The Cure's Robert Smith on dynamic pricing: "[it's] easy to set ticket prices, but you need to be pig-headed"

The Cure are gearing up to release their first full-length studio album, in sixteen years. Songs Of A Lost World sees Robert Smith reckoning with a world that is "falling apart". Elaborating on this, he says: “It’s insane. It’s greed, inequality, monetisation. I’ve realised some of my reactions to the modern world are a bit extreme, that I’m becoming an old grouch and that it’s easy to tip over to talking about the fond memories of a world that’s disappeared … but there are moments I just want to leave the front door shut.”

Speaking to The Sunday Times he realises that the world has changed quite a lot over the near five-decade span of the band – especially on the live front – and he has been outspoken on his thoughts about ticket sales and dynamic pricing. "My fights with the label have all been about how we can price things lower. The only reason you’d charge more for a gig is if you were worried that it was the last time you would be able to sell a T-shirt," he explained.

“It was easy to set ticket prices. Most artists hide behind management. ‘Oh, we didn’t know.’ They all know. If they say they don’t, they’re either f***ing stupid or lying.”

God bless ROBERT SMITH and the return of The Cure https://t.co/roOx0zr0I6

— Jonathan Dean (@JonathanDean_) October 13, 2024

Last year, on a North American tour, The Cure announced that tickets would not be "transferable" as they want to minimise "resale and keep prices at face value", and after speaking about how their system is "far from perfect", Robert Smith responded to fans seeing Ticketmaster adding extra fees, saying he was "as sickened as you all are". He later shared an update after speaking to Ticketmaster, revealing that the ticketing giant agreed to refund $10 to verified fan accounts for lowest ticket price transactions, and $5 for all other verified fan account transactions.

"You don’t want to charge as much as the market will let you. If people save on the tickets, they buy beer or merch. There is goodwill, they will come back next time. It is a self-fulfilling good vibe and I don’t understand why more people don’t do it," he elaborated. "It was easy to set ticket prices, but you need to be pig-headed. We didn’t allow dynamic pricing because it’s a scam that would disappear if every artist said, ‘I don’t want that!’ But most artists hide behind management. “Oh, we didn’t know,” they say. They all know. If they say they do not, they’re either fucking stupid or lying. It’s just driven by greed."

Content with his career, and fan-first decisions on how to cultivate a pleasant live experience, Smith details plans to tour until 2028, for the band's 50th anniversary; "And that's it. That really is it. If it make it that far, that's it."