Why waiting until the day doesn’t just stress promoters, it affects the artists, production and experience audiences ultimately receive.
If you spend any time around independent events in Auckland, you start to notice a strange pattern.
People come. Sometimes lots of people come.
They just don’t necessarily tell you they’re coming until the very last minute.
Yuli’s Story Sums it Up..
I am a last minute ticket buyer. I was always this way. One part chaos scheduling to two parts commitment issues makes this a hard habit to kick, but now that I am on the other side of the curtain, kicking it is something I am actively trying to do.
Because the whole world has become like me, not from chaos or commitment but from covid, and it has made it very hard to run events.
Picture this: you are planning a show. You make a budget – performers, technicians, drink stock, seating arrangements. All that jazz. A week out, you have sold 3 tickets. What do you do? Do you cancel? Do you pay the performers yourself? Do you sit at home and bite your nails and pull out your hair (trick question, you do this anyway). In the end, you cut down expenses, beg the artists to accept less, take the cool lights out of the budget line, and stock enough drinks for 20 people. You’re an optimist, after all. On the day of the show, 50 people buy tickets and 50 show up at the door. Ahhhh.
This is a reality for everyone in the events industry at the moment. The uncertainty of events during covid years shifted the whole culture of ticket buying to last minute, on-the-day purchasing, leaving us with more guesswork, scrambling, and stress, in an industry with an already naturally high level of all three. The worst part is that it sucks for the audience too (that’s you, baby!) – cutting out the cool lights because we thought we couldn’t pay for them means you go to a show without the cool lights, and we all want the cool lights right??
So if you have become a last minute ticket buyer, spare it some thought. Understand that your ticket is directly related to whether the event can run, what can be planned, and the stress levels and overall wellbeing of the people creating the things you enjoy. Time is money and money is time, and timing is everything. This cultural shift can be shifted back, but only if we do it together. A little attention in this direction will truly go a long way.”
What this means for the scene
Yuli’s story isn’t unusual. Speak to independent promoters, artists and venues and you’ll hear variations of the same thing: a quiet week of ticket sales, difficult decisions being made behind the scenes, followed by a sudden rush in the final 24–48 hours.
And while a packed room on the night is still a packed room, the timing matters.
Events are built before the doors open. Artists need confirming. Technicians need booking. Bars need stocking. Equipment gets hired. Production gets scaled up—or down. For small independent events, advance sales are one of the few signals available when those decisions have to be made.
The bigger consequence is harder to see. If ambitious or unusual events repeatedly look financially impossible until the day they happen, eventually organisers become less willing to take those risks.
Less experimentation. Smaller production. Safer programming.
And that ultimately changes the kind of cultural scene we all get to participate in.
So… buy the bloody ticket?
Not always.
Some of us genuinely can’t know what next Friday looks like. Money is tight. Kids get sick. Work changes. Life happens. This isn’t about guilting anyone into committing when they can’t.
But there is another group—and many of us probably recognise ourselves here—who already know we’re going.
We’ve sent the event to the group chat. We’ve clicked interested. We’ve talked about what time we’re meeting.
We just haven’t actually bought the ticket.
If that’s you, buying a little earlier is a surprisingly meaningful way to support the artists, promoters and independent spaces you want to see survive.
A like tells the algorithm you’re interested.
A ticket tells the people making the event that you’re coming.
And occasionally, it means we get to keep the cool lights.
Over to you: are you an early ticket buyer, a week-of buyer, or an incurable door-sale person? And what would actually make you commit earlier?