In 2023, the Cure announced their first North American tour in a long while, and they did their best to keep ticket prices affordable. When Robert Smith saw the Ticketmaster service fees that were tacked on to most of those tickets, he said that he was "sickened," and he got Ticketmaster to agree to partial refunds on those "unduly high" fees. These days, Smith is a reliably crusader against the strategies that companies like Ticketmaster use to inflate prices, and he's made a believer out of his fellow legend Neil Young.
When the Cure's Ticketmaster fiasco went down in 2023, Neil Young responded to that band's story with a post on his Neil Young Archives site, writing that "concert touring is broken." At the time, Young hadn't yet returned to playing live in the wake of COVID. Since then, Young has been back on the road, and his ticket prices have been quite high. Young and his new band Chrome Hearts have a world tour coming up, and Young has now taken inspiration from the Cure and pledged to discontinue the use of inflated "platinum" tickets "very soon."
Last year, Robert Smith described Ticketmaster's tactics as a "scam" in an interview with the Sunday Times: "If you had the self-belief that you’re still going to be here in a year’s time, you’d want the show to be great so people come back. You don’t want to charge as much as the market will let you. If people save on the tickets, they buy beer or merch. There is goodwill, they will come back next time. It is a self-fulfilling good vibe and I don’t understand why more people don’t do it."
In a post on his Neil Young Archives website, Young links to a Consequence Of Sound story about that Times interview. Young asks his fans to read the COS post, and he writes this:
It's the story of the bad thing that has happened to concerts world-wide. It's this story that really helped me to realize that I have a choice to make and can make a difference for my music loving friends. My management and agent have always tried to cover my back on the road, getting me the best deals they could.
They have tried to protect me and my fans from the scalpers who buy the best tickets and resell them at huge increases for their own profits.
Ticketmaster's High priced Platinum tickets were introduced to the areas where scalpers were buying the most tickets for resale. The money went to me. That did not feel right.
VERY SOON, PLATINUM Tickets will no longer be available for my shows.
I have decided to let the people work this out. Buy aggressively when the tickets come out or tickets will cost a lot more in a secondary market.....
Try to read this following story about Robert Smith "The Cure', and what they did. I think it was right.
Neil Young and Chrome Hearts officially kick off their world tour in Sweden this June, though Young has plans to play a free concert in Ukraine first.
