Photo: Adam Bettcher/Getty Images
He will now make the boys, and 99 percent of touring artists, cry. More than a year after defeating Ticketmaster’s dynamic-pricing chokehold for the Cure’s nationwide tour, Robert Smith is calling out his fellow musicians for continuing to quietly support the monopoly because, well … money. In a new interview with The Telegraph, Smith insisted that getting Ticketmaster to sway direction for the common good, like the Cure did, boils down to relentlessly kicking and screaming until you get your way for your fans. “It was easy to set ticket prices, but you need to be pig-headed,” he explained. “We didn’t allow dynamic pricing because it’s a scam that would disappear if every artist said, ‘I don’t want that!’ But most artists hide behind management. ‘Oh, we didn’t know,’ they say. They all know. If they say they do not, they’re either fucking stupid or lying. It’s just driven by greed.” Having a moral backbone, Smith notes, will pay off through other means. “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,” he says. “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.”
When the Cure announced their 2023 tour, Ticketmaster, being the greedy little bitches that they are, utilized a dynamic-pricing system — a demand-driven payment structure that surges for popular tours. (The most recent example of this malpractice is Oasis, with the U.K. government now investigating Ticketmaster for tapping the system.) Smith went on a caps-lock Twitter tirade about how Ticketmaster included mandatory “junk fees” in its prices, which resulted in the company issuing an unprecedented amount of partial refunds to ticket buyers to appease Smith. “After further conversation, Ticketmaster have agreed with us that many of the fees being charged are unduly high,” he wrote at the time. Smith also made Ticketmaster cancel about 7,000 ticket sales due to suspicions of scalping. Now that he’s shown us how to do that trick, everybody better use it.
