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Comment by aetherson | Hacker News Reader

I think the point is, you start at the maximum price you think any significant number of people will pay. If that's $4000, it's $4000.

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If you want your marketing signaling to be "this artist is for rich people, normal people have no chance to see them anyways", sure. Many probably don't want to do that - indeed the strength of the lottery system is that it does signal the opposite.

No, they would also advertise the descending nature of it, so if they book a big enough venue, there won't be that much demand at $4000 to sell it out. So the price will descend down to more affordable levels.

Of course if the biggest venue isn't big enough to do that, then that's more of a problem of the local facilities, or the artist's decision to play in an area with inadequately sized venues.

I don't think "avoid playing in places without mega-venues, because otherwise our self-choosen pricing policy will make us look bad" is a particularly clever approach. (not to mention that doing so will drive up the price for events in places with such mega-venues)

People accept the logic that smaller facilities = more restricted capacity = higher prices in pretty much every other context.

A Ferrari dealership has to turn away the vast majority of folks who want to test drive their cars, a B&B, or boutique hotel has to turn away customers, or price rooms very highly, on a busy weekend, etc.

They are still very popular regardless.

You can of course have a hybrid — where say 75% of the tickets are lottery, the rest are insanely high priced.

This already basically exists, with things like VIP / "meet and greet"

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