The Director Sector

My day job deals in the futures market for live events.  Seeing as how I had no idea what that was before I started here, I’ll give a short description and example.

Let’s say you want to see the Chicago Bears in Super Bowl XLIV.  At our website, you buy dibs — or reservation — on face-value tickets to see the Bears at the Super Bowl.  The reservation cost for Super Bowl tickets generally starts out at 20 bucks.

You buy dibs on the Bears at the Super Bowl.  If the Bears make it, you’re only paying $20 + face value for the ticket.  How much is street value for Super Bowl tickets?  At least a thousand bucks.  If the Bears don’t make it, you’re only out $20.  The condition here is that the Bears make it to the Super Bowl.  If they make it, you get tickets.  If they don’t, you don’t get tickets.

This is genius for us, because it allows us to sell the same tickets more than once.  There are 32 teams in the NFL Playoffs.  That means for the Super Bowl, we can sell the same tickets 32 times.  We only have to pay out for the two teams that make it to the Super Bowl.  If each reservation goes for $20, and we sell 100 tickets per team, then we’ve made $60,000 per team and had to pay out $4,000 in tickets.   Make sense?

We’ve decided to branch out into other markets, including music concerts and theatre.   

So here are my questions to you guys:

1)  Would this model be interesting to you?   

I understand that most of you don’t want to take money from patrons if they’re not going to get anything in return (unless, of course, they’re donating money).  Totally understandable, and I even agree with you.  However, think about it this way:  You don’t have to guarantee all your tickets.  Just take however many tickets you usually wind up with at the end of each run and put them up.  Say you have capacity for 300 seats over the course of the run, but you usually only sell about 250 tickets.  You can put the other 50 up with our system — you probably weren’t going to sell them anyway).   This way, you’re only putting up tickets that probably wouldn’t have sold in the first place — win/win situation!  The minimum reservation fee is $5, so you’d get (5 dollars) x (number of tickets reserved) x ( possible outcomes ).  This leads to my next question.

2)  What conditions, if any, could be imposed on storefront theatre to determine who gets tickets?

There has to be a condition.  We don’t sell tickets — just reservations.  There has to be at least two possible outcomes, or else the whole model is pointless.   This is the part we’re struggling with.  For larger theatre organizations, like Broadway in Chicago and The Goodman, we can set up a “If Show X comes to town before 2012, we guarantee face value tickets”.  In fact, as far as I’m aware, we already have a set-up like that with Broadway in Chicago.  The question here is for storefront theatres.  What conditions can be established on a storefront theatre, most of whom generally focus on world or regional premieres?  How would anyone else know about those to request them?  The “If Show X comes to town” condition wouldn’t work here.  

What other conditions could there be?

As I said, I understand that some of you are opposed to this idea.  It sounds like gambling.  It kind of is, except instead of getting cash, you’re getting tickets.  However, many theatres already do this kind of thing.  Wicked, for example, would raffle tickets an hour before the show.  I think that if thought out properly, this model could generate some much needed extra cash for shows, generate publicity (through our website), and give more people an opportunity to attend our shows.

What do you guys think?