Why Are Gig-Goers Not Buying Advance Tickets To Shows In Smaller Venues?

I asked my Instagram mates – all of them active fans of new music – why they didn’t buy tickets in advance for gigs in smaller venues.

The question was simple, just “Why do you not buy tickets to gigs in smaller venues in advance?” The point was to get qualitative results from a relatively small panel – it’s not large-scale quantitative research (like a survey, or a political poll), but more like a focus group.

As such, no-one should take this as gospel truth – the intent here is to spark ideas about the root causes behind people not buying advance tickets, and perhaps suggest some routes to address them. To do the job properly though, you’d want some large-scale surveys done too.

There were about 50 answers to the questions, which I paraphrased and categorised into buckets. These are the answers:

I’ll go through the categories of reasons given first and wrap it up with some implications.

Keeping Options Open

The first and largest group of responses centred around not wanting to commit to a particular show in advance, and missing out on a possible alternative, even if that possible alternative – a party, another gig – hadn’t been announced.

This is the most depressing part of the results for artists – what it’s saying is that even if there is nothing better happening they still won’t buy a ticket just in case something better is announced later. In short, your gig is less important to them than something that doesn’t exist yet.

That’s probably hard to hear, but it’s a necessary insight for all bands – as much as your music means to you, you are the only person to whom it means that much.

The good news though is that this is true – at different scales – of literally every business that is trying to sell their thing to someone else. The trick is to turn yourself to face the other direction, to think and act based on what your audience thinks of you, not how you see yourself.

“It Won’t Sell Out”

Self-explanatory, but it was the second-most common response – the assumption among a good slice of the group that a gig in a smaller venue is simply unlikely to sell out, making an advance purchase unnecessary.

Gig-goers aren’t wrong about this, either. Leaving a ticket purchase for a gig at a smaller venue until you literally arrive at the door rarely carries any negative consequence.

This points to a possible direction of travel though – if the audience cannot (and is unlikely to) be persuaded that there is a negative consequence for buying on the door, perhaps there is a way to persuade them of the positive benefits of doing so.

As an additional hurdle though, punters don’t just find it unnecessary to buy advance tickets, it’s also undesirable based on our next category.

Money Worries

This is perhaps the least surprising reason among those given, but it came as a surprise to me to see it only place as the third-most referenced reason, and not at the top.

Yes, it’s a very real barrier and, when combined with the assumption a gig won’t sell out anyway, a very powerful one. If something is both unnecessary and undesirable financially, there’s probably not much anyone’s going to be able to do to convince them otherwise.

However, I still find it interesting that this was still a relatively uncommon response, only appearing 13% of the time. It’s entirely possible – despite the financial pressures of our time – that gigs are one of those things that people find worth paying for.

Last-Minute Lookers

In the last significant section, there was interesting behaviour that surfaced, that of people either not paying attention to gigs in smaller venues until closer to the date, or the information only being available at shorter notice.

Again, this was one of the smaller buckets, but it’s potentially an interesting one – if a proportion of the gig-going audience aren’t even in the market for ticket-buying until close to the event’s date then that’s something that needs to be accounted for, not just by artists, but by promoters and venues alike.

Illness Or Disability and E-Commerce Averse

The last two buckets were very small, but worth noting. The first of these was the barrier of chronic illness or disability, which obviously makes committing to a ticket in advance a far more complex decision. Alongside this were a couple of comments from those who just didn’t like buying things (not just tickets) online.

Neither of these are things that we can do anything about, and given their relative size, it’s included here for the sake of completion.

OK, So What?

Wrapping all of that up, there are four key themes and implications that are suggested by this ersatz focus group, all of which suggest directions of travel for further investigation or testing.

Hypothesis	Potential Implications
Audiences are reluctant to commit to advance purchases, on the basis that something as-yet-unnannounced might offer a better option nearer the time.	Your show is simply not high enough on a list of audience preferences to break through. Overcoming this may require offering more value, in pricing or other ways. Similarly, expectations of how and when people buy tickets clearly needs adjusting, which may require changing the business models involved across artists, promoters, and venues.
For smaller artists, the perception that a show won’t sell out is a powerful, entrenched barrier to advance ticket purchase.	Audience perceptions are usually based on heuristics, simple mental models that inform decisions. Those heuristics need to be challenged or interrupted in order to create a new sense of urgency or scarcity to provoke earlier ticket purchases. This essentially acts as the other side of the coin to the first item above.
Financial pressures are an immediate and real worry for many of the audience – however, for those who love live music, gig tickets may be lower down on the list of items they are willing to cut back on in the face of financial stress.	This is a double-edged sword – while cost of living pressures act as a brake on advance purchase, the love the audience has for live music may go some way to mitigating this. If the first two items above are dealt, a best-case scenario might mean this brake is rendered neutral.
There will always be a section of the audience who is simply not in the market for an advance ticket until days before the show.	First of all, expectations need to be tempered to accept that a proportion of the audience at any show will only have decided to attend at short notice. Secondly however, there are potential other options involving communications to try and convince this section of the audience to buy earlier.