Q. What is the price to pay for the best seat in the house to the hottest theatre show on Earth?
A. $849.
Excuse me? Is that a typo? $849!
That is no typo, ladies and gentlemen. Rather, that is the price to pay for one of the best 200 seats in the house for the musical Hamilton on Broadway. A definition is now needed:
Demand–based pricing, also known as customer-based pricing, is any pricing method that uses consumer demand – based on perceived value – as the central element
In theory, demand-based pricing is meant to be the result of considerable analysis, arriving at the highest acceptable price the consumer is prepared to pay based on demand. This type of pricing is now common among many events in our sporting and cultural lives, with different ticket prices existing at different times. But in reality, demand-based pricing can also mean how much can we actually get away with considering we could almost charge what we want, as the demand is so high?
And so it is … the producers of Hamilton have just announced that they will nearly double the current price of the best 200 seats in the orchestra each performance, raising them from $475 a ticket to $849. I’m not quite sure the trade-off of doubling the $10 lottery seats to 46 per performance is quite going to cut it, though?
When you’re not only the biggest show in town for your art form, but also the only venue with the show, you can certainly ask a lot. We’ve seen it with everyone from Michael Jackson concerts to The Three Tenors in years gone by. But in the case of Hamilton, you also have a record-setting 16 Tony Award nominations in your back pocket and are a slam dunk for winning Best Musical this Sunday.
Of course, you don’t have to pay the $849 ticket price to see Hamilton on Broadway if you don’t want to. Over a thousand seats per performance at the Richard Rodgers Theatre are set between $139 and $177. Much more reasonable, methinks. Many would argue ticket scalpers are selling Hamilton seats at higher than $849, anyway.
So next time I pay $150 to get one of the best seats in the house for the hottest show in town here in Melbourne, I’m going to put my credit card back in my pocket … and smile 🙂
