As part of its recurring “No Service Fee Wednesday” promotions, Live Nation placed the promotion offer in the hands of its music fans during a vote last week.
With a 36-hour voting window, more than 35,000 music fans reportedly voted on the promotion for this Wednesday, July 23. A winning total of 72 percent of the voters opted for the chance to buy one lawn ticket at full price (plus fees) and get one ticket absolutely free (with no fees).
The other options available during the voting process were for no service fees on any amphitheater ticket, or all-in pricing at $29.99 per ticket that included fees, a hot dog and soda.
“We spend a lot of time listening to fans,” said Michael Rapino, president and CEO of Live Nation, in a statement. “This week we decided to take it one step further and for the first time ever let the fans choose for themselves what our Wednesday ticket offer should be. Anything we can do to help make it easier and more affordable for more concert fans to get to the show, gets our vote.”
For the past seven weeks, Live Nation has been giving concert-goers various ticket buying incentives under the “No Service Fee Wednesday” banner. In a recent interview on CNBC, Rapino told host Julia Boorstin that the weekly promotions are meant as an incentive for ticket buyers as Live Nation works to fill its venues.
“Forty percent of our tickets are unsold, so our job at the end of the day is to fill the building,” Rapino noted during the broadcast. “We want every seat full when the artist gets on stage.”
He went on to explain that about 10 percent of Live Nation’s inventory has been moved through the promotion in the past four or five weeks, equaling over half a million tickets sold during the various one-day sales.
While those tickets sold at lower prices than usual, Rapino argued that they were sales that the company might not have made otherwise. “You’re selling at a lower margin, but if they’re incremental tickets, it’s new margin to us,” he told Boorstin, “so we expect about a five percent overall increase in ticket sales in incremental.”
