A COMMENT from a chum on social media caught my eye. He'd been intrigued by the prospect of veteran rock vocalist Paul Rodgers, more recently seen filling the shoes of Freddie Mercury alongside other members of Queen (although probably very different footwear, and certainly not the leotard), going out on the road with a band playing the music of the group with which he made his name, blues-rockers Free. However he had swiftly thought better of the idea when he saw that the best tickets for the May concert in Glasgow's Clyde Auditorium were priced at just a couple of quid short of £100.
The sum being requested for what will surely, by definition, be a fairly lo-tech production (and which does not involve the other living member of Free, drummer Simon Kirke), is pretty much the same as you will be asked to fork out for the best seats for a top-scale opera production at the Edinburgh International Festival, with a full cast and orchestra, star soloists and globally renowned conductor, director and designer. And as EIF director Fergus Linehan has said, the Festival has a responsibility, as a publicly-funded organisation, to charge those who can afford it what they are prepared to pay, so that some tickets can be made available to young people and others of more slender means.
We seem oddly complaisant these days in allowing the market to decree ticket prices. As you will have seen from our cover feature, Glasgow Comedy Festival begins this week, and prices of around £20 for appearances at the King’s Theatre or Clyde Auditorium by folk off the telly are the norm – for shows that will usually be one person on stage for little more than an hour (“a full show” in comedy circuit parlance). This seems rather a lot to me, but presumably it is simply “what the market will stand”. Some comedians have, of course, taken a stand over the extras charged by big theatre chains in the form of booking fees and refuse to play those venues, but gone are the days when Thatcher-baiting “alternative” comics would make much-reduced tickets available for “the unwaged”.
A colleague on The Herald newsdesk is watching closely what happens regarding the much sought-after tickets for the BBC 6Music weekend in Glasgow later this month, for which tickets to see big names in intimate spaces are changing hands at inflated prices. He has been told that those with re-sold tickets will not be admitted, but if the BBC really has a way to confound that black market, we can only hope that it will share the knowledge swiftly with other promoters.
I am acutely aware ¬– before readers rush to email or Twitter – of being in a position of privilege as someone who sees a great many more performances in the course of his working life than he ever pays for, but the evidence is that others think about these things as much as I do. The last time I wrote about it here, in the context of the ticket price for a rare Scottish appearance by Tom Waits, a reader sent me a scanned copy of his ticket from the 1980s concert by the same chap at the same venue which we had both attended. It had cost less than I spend on my lunchtime sandwich.
Issues of quality or taste, or event scarcity, are immaterial here. The simple truth is that as long as people are prepared to pay way over the odds to ticket touts, or just at the box office, obvious inequities in “value for money” in the arts will persist. The solution is in the hands of the consumer, which is the point my chum thought it worthwhile to share.
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