Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello has described dynamic pricing as an “awful idea” after discussing ticket prices for the band’s recent reunion tour.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, guitarist Morello asked to talk about ticketing for last year’s tour, which eventually saw the UK and European leg cancelled due to an injury to frontman Zack de la Rocha.
Morello said: “I think by this point, I think everybody is familiar with the awful idea of dynamic ticket pricing. There was that big uproar with Springsteen and this one and that one. Just to reiterate, every ticket for the show was $125 (£101/€115) with the exception of about five to 10% of tickets, which we did the dynamic ticket prices with, and gave away every cent.
“Every penny over $125 went to charities in those cities. In New York City, we raised over a million dollars for activist organisation charities. There was a total of about six or seven million raised on that tour in what was basically a Robin Hood tactic. I wanted to say those things out loud since there was a lot of misinformation in the world about those two things.”
The Bruce Springsteen instance Morello referred to saw fans voice their anger over inflated prices in July last year. Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing model saw mid-floor tickets reportedly go on sale for between $4,000 and $5,000.
Following the incident, Ticketmaster said that Platinum (Ticketmaster’s dynamically priced tickets) tickets only accounted for 11.2% of overall tickets sold.
In February this year, the Springsteen and E Street Band fanzine Backstreets announced it was closing after 43 years, naming ticket prices as one of the reasons for its demise.