What does £3 buy you these days? The quick answer, is not much. However if I told you that £3 would get you a ticket to a gig in Central London featuring Ice Black Birds, Boy Mandeville, Wilder and Summer Camp you’d be forgiven for assuming I was talking nonsense but on this occasion I’m not hallucinating!
The gig in question is the fourth and final in the Curated by Lyle & Scott series of gigs showcasing new talent, you may recall I mentioned it a few weeks ago. Like the others, it takes place at the XOYO Club which is often described as intimate, what they mean is small. It’s an okay venue if you ask me tho as I recall drink prices float in the upper range. The gig is happening on Thursday 31 March 2011 and tickets are available now and at only £3 they are a bit of a bargain; that’s less than £1 a band.
My only gripe is with TicketWeb who are responsible for the ticketing, while the service charge is only 85p per ticket I really do object at having to spend money to
have your tickets delivered by email so that you can print them out yourself!
Like a good whinger I once called Ticket Master when they first introduced the whole print-your-own-ticket scam/rip-off/ feature and asked for the address of the finance department so I could invoice them for paper and ink but after she stopped laughing the call centre prisoner informed me that these things I have to pay for myself…don’t hate me but I like real tickets
It seems the nominal fee for delivery is only a fraction of the costs involved in issuing bar-code readers to all the venues they sell tickets for. I’d be interested in seeing their initial set-up costs and the annual on-going costs for that before agreeing it’s not a con.
However, ticket exploitations aside, Lyle & Scott have shown that they know more than how to knit a sweater. Putting on gigs of new bands with low ticket prices is something to be applauded and whilst I hope it was successful enough for Lyle & Scott to consider repeating, I also hope it doesn’t prove so successful it loses its originality and becomes a caricature of itself à la Now That’s What I Call Music volume 3,271
