Robert Smith on Keeping Tickets Affordable: ‘I’m Not Letting This Go’

Robert Smith opened up about the notorious stance he took against predatory ticketing practices for the Cure‘s North America Tour last year, recalling his goals to keep tickets cheap as well as his viral Twitter threads calling out the ticketing business from Ticketmaster to scalpers to other artists.

“It was one of those moments I thought, ‘No, I’m not letting this go,’” Smith told the New York Times in an interview on Friday. “And so I didn’t.”

Smith’s strategy remains the gold standard for how artists can keep concert tickets affordable. He used a fan-to-fan ticketing exchange to make it harder for brokers and scalpers to sell tickets at huge markups on the resale market, and he refused to use dynamic pricing models that artists like Bruce Springsteen and Oasis employed to increase ticket prices, calling it a scam driven by greed.

“But most artists hide behind management,” Smith said earlier this month. ‘Oh, we didn’t know,’ they say. They all know. If they say they do not, they’re either fucking stupid or lying.”

Speaking with the Times Friday, he said that industry contacts of the band had advised the Cure against pricing seats the way they did, where all venues had some tickets for as low as $25. (The shows ended up being the band’s most successful ever, according to Billboard.) He also said he felt some in the business weren’t taking him seriously, which inspired him to get more vocal online.

“I was spoken to in a certain way by a certain individual. And something in me was like, what? You know, it’s like a ‘Run along, Sonny’ kind of moment,” Smith said. “And it just gradually escalated until I was thinking, ‘No, I’m not backing down. This resolves how I want it to resolve.’ In my weird view of the world, I thought because we were doing the shows, and we were who we were, that we had the upper hand.”

Smith’s ticketing battle went far beyond Live Nation and Ticketmaster — which itself faces a DOJ lawsuit seeking to break up the company — also highlighting inaction from other artists about their ticketing strategies as well as problems with ticket scalpers. Smith acknowledged the inherent disappointment many fans would experience as there simply were more fans than seats at a venue.

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Still, the on-sale left fans angered at the company once again. Soon after tickets went on sale, fans criticized Ticketmaster’s fees, which in some cases were more expensive than the tickets themselves. Smith wrote at the time that he was “sickened” by the fees and asked Ticketmaster to justify how that happened, and by the next day, the company gave out partial refunds.

In a statement to the Times, Ticketmaster said the Cure’s shows were atypical given how much cheaper they were than usual events of their size but added that the shows inspired the company to more closely analyze fees on those cheaper seats.

“To the Cure’s credit, their ticket price was so much lower than typical that even the smallest fees set by venues didn’t make sense. We stepped in to help fans by refunding fees,” Ticketmaster said. “And since then, we’ve actively monitored fees on lower priced tickets. When flags go off, some venues reduce fees, some leave them as is, and in some cases Ticketmaster has stepped in to cover a portion of the fees.”

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Of that decision, Smith said “their decision was made because it looked good.” “It was optics,” he said. “In the grand scheme of things, it’s like peanuts.”

If there’s something Smith seems to want more of from other artists in the ticketing world, it’s to actually step up on their own as well. “People are terrified of upsetting Live Nation and Ticketmaster,” Smith said. “It’s really bizarre, actually, because the power of the artist, it’s the ultimate power.”