Yes – two blog posts about an impending gig that I won’t be going to is probably two too many. But one of the things I’ve always wondered about is when should a concert put tickets to major concerts on sale?
You’ve got to assume that tickets to an Oasis gig in 2025 won’t be cheap. Whether they go down the full range pricey of “VIP” offerings or not, I don’t know. A “Meet and Greet” with Liam? Hmm.
But if you’re going to expect an audience to fork out several hundred pounds, and possibly more in the secondary ticketing market, then when do you sell your tickets?
Putting tickets on sale up to a year ahead of time is not unusual. Interest rates rose very slightly at the start of August, and if the promoter can bank that money now, they can make some extra returns over the next 12 months before they have to spend anything on actually putting on the gigs.
The answer would seem to be that you extract the money soon after prospective concert goers paydays. That way, you get it before they spend it on something else like, food, housing or utilities! But when do most people get paid?
In my working career I’ve never been paid at the end of the month, but considering the number of “payday sales” I get in email marketing that arrive at the end of the month, I suspect I may be in the minority.
Once upon a time, people were paid weekly, and quite possibly in cash. That would probably be at the end of the week in time for spending it at the weekend, and then regretting how much you’d spent come Monday morning. But with electronic transfers, there’s no real reason not to pick any day of the month.
The answer comes from the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals which publishes an annual report into this very thing!
Their 2024 report shows that 97% of companies pay employees monthly.
The most common “date” for monthly payroll isn’t even a date at all. It’s the last working day of the month with 37% of companies choosing. Where there is a specific date the 25th, 15th, 28th and the last Friday are the most popular.
So if you want to get people when they are likely to have the most money in their bank accounts, then after the 28th of the month is probably safest, and ideally from the 31st.
Whether choosing to go on sale at the end of August, a month in which many will have spent quite a lot on holidays, and others may be facing “back to school” bills, I don’t know. Perhaps the average 40-60 year-old Oasis fan is better off financially, and anyway has a credit card that can accommodate this discretionary spending.
But if the 31st happens to fall on a Saturday, a day when more people have more availability to open multiple tabs in multiple browsers on multiple devices, whilst swearing a lot at “Queue-it” progression charts showing that they’re at position 250,000 in a queue, then more power to you.
Obviously, none of this takes into account the sizeable self-employed population. Nor does it really allow for those who’s month-to-month pay may vary wildly depending on shift patterns, zero-hours contracts or piecemeal work opportunities.
Header image AI generated via Adobe with the prompt: “A sloth sitting at a kitchen table with a laptop open on a ticketing website as they wait for the queue to buy tickets. On the table is a credit card.” And no, I can’t see the credit card, but this was the best of 9 images generated.