Prospecting For Gold

 I recently read something that made me sit up and say "Oh, I never thought of it like that". It's about striking gold.

The story of gold prospectors is that all these grim and grizzly men (it's always men, in this story) go out into the hills, and some of them - the lucky ones - strike gold and get rich, and no one much cares what happens to the others. And this would be an accurate reflection of the economics of the situation - if it was just a case of one man going and looking and finding or not. 

But gold is rare. And because it's rare, it's expensive. It's expensive because it takes a lot of effort to find it; that expense reflects the total cost of the labour that goes into finding the gold which includes all the effort that's put in by people who go looking for gold and don't find any. Looking for gold and not finding it is part of the process of elimination by which the gold is found; no one expects come home with a nugget as big as a hen's egg the first time they go out. 

If, by the end of the gold rush, every square kilometre of mountain has been claimed and prospected, and all the gold has been found, then the value of the gold is clear - it's what's refined and been weighed. But the cost of the gold is the time everyone, collectively, spent looking for it - finding it and not. After all, if an evil multinational mining corporation buys the rights to prospect the whole mountain range, and then hires people to do it, they pay all their employees a salary. You get paid to go out looking for gold, because that's then your job, and whilst you might get a bonus if you find some, you don't get nothing if you don't. 

Anyway, this kind of unpaid, unrewarded labour - looking where the gold isn't - stuck in the back of my head, working away, until last night at dinner it popped out as a thought. 

"Oh. This is Grantium". 

Thousands of people spend thousands of hours filling in horrible forms, and a lucky few of them get grants, and the majority don't, and just view all that time as wasted.

We fund and structure the rewards and remuneration in the arts like a gold rush- the winners get everything, everyone else gets nothing, and we regard people who don't find their gold as being somehow lacking in dedication or talent, rather than an essential part of the process by which the rare and sought-after gold is found. 

And the only ones who make a decent living are the ones selling the shovels.

Paying What You Decide

I love Pay Way You Decide as a concept, and as a movement.

But boy does it make it hard to organise ticketing.

It's fine, of course, until you start selling out. Whilst you have room for everyone, there's no reason to turn anyone away, and if they decide afterwards that the performance was not worth anything, then that's no loss.

The problem comes when you have a limited capacity.

You can say "no advance booking, first come first served on the door". The problem with this is that if 200 people show up on the door and you venue has room for only 100, you're turning away 100 people who are presumably, if not your fans, then at least interested in what you're doing, and giving them a shit evening. Which is not going to fill them with warm feelings towards you.

So as we don't want this to happen, we might say "tickets can be booked in advance for free, pay what you decide on the way out". Which is fine, until your 100 seat space is fully booked for an event, but then it rains, and 50 of those people go "fuck it, it's raining, the tickets didn't cost anything, let's stay in", and you play to a half empty room (previously) when there WERE easily 50 other people who would have wanted to come in spite of the rain and they missed out.

The thing is, the money charged for a ticket isn't only about how the venue and performers get paid. It's also a commitment from the ticket buyer to show up - or otherwise they will have wasted their money along with everyone else's time. It's what makes a performance professional, and respectful, and stops people wandering in and out half way through and deciding to have a chat with their mates instead.

I really want to have an answer - to be able to say "yes, the system supports Pay What You Decide by doing X". And so I'm talking to myself here working out what X is, but part of the problem is that I'm not sure I know well enough what PWYD is for. 

Is it a way of minimising the consumer surplus, just another dynamic pricing strategy that maximises the total revenue by allowing each audience member to decide (based on their good feelings, rather than reviews and buzz) how much the show was worth?

Is it an audience development strategy, where the point is to get people who don't normally to go the theatre to take a chance on it, safe in the knowledge that if it's shit (or they completely fail to understand it) they don't have to pay, whilst avoiding giving such steep discounts that you fail to make any money off the nice middle class people who normally buy tickets and keep the doors open?

Or its it a radical rethinking of the role of the audience in 21st century performing arts?

Or perhaps Pay What You Decide just isn't a good fit for popular things that are going to sell out. Perhaps we should just accept that people who can't afford an expensive ticket paid in full in advance shouldn't have access to quality live entertainment.

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Dropping coins in a hat is another thing that doesn't scale up terribly well. Lets assume we also have an interest in capturing data about our audience, and letting them pay by card.

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So what can we do? Depending on the answers above, I propose some or all of the following:

1. Do ticket ballots for all performances - even ones that aren't going to sell out. Ticket Ballot winners will hopefully feel more special about having "won" tickets than people wbo advance booked PWYD tickets for free. This also allows us to capture marketing info about people who want tickets.

2. Charge a minimum ticket price for advance bookings, and only let people in with no minimum on the door, where entry is not guaranteed. It will be important to make clear that the advance fee is a minimum required to secure the booking, and the balance of "what you decide" is payable afterwards.

3. Charge a standard ticket price in advance, but offer a no-quibble money back guarantee for any reason after the show - as long as the ticket buyer is there in person. If someone says "I didn't like it, and I'd like not to have paid for it", then they get their money. But if they didn't show up then tough - no money back over the phone.

4. Have simple, contactless donation points available for people to donate after the show. This sort of thing: https://www.goodbox.com/