Fans still reeling over the ticket prices announced for The Police’s Australian tour have one more reason to be disgruntled. The band has elected to auction selected seats in the first five rows of the Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.
The practice of auctioning premium seats is new for Australia, but has been around in the United States since 2003. Tickets typically sell at an average of 74% higher than their face value.
Where does the extra money go, you ask? Not to the ticket retailer, but straight to the pockets of Sting and his cohorts. Auctioned tickets from the band’s American shows had a “charity component,” but no one’s exactly sure how large that is.
Supporters of the practice say it helps to boycott scalping by allowing fans to buy tickets at their “real value.” Yet this claim is dubious, as the starting bid of these tickets is the face-value of a non-auctioned tickets. Perhaps front row tickets at The Police were never really worth $250 to begin with, after all.
I’m with the large proportion of fans who are against this idea, as it seems to reward punters with the deepest pockets rather than the deepest passion for the band.
Call me old fashioned, but I miss the “good old days,” where I’d queue overnight with other enthusiastic fans in hopes of getting that elusive front row. We’d be cold, sometimes wet, definitely hungry, hoping that a radio breakfast show would take pity on us and bring food. But we’d bond over those hours and all feel satisfied in the end that we’d earned those tickets.
On the advent of internet ticketing, it became preferable to sit there at your computer screen hitting “refresh” as you watched the minutes tick on to the sale time. The camaraderie was gone, but that familiar adrenalin rush was still there.
It’s the fans with that passion who deserve to see The Police up close and personal. Not the people who can simply afford the privilege.
If you’re so inclined, you can bid on Police tickets from July 23 until August 2 through Ticketmaster.
Image source: Lionel Urman @ Wikimedia Commons
