The ticket retailers DICE have confirmed the introduction of booking fees to their site.
When the site started in 2014, they promised “Best Gigs. No Booking Fees,” but have since found the business model financially untenable.
Following a heated Twitter exchange between the company Twitter account and the band Shame, DICE UK managing director Russ Tannen released a statement outlining the changes.
“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,” Tannen said.
We had a choice — drop ‘Best Gigs’, or drop ‘No Booking Fees’.https://t.co/rZxi6Bpq3N
— DICE (@dicefm) February 13, 2018
He added that the company had lost money on every no-fee ticket sold, and had been limited to small ticket allocations for bigger shows.
He explained: “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.”
He added that the fees will not apply to all shows sold on the site.
Last weekend, Shame criticised the website for adding fees to their upcoming UK tour tickets without informing the band, now removing the November tickets from DICE altogether.
You may notice tickets are no longer available via @dicefm for the November run, this is because of the aforementioned reasons referred to in this @bestfitmusic article. https://t.co/kPePfL3Hdo
— shame (@shamebanduk) February 10, 2018
Just to clarify, the issue we take here is with direct Dice booking fees being added without any prior consultation to ourselves, other artists or our fans.
— shame (@shamebanduk) February 10, 2018
Meanwhile, Shame recently played Laneway Festival in Melbourne, Australia, bringing their distinctive brand of post-Brexit punk to warmer climes.
See all of Shame’s upcoming UK tour dates here.