Europe, Eurovision, pressure-selling, ticket queues and… Candide? Robin Cantrill-Fenwick examines what goes wrong when tickets go on sale for popular events.
Helen Boddy
Before we dive in, I’m going to need to confess two obsessions up front: the first, the Eurovision Song Contest and the second, Leonard Bernstein’s operetta Candide based on Voltaire’s novel of the same name. All will become clear, I hope.
Candide brought to both page and stage the character of Dr Pangloss and his Panglossian worldview of pure optimism. “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds,” trill the good folk of Westphalia as Pangloss puts a positive spin on the existence of everything from snakes to war. It’s an earworm, I warn you.
Using the Panglossian world as a jumping off point, it seems that ticketing continues to make headlines for doing all it can to thoroughly hose down even the most optimistic among us. Nowhere is this more true than in high-demand hot-ticket, often live, music events.
High-pressure panic
Take Eurovision. This year, tickets to the Ukraine-UK final were sold by Ticketmaster UK. Being lucky enough to get to the front of the online queue quite quickly, I experienced the sort of high-pressure panic now all too familiar to fans of top name performers and shows.
The £100 - £150 tickets I had selected were not available, but instead I could buy tickets for £290 each. I had precisely 90 seconds to decide whether to accept the tickets before losing them, risking missing out altogether.
Just 90 seconds to evaluate if my budget of c.£200 for two tickets might stretch to £580 - with no time to consult my fellow fan on whether they’d be willing to stump up their half. I had visions of the phone-a-friend moment from Who Wants to be a Millionaire, with me screaming: “HAVE YOU GOT £290? IS EUROVISION WORTH £290 TO YOU? CAN I CLICK YES ON THESE TICKETS? JUST TELL ME WHAT YOU’RE THINKING… HELLO? CAN I ASK THE AUDIENCE?”
I took a gamble. If I had only 90 seconds to decide, the same must be true of other ticket purchasers. If I released the seats and kept clicking refresh, there was a chance that cheaper seats would be released. This was not explained. All Ticketmaster’s site told me was: “We couldn’t find your first choice, but we found you our next best tickets.”
Release seats. Refresh. Nothing. Sweat a bit. Refresh. Nothing. Sweat a bit more. Refresh. Cry “Bucks Fizz and Måns Zelmerlöw preserve us, what have I done!?”. Refresh. Result!
Random allocation
I’m happy to say I’m going to Eurovision at a price I’m comfortable with. But a different outcome was a real possibility. Having just 90 seconds to decide forces the buyer, under pressure, to rapidly evaluate how much they want to see a show. It is an open invitation, if not a sharp shove, to make an irrational choice.
The European Union (EU) recognises this widespread practice and has introduced the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) which, among other things, aim to crack down on dark patterns and digital pressure-selling. We ticket buyers rely on regulators to protect our interests. This is a global issue but, unfortunately, UK citizens aren’t protected by the DSA or DMA.
Candide in his story, like the Eurovision Song Contest (I may be stretching this a bit), journeys across the countries of Europe. On his way he encounters a thoroughly bitter character who inverts Pangloss’s theme, intoning: “Nothing to trust in this worst of all possible worlds. All ends in dust in this worst of all possible worlds.”
Ticketing is not quite yet the worst of all possible worlds, but it is unsettling to see some parts of the industry needlessly tilt the playing field away from practices that better serve buyers. For example, how should a high-demand sale like Eurovision be handled? In conversations I have with ticketing professionals, there is a growing view that lotteries are fairer than queues – giving the prospective purchaser a randomly allocated chance to buy.
A hybrid approach
But it doesn’t have to be a binary choice. Contrast Eurovision in 2023 with 2020, when the Dutch ticketing company Paylogic were the vendors for the Rotterdam contest. Then as now, prospective buyers joined a queue and had limited time to confirm their purchase – about five minutes I think.
The big difference was that tickets were released in three large, pre-announced waves*. With three opportunities to join the queue, there were three opportunities to be at the front when your position in the queue was allocated. This approach – queueing with an element of chance as to where you’d find yourself in the queue - hit the sweet spot for me. On that occasion, I rode the second wave to victory, though Covid later forced the closure of that year’s contest.
Back to Candide who finds himself in El Dorado, a land of unbelievable wealth where even the gravel on the ground is made of pure gold. Whether by queue or by lottery, in a high demand sale - despite the narrow margins - someone somewhere is making a lot of money. When a concert or show sells out, the financial result is largely pre-determined with the total yield landing close to the gross potential – the uptake of concessions is the only variable.
In a time-pressured environment, the queues-and-countdowns approach means that revenue may be drawn inequitably from pockets of varying depth. That is to say, some people will panic and pay more than they can comfortably afford, when they didn’t have to. There is no need for this – we can do better.
Need for regulation
In the coming years, the UK and the EU will dance a dance called ‘adequacy’, with each side assessing whether their data protection and digital regulations are on a par with the other’s? Ticket buyers can only hope that as the UK seeks to force the EU’s hand on online harms, in turn the EU pushes Westminster into some form of equivalence with the DMA and DSA.
Why the mentions of my other passion, Candide? I’m pleased to say there are no pressure sales shenanigans in sight from the Welsh National Opera who are undertaking a rare tour of Candide around Wales and England this summer. If you book now – and I heartily recommend you do – I’m optimistic you’ll have much longer than 90 seconds to choose your seats for a stunning show.
Robin Cantrill-Fenwick is Chief Executive Officer at Baker Richards.
www.baker-richards.com
@BakerRichards | @RobinComms
* The UK competition's tickets appear to have been released in one wave, with a smaller follow-up after production holds were released.
This article is one of a series of articles, case studies and industry insights looking at the power of data to inform strategic decision making.
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