The problem with San Francisco Opera ticket prices

The problem with San Francisco Opera ticket prices
perfectprice.io

Not exactly. I mean yeah, I sometimes pay them, but I simply go out far less because of them. So choose wisely if you're going to go that route!

They talked about how it's more complex then resellers charging mark-ups to meet market demand. Often, venues have either social pressure or pressure from artists to keep prices low. The idea is that if the venue sells Katy Perry tickets at market price (say $2000/each), her fans are going to be upset with not only the venue but also her, so her management will make sure that doesn't happen.

However, simply lowering ticket prices means losing out on tons of money for both the venue and artist. One solution that is used is: the venue offloads large chunks of their ticket pool to ticket resellers (ticketmaster/stubhub) under the condition that they split a % of the markup with the venue and artist. The reseller absorbs the social blame for 'egregious' ticket prices, the venue/artist keep more of the profits than if they had kept prices below market price.

So let's untangle these two sentences near the end of this essay.

1. I believe that the San Francisco Opera should raise its prices to match - or exceed - what this ticket scalper site is asking. 2. But lower ticket prices will usually result in more butts in seats.

The entire post is written from the perspective that the Opera should be making the absolute highest amount of money per ticket sale possible. But at the end of the post, the author very casually mentions that this is going to probably mean a lot fewer butts in seats watching opera. And then completely ignores it, going on to suggest ways the SFO could learn from TicketMiddleManThatHopesYouDon'tThinkVeryHard.Com.

I have not been to the San Francisco Opera; I do not know how much it's focused on the bottom line. But I would bet money that, if offered the choice between getting about twice as much per seat, and getting more viewers, the SFO would probably choose the latter. Because arts organizations don't just exist to make money; they exist to spread their art. You have to pay enough attention to the bottom line to be able to pay everyone involved enough to keep doing it, but it should never be an organization's only concern.

The author of this post also offers us no statistics on how many tickets to the SFO are actually bought though the scalper site that's selling them for about twice what they cost versus ones sold directly by the Opera. The fact that someone built a robot that automatically scrapes a ton of venues and offers their tickets at 200% markups, and did some SEO tricks to make it pop up higher than the actual site for people who don't block ads, doesn't mean they're automatically capturing the money of everyone who types "san francisco opera tickets" into Google. Without evidence of that, I seriously doubt his thesis that this is money the SFO is leaving on the table.

I am also pretty amazed by the fact that the closing paragraphs suggesting "dynamic pricing" and noting that it can be very complex to do don't casually link to any of the services provided by the company whose blog this is on, because they seem to be trying to do just that.

tl;dr:

1. the existence of a bot that offers San Francisco Opera tickets at a crazy markup doesn't mean enough people actually buy through it to be worth chasing,

2. raising prices to match this bot probably runs counter to the part of an opera house focused of Getting More People Interested In Watching Opera Instead Of Playing Video Games Or Whatever.

3. geeze dude you write an essay this long that's a stealth ad for your company and you can't even slip a link into the concluding paragraph?

But there's an arbitrage from reselling, so clearly retail prices can be raised without hurting attendance significantly?