Neil Young will stop selling platinum-priced tickets for his future concerts, the musician confirmed on his website, calling the practice “a bad thing that has happened to concerts worldwide.”
Young said he was inspired by The Cure’s Robert Smith, who took a similar stance for the band’s North America tour back in 2023, calling platinum and dynamic tickets “a greedy scam” that artists can choose to opt out of (at the expense of some of their ticketing revenue.)
‘It’s this story that really helped me realize I have a choice to make and can make a difference for my music loving friends,” Young wrote on Friday. He explained that he used platinum tickets to counteract scalpers buying up tickets and gouging fans on the secondary market. With platinum, the extra money went to him instead. “Ticketmaster‘s High priced platinum tickets were introduced to the areas where scalpers were buying the most tickets for resale. The money went to me. That didn’t feel right.”
Young has long made business decisions on his own ideals, like back in 2022 when he decided to remove his music from Spotify in protest of misinformation Joe Rogan was sharing about vaccines. (He finally brought his music back to the platform last year.)
Platinum and dynamically priced tickets are one of ticket buyers’ biggest sources of frustration in the live music business as concert ticket prices continue to rise. Oasis, who hit the road for their much-anticipated 2025 reunion tour later this year, received significant blowback from U.K. fans for using dynamic pricing, with the band posting on X after the on-sale that “the execution of the plan failed to meet expectations.”
As Young acknowledged, artists themselves tend to use higher priced ticketing tiers because they’ve seen how much money scalpers can make taking advantage of them for pricing tickets far below their demand. Instead, they’d like for that extra money to go back to them and their teams directly involved with the tour. But in the case of The Cure, the band also prohibited resale try and get more control of the market themselves to curb scalpers. More artists are using so-called “face value ticket exchanges” so that fans who purchased tickets but can no longer attend a show can resell them to someone else for the same price they paid.
Finishing his letter to fans, Young wrote that he has “decided to let the people work this out.”
“Buy aggressively when the tickets come out,” he said, “or tickets will cost a lot more on the secondary market.”