Dynamic Pricing

Ticket-sales company Ticketmaster might be adopting a dynamic pricing structure in the future, according to reports from CEO Sean Moriarty’s keynote address at SXSW. The address came on the heels of several years of challenges to the once-dominant ticketing service, culminating in concert-promoter LiveNation’s decision to end its deal with Ticketmaster and offer its own ticketing service.

Ticket-sales company Ticketmaster might be adopting a dynamic pricing structure in the future, according to reports from CEO Sean Moriarty’s keynote address at SXSW. The address came on the heels of several years of challenges to the once-dominant ticketing service, culminating in concert-promoter LiveNation’s decision to end its deal with Ticketmaster and offer its own ticketing service.

The proliferation of online re-sale services, which often use automated software to buy up hundreds of event tickets to then sell at multi-tiered (read: higher) prices, has set the course for industry-wide dynamic pricing, Moriarty said. In an effort to compete with, and hopefully neutralize, these re-sellers, Moriarty proposed a system where the price of your ticket might continually change from its on-sale date right up until the event.

“It’s going to take another five years to get very fluid dynamic pricing applied to wide swaths of inventory,” Moriarty told the crowd at SXSW. “The technology is there … I don’t think there’s any downside. The perceived risk would be that with greater transparency—if people look at a show and a show appears to be a dog—it reflects poorly potentially on the artist, potentially on the promoter, potentially on the venue.

“Ultimately, when you look at what a ticket is—a license to sit in a specific seat at a specific time—and recognizing how much the value may fluctuate, it lends itself to a marketplace approach.”

It remains to be seen how or when the changes will take place, or how they will affect the once-cooperative, now-competitive relationship between Ticketmaster and LiveNation.