Concert History | The Police at Fenway Park — Premium Seats Switched from Face Value to Pay-Your-Bid

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On Sunday, July 29, 2007, The Police played the second of two Fenway Park concerts. A contemporary Boston Herald review, preserved in the band’s official archive, identifies the date and calls it the trio’s second sold-out Fenway night: https://sting.com/blogs/news/seasoned-pros-police-pitch-perfect-in-fenway-finale

Part of that night’s premium inventory was sold differently from an ordinary fixed-price ticket. Economists Eric Budish and Aditya Bhave used Ticketmaster’s proprietary auction records and preserved the exact July 29 Fenway interface in their study. For the quality group shown, a conventional ticket carried a $225 face value plus a $21.60 convenience fee, or $246.60 all-in. The auction opened at $250. Buyers entered a per-ticket bid and a quantity; they could raise a bid but not lower or retract it. The highest bids received the best available seats, and successful bidders paid their own bids. The interface also displayed tentative clearing prices by seat-quality group and emailed bidders when their provisional assignment changed: https://ftp.aeaweb.org/conference/2015/retrieve.php?pdfid=8988&tk=8r4GdQbz

That made this exact concert a small experiment in primary-market price discovery. Instead of assigning every premium seat at face value and leaving any price gap to resellers, Ticketmaster let demand set those prices before admission. The peer-reviewed final paper reports that auctions substantially improved price discovery across its 576-event dataset, but those aggregate results are not a measurement of Fenway alone: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mic.20180230

The sources do not identify which band member, promoter executive, or venue manager selected the auction, so this memory assigns no personal motive. They also do not provide a night-by-night Fenway ticket count. As of September 2026, Fenway Park remains the Boston Red Sox’s home ballpark; this account concerns the 2007 ticketing design, not a current sales policy.

Coordinate method: the pin at 42.346389, -71.097500 is the Fenway Park center recorded by Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q49136. Singalto1’s independently geotagged venue photograph places the camera at 42.347222, -71.096389, about 130 metres away: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fenway_Park,_Boston,_MA_2008.jpg. A ±200-metre precision radius covers the compact ballpark footprint. It does not claim the undocumented temporary stage position or the location of any auctioned seat.

Image: Singalto1, “Fenway Park, Boston, MA 2008,” own work, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fenway_Park,_Boston,_MA_2008.jpg. The visually inspected photograph shows Fenway in a baseball configuration on July 28, 2008. It does not depict The Police, the 2007 concert, its stage, or auction participants.