Recently, there has been a significant increase in demand for music concerts in Vietnam. For example, tickets for two concert “Anh trai vuot ngan chong gai” nights in June sold out within just a couple of hours. Thanks to this increased demand, the organizer is clearly happy, because they earned a high amount of revenue from the events.

If you’re an auditor of the concert organizer in Vietnam, revenue testing may be simpler than expected. This is because ticket prices are fixed for each category. Normally, in Vietnam, ticket prices are announced in advance and do not change during the entire selling period. Therefore, to estimate revenue, using the fixed price and the number of tickets sold is generally sufficient.

This is different from the situation in North America and Europe, where platforms like Ticketmaster dominate. In those markets, ticket prices are determined through a different mechanism. While a base price is set, the final selling price varies depending on many factors, such as demand, historical data on similar events, algorithms, and more. As a result, each ticket might be sold at a different price, making revenue estimation and audit testing more complex.

Why does this happen? The answer is simple: capitalism. All parties involved, such as artists, platform, organiser, etc… want to maximize revenue, so they try to charge as much as possible based on fans’ willingness to pay. As long as fans are happy to pay the price set by the platform, the practice is good to continue.

Would this model work well in Vietnam? Honestly, I have no idea. Since the music concert market here doesn’t have a long history, it’s hard to say. Which practice is better? I don’t really know. Which one do you prefer? As long as you get a ticket and enjoy the concert, maybe that question does not matter so much.