I won’t give specific examples today, but I see many concert promoters offering 50% off tickets to their email audience (or sometimes, brazenly, on social media as well) quite close to the show date. Most of the tickets have full prices around $25 to $40.
How can this be a good idea? I would guess that these promoters are panicking about these particular shows and suddenly become willing to give up tons of margin just to fill seats. But it seems like the opposite of what you’d want to do to encourage more pre-sales: early-bird pricing. This phenomenon is more like late-bird pricing and is equivalent to a big arena show that doesn’t sell out and sees secondary sales at rock-bottom prices.
