Neil Younger will cease promoting platinum-priced tickets for his future live shows, the musician confirmed on his web site, calling the apply “a nasty factor that has occurred to live shows worldwide.”
Younger mentioned he was impressed by The Remedy’s Robert Smith, who took an analogous stance for the band’s North America tour again in 2023, calling platinum and dynamic tickets “a grasping rip-off” that artists can select to choose out of (on the expense of a few of their ticketing income.)
‘It’s this story that actually helped me understand I’ve a option to make and might make a distinction for my music loving buddies,” Younger wrote on Friday. He defined that he used platinum tickets to counteract scalpers shopping for up tickets and gouging followers on the secondary market. With platinum, the additional cash went to him as an alternative. “Ticketmaster‘s Excessive priced platinum tickets had been launched to the areas the place scalpers had been shopping for probably the most tickets for resale. The cash went to me. That didn’t really feel proper.”
Younger has lengthy made enterprise choices on his personal beliefs, like again in 2022 when he determined to take away his music from Spotify in protest of misinformation Joe Rogan was sharing about vaccines. (He lastly introduced his music again to the platform final yr.)
Platinum and dynamically priced tickets are one in every of ticket consumers’ largest sources of frustration within the dwell music enterprise as live performance ticket costs proceed to rise. Oasis, who hit the highway for his or her much-anticipated 2025 reunion tour later this yr, obtained vital blowback from U.Okay. followers for utilizing dynamic pricing, with the band posting on X after the on-sale that “the execution of the plan failed to fulfill expectations.”
As Younger acknowledged, artists themselves have a tendency to make use of greater priced ticketing tiers as a result of they’ve seen how a lot cash scalpers could make making the most of them for pricing tickets far under their demand. As an alternative, they’d like for that extra cash to return to them and their groups immediately concerned with the tour. However within the case of The Remedy, the band additionally prohibited resale try to get extra management of the market themselves to curb scalpers. Extra artists are utilizing so-called “face worth ticket exchanges” in order that followers who bought tickets however can not attend a present can resell them to another person for a similar worth they paid.
Ending his letter to followers, Younger wrote that he has “determined to let the individuals work this out.”
“Purchase aggressively when the tickets come out,” he mentioned, “or tickets will value much more on the secondary market.”
