Are Ticket-Pricing Policies a Threat to the Arts?

I am greatly saddened by the recent trend among arts companies of using the promise of a better seating location as a lever to extract “donations” from subscribers (“Asked to Go Above and Beyond,” by Chris Pasles, June 11). This idea is typical of the shortsighted, self-defeating thinking common among marketing executives.

Let’s be honest: The so-called donations are simply a disguised method of introducing more multitiered pricing. It has long been the case that some seats in entertainment venues are more expensive than others, based on the desirability of the seat. However, practical problems have led to “block” pricing of sections, when the promoter would undoubtedly prefer to place a different price on each seat. The forced-donation idea is nothing more than a solution to these practical difficulties.

Although many would welcome this innovation as a move toward free-market pricing of subscriptions, I fear that the particular approach will instead result in serious harm being done to the future of the arts.

The first difficulty is that the price of a particular seat becomes unknown, which is a violation of one of the conditions necessary for a free market. How much should one “donate” to get into the front row? $100? $1,000? It is impossible to know, and even after the fact, the purchaser will be unable to learn whether a lesser amount would have sufficed.

A second difficulty lies in the effects of turning arts subscriptions into auctions. Instead of pricing seats based on costs, they will be sold for whatever the traffic will bear. The likely result will be an increase in the true price paid by most subscribers, which will eventually produce a further increase in production costs when stars demand a cut (as has happened in sports). Small companies and less wealthy audiences will be priced out of the market, which in the long term will harm us all.

The Los Angeles Opera has spent years trying to counteract the popular notion that opera is only for the rich. Now we find that although opera is supposedly for everyone, you won’t actually be able to see Tosca jump from the parapet unless you plop down several thousand extra dollars beyond the official cost of your subscription.

A third difficulty with the approach is that it unintentionally discriminates against one of the most important parts of the support base: volunteers. At the Los Angeles Opera, volunteers meet singers at the airport, host parties, feed the chorus during rehearsals, run the gift shop at intermission, give talks to schools and potential subscribers, raise money and perform a host of other tasks that are indispensable to the success of the company. When ticket-renewal time comes, however, those crucial activities fall by the wayside. Rather than taking an unpaid day to build future audiences by visiting a high school, I would be better off devoting that day’s pay to a self-interested “donation”--even though the volunteer work will do more for the company’s bottom line in the long run.

The final and greatest problem with insisting on donations for better seating is that it alienates the subscriber base. Every year, when I stretch my budget to renew my subscriptions to the symphony and opera, I ponder the place on the form where they attempt to blackmail me into paying even more, and my resentment of this tactic grows. Can arts companies really afford to spend the next 20 years building a base of angry subscribers?