell-out. My friend Mardi, who used to be the CFO for Capital Tickets, the ticket agency in Kansas City before they were bought by Ticketbastard, loved working with the Dead organization and said they were the most professional and effective group she had ever known.