‘We Never Want To Outkick The Market’: A Q&A With Wasserman Music’s Pricing & Ticketing Director Oskar Muller

It’s been a little more than a year since self-described “numbers nerd” Oskar Muller joined Wasserman Music as its Pricing & Ticketing Director and, because its ticketing, there’s already been changes to and challenges within the space.

Pollstar chatted with Muller on his journey to the world of pricing (a job he said would have been his dream if he’d known about it growing up), the growing pains of the all-in mandate, the relevance of intuition in an increasingly data-heavy world and, of course, Weird Al.

Pollstar: What’s the journey to a career in pricing? Plenty of people get into the business to be agents or managers, but I don’t know if I’ve ever heard someone say they want to be in pricing and ticketing, as important as those things are. How did you get here?

I was always such a numbers nerd as child. Every morning I would search the newspaper for all the basketball and baseball statistics I could, and spent more time consuming the numbers behind the sports than watching the games themselves.

I wish there was a poetic journey into the pricing and ticketing world that followed, but the truth is that I saw a posting about a concert ticket pricing job while scrolling LinkedIn in the back of an economics lecture my senior year of college and it blew my mind that a job that combined my passion for data with my background as a failed childhood musician existed.

I had this love for live music that my dad jumpstarted by taking me to see The Rolling Stones when I was 6 years old, but it never crossed my mind that there was a place in this industry for dorks like me.

This would have been my dream job if I had known something like this existed, but I had no clue there were all these analytics that went into planning just a single show.

With all the data available now, how much of pricing is art versus science? Are there still times when gut feeling or intuition drives decision making?

The science gives you the framework with market comparisons and relevant historical data, but you still need to know what is going on in the zeitgeist and have a read on the market beyond what the numbers tell you. There are going to be viral moments and cultural shifts that change the market for an artist overnight, and sometimes you need to insert the art of a gut feeling when you recognize the signs of growth that are not well captured by traditional data sources.

Without giving away any secrets, what’s the newest or most interesting data source that helps drive pricing decisions? We know streaming services, newsletter sign-ups, social media interaction, etc. can help drill down where and who the fans are, but is there something off the wall or lesser known that helps inform these decisions?

I think any merch purchasing data is cool to look at. There are always going to be artists that have a much more intense fanbase than any social and streaming data would indicate, and anything that can flag those to us is incredibly beneficial when making pricing decisions.

How do you balance all the competing interests in the ticketing discussion? The artist needs to make a living, but fans want tickets to remain as affordable as possible, etc. Ticket prices have been a hot topic forever, but especially so in the last couple of years; are you getting a sense of pushback from the consumer?

There is always going to be a battle between prioritizing profitability while at the same time minimizing fan pushback, and there is never going to be a one-size-fits-all solution for our artists. The core of this job is how to best strike a balance between those two objectives, and we always need to work backwards from the goals of the artist and artist team before getting the ball rolling on any pricing or ticketing initiative.

Every artist is at a different stage of their touring career, and our main priority is to prioritize long-term growth. We never want to outkick the market with initiatives on an ascending artist and stall their long-term trajectory.

There has absolutely been consumer pushback over the last few years on ticket prices, and that pushback has never been more fed directly to the artist than it is today with social media. It is on us to be as transparent as possible with our artists and their fans on how the primary ticketing market operates, because right now it is a space with a lot of consumer distrust .

What’s the biggest challenge you see in the next year in the space and what excites you?

The biggest and most currently popular challenge in the space is the recent mandated switch to all-in pricing across all shows. I think we are in a bit of a growing pain phase where fans are getting a bit of sticker shock since the prices initially displayed are higher than what they have been accustomed to seeing, but I am excited to reimagine the way we price out our shows moving forward knowing that the fan purchasing experience has flipped on its head.

I think the transparency of where each dollar a fan spends is going will be beneficial in the long term and help build some of this trust in the artist ticketing world, but it will still require an awkward transition period.

And always: What’s your favorite recent concert and what concert are you looking forward to?

I lived out my childhood dreams and saw Weird Al Yankovic at Ravinia this past weekend and I have been on cloud nine all week. I cannot put into words how magical of an experience that was.

I am counting down the days until Cameron Winter at Rockefeller Chapel in Chicago. I love artists who use unique spaces to bring their music to life, and he is one of my favorite acts out there right now.