Dice Tickets UK Stops Waiving Booking Fees

– Dice
The UK based ticketing company can no longer afford to waive booking fees

UK-based live music discovery and mobile ticketing platform Dice has announced the introduction of booking fees, or, more precisely, justified the unannounced introduction of booking fees.

Dice launched in the UK in 2014, with a slogan that had fans, as well as the industry, pricking their ears. “Best Gigs. No Booking Fees,” the company had promised. And, indeed, that’s what ticket buyers got. No booking fees.

At least up until 2017, when Dice dropped the latter half of its slogan. Unannounced mind you. It took UK punk band Shame to bring the change to the wider public’s attention. “Everyone’s favourite ‘no booking fees’ vendor @dicefm have slyly added a 10 percent booking fee to shows costing above £10, we knew absolutely nothing about this,” the band tweeted.

– Shame
Accusing Dice of “slyly” adding fees

A tweet that prompted a reaction from Dice in the form of a blog post penned by company MD Russ Tannen. In it, he explains that, “to get a significant allocation of tickets for bigger shows, we had to agree to include a ‘booking fee.’ This was particularly the case for our expansion in North America.”

“So what are these fees,” he continues to write. “It’s essentially a small markup that covers some of our costs, and fulfils contractual obligations to some of our partners.

“We spent a lot of time debating our options at Dice HQ. Do we stick with Dice being a small player forever, and keep the ‘no booking fee’ line, or do we accept some fees, so we could sell more tickets to more incredible events. Ultimately, it was a case of either drop ‘Best Gigs’ or drop ‘No Booking Fees.’ So we decided to start incorporating some fees to a small number of shows and dropped the ‘no booking fees’ line in January 2017.

“What didn’t change is our commitment to always try and be the lowest price.”

Pollstar has reached out to Dice for clarification, but was met with silence.

Tannen explicitly mentioned the U.S. expansion as one of the reasons the company could no longer afford to roll with the “no booking fees” line, at least if it wanted to attract bigger clients. In the States, most major venues, and larger promoters, sign exclusive contracts with a ticket vendor in exchange for a large advance fee against the add-on fees charged to ticket buyers.

Upfront payments in return for a certain allocation of tickets are also paid in Europe, at least for the big tours. It just gets more complicated overseas, as there are usually a couple of different ticket vendors involved. The bigger the tours the higher the upfront payments, which means independent ticket sellers will struggle to compete for big shows, unless artists, agents and promoters really insist on working with a particular independent ticket agent.

While Tannen does not explicitly mention upfront payments, he writes in the first part of the blog post that the company had to introduce a fee to get a significant allocation. However, he also hints that introducing the fees was necessary to grow, which could simply mean that Dice wasn’t able to run a viable business without the fees. After all, booking fees, or service fees as they are more commonly referred to in the U.S., are used by the ticket agencies to run and improve their service.

– Dice Ticketing

There are some industry professionals, who believe Dice simply went out on a limb when announcing its business model in 2014, who think it was a bad idea to scrap the fees that are essential for the survival of other ticket operators, and who now think, reality has caught up with the company.

Like many tech startups, Dice, too, had to raise investor money to operate. Sooner or later, all investors will want their ROI, which may be putting the company under pressure to make money as well.

In his blog post, Tannen goes on to apologize for not having made the introduction of booking fees public earlier, without mentioning the reasons for the delay.

All of this doesn’t make Dice an unattractive option for artists, of course. It’s just disappointing for artists who loved the fact they could market the no-fees idea to their fans. Dice is still committed to curbing the secondary ticket market by offering face-value refunds to customers who can’t make the gig. Returned tickets are then sold at face-value to people on a waiting list.

The company also remains committed to achieving the lowest price for tickets and remaining transparent about all fees upfront, and, as Tannen emphasizes, “there are lots of shows where we don’t have any markup at all.”