Broadway Lottery Tickets Are No Longer The Bargain They Used To Be

Sometimes Winning The Lottery Isn't Exactly Winning The Lottery

Why the Broadway Ticket Lottery Started

It used to be that the more-prominent Broadway shows would offer ticket lotteries for their dedicated fans who may not be able to pay the costly prices for their favorite Broadway show. Entrants would be able to enter the Broadway ticket lottery for free, and the winners would then be asked to pay the standard rate of $10 per ticket if they won. The $10 price point was affordable and just enough money to cover the ticket lotteries overhead expenses and nothing else.

Broadway productions would hold a set of seats for every show, and the lucky winners would sit in the first two rows. In some cases, winners were even awarded an exclusive backstage tour from one of the cast members before the show began. The real reason that the bigger Broadway shows even offered lottery tickets was to show their appreciation to their less financially-fortunate fans, but things are now changing fast.

What Most of the Broadway Ticket Lotteries are Doing Today

Now, many show producers will introduce the ticket lottery system as a cheap way to increase the show’s marketing. For the less-popular shows, they will use the lottery to finish filling up the theatre’s unsold seats. Many of today’s Broadway show lottery ticket prices have increased significantly. Not only are many of the ticket lotteries more expensive, but most of the lotteries are using their unsold ticket inventory, instead of the pre-assigned seats they had previously used.

This means that the lottery winner’s seats could be located anywhere inside the theatre, including all the way in the back where it may be tough to see the show. Some lottery ticket winners have reported that their seats have been “partial view or obstructed view seats”, which did not allow them to get the complete Broadway show experience and left them feeling quite unhappy.

Best and Most Wicked Broadway Show Lotteries

The long-time, popular Broadway musical Wicked, offers the most expensive Broadway ticket lottery, at $49 (weekday) and $59 (weekend). Their lottery is hosted by The Nederlander Organization’s own website, Broadwaydirect. There is not a set amount of saved theatre seats per performance, so the available ticket inventory can vary wildly. This pricing is quite high for a Broadway show lottery ticket - it is more than double the price of many other Broadway lottery tickets.

Wicked is not known as a Broadway show that is hurting for cash, so this move comes as a surprise move. In early 2016, Wicked crossed the billion dollar mark in total show revenue and they are only one of three Broadway shows to ever do this. Their new ticket lottery prices are so pricey, it has gotten people on the Broadway social media sites asking, “If lottery tickets are supposed to be a cheap way to see the show, then why is their lottery so expensive?”

Hamilton lottery model

In contrast, Hamilton offers the best Broadway show ticket lottery. The Hamilton production hosts their own ticket lottery on the Ham4Ham website and “Ham4Ham” mobile app. The show follows the old lottery system, where winners pay only $10 per ticket if they win and they get to sit in the first two rows of the theatre.

Hamilton runs their lottery with their same give-back mentality as they did when the show first started, as they are just trying to give a lucky handful of fans a performance to remember and they are more than happy to lap up the goodwill that this brings on the social media sites.

Conclusion

The Broadway ticket lottery system may be morphing into a new type of marketing scheme that may not be compatible with its original purpose, that original purpose being to give back to fans of the show that may not be able to afford tickets and the new purpose may just to sell unsold tickets at discount without damaging the brand by offering a straight discount code.