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A-Train Membership Cost Analysis

Data pulled from 2023 through 2025: what each membership level costs the club, and what it returns.

Prepared for the Dakota board by Lisa Speedling Consulting · Draft for review

Current Membership Levels and Benefits

Basic

$250.00 + tax and processing

Pre-sale period on all seating before public onsale
Two member tickets per year for performances $50 and under
10% discount on any food or beverage purchased
10% discount on tickets (limit two per artist; member tickets may not be combined with discounted tickets)
Emailed updates on music, food and wine specials

2 free tickets

Sponsor

$750.00 + tax and processing

All Basic benefits, plus:
Ten member tickets per year for performances $50 and under (limit two per artist)

10 free tickets

Patron

$1,500.00 + tax and processing

All Basic benefits, plus:
Unlimited member tickets for performances $50 and under (limit two per artist)

Unlimited

Platinum

$3,000.00 + tax and processing

All Basic benefits, plus:
Unlimited member tickets for all performances priced $100 and under (limit two per artist)
Additional tickets, and tickets over $100, at a 10% discount

Unlimited

Key Revenue Impacts

Member Count

A-Train membership fell by 57 guests over three years. Basic level dropped by 71 members, while Patron and Platinum each grew by 7 members.

Member Benefits Given

Over the same period the number of free member seats used rose 23%, from 9,368 seats to 11,549 seats. At full ticket price those additional 2,181 seats are an additional $95,134 in Member Benefits.

Data Review 2023–2025: All Membership Levels Combined Choose the same year twice to see it on its own, two different years to see the change between them, or All for the three-year total. Every figure is members only — no non-member revenue appears anywhere on this page.

Start year

End year

Total Member Count

Gross Member Revenue

Member Benefits Given

Net Member Revenue

Member Averages at Each Membership Level Select years above and a level below. The box labels tell you which view you are in.

Level

Cost per Member

Benefits given ÷ members — what one member of this level costs.

Gross Revenue per Member

Dues, tickets and F&B.

Net Revenue per Member

Gross less benefits given.

Dues per Member

All Membership Data for 2023–25

Show every year and level

Click Year or Level to sort. Benefits given reflect the current sell-out setting in the scenario planner.
Year ▲	Level	Members	Dues	Free Tickets Used (Qty)	Total Tickets Used (Qty)	Total of Tickets Purchased	Food & Bev Purchased	Gross Member Revenue	Amount of Benefits Given	Net Revenue

Member Activity Notes

The data shows Basic and Sponsor level members consume less than the benefit they are entitled to.

Basic members use 1.6 free tickets used against an allowance of 2 tickets per membership.
Sponsor members use 6.3 tickets against an allowed 10 tickets.
Patron and Platinum use 85.1% of total benefits given for all levels, in 2025 amounting $492,381 out of total benefits of $578,861.

Revenue Growth Opportunities

Membership Campaign. See member count scales below to adjust the member count at each level and model how member counts affect revenue. Based on 2025 membership dues and 2025 benefits given.
- Convert High-Engagement Guests by reaching out to non-member guests whose show attendance and in-venue purchases indicate they would benefit from membership.
- Re-Engage Lapsed Members by conducting outreach to members we have lost since 2023 to understand why they left, address barriers, and encourage renewal of membership.
Review and Adjust Membership Dues. See scales below to adjust membership dues at each level and model how increases in membership affect revenue. Based on 2025 membership dues and 2025 benefits given.

Projected Membership Revenue Trend Straight-line projection from the three observed years at current dues rates, allowances and member activity.

What "net" means here. Net member revenue only: A-Train dues collected, plus the ticket money those members actually paid, plus their in-venue food and beverage purchases, less the value of the benefit they consumed. No non-member revenue is included and no club costs other than the membership benefit itself. This is what the A-Train program contributes, not the club's bottom line.

Observed 2023–2025 Projected 2026–2028, current policy With your scenario settings

A projection from three points is a direction, not a forecast. Its value is the sign of the slope: on the current structure, net member revenue declines while benefits given continue to rise.

Notable: Benefits Given Outside of Policy

In 2025, 115 of Basic's 784 free seats, 15%, were for performances priced above $50. Patron was given 174 seats above its $50 ceiling. Platinum stayed almost perfectly inside $100, with 64 seats out of 7,650 above it.

So the benefits ceilings are mostly respected but not entirely, and the drift is accelerating: four times as many out-of-policy free seats in 2025 as in 2023.

However, enforcing every ceiling perfectly does not solve the revenue erosion. If ceilings were enforced in 2025, it would have saved only $7,665. Meanwhile, capping Patron and Platinum at 24 tickets saves $398,529. The data shows benefits enforcement is not the area to focus on, but I thought it was worth noting.

Member Discrepancies Tickets sold that reference an A-Train membership level, or use an A-Train price code, where the customer was not on that year's paid membership list.

Discount given to non-members, 3 years

$149,970

$53,775 in 2023 · $37,918 in 2024 · $58,276 in 2025

Seats involved

6,671

Across 635 distinct customer IDs.

Never a member, 2023–25

240

Customers who appear on no membership list in any of the three years, holding $45,634 of the discount.

Concentration, 2025

71%

Ten customers account for $41,196 of the year's $58,276. One took $15,640.

By year. Customers are counted within each year, so the three-year row counts anyone flagged twice, twice.
Year	Customers	Number of Tickets	Amount Paid	Amount of Discount	Members the prior year
2023	194	2,213	$56,152	$53,775	—
2024	287	2,178	$90,180	$37,918	214
2025	213	2,280	$68,393	$58,276	128
2023–25	635 distinct	6,671	$214,726	$149,970

The pattern is lapsed members, not strangers. Of the 287 customers flagged in 2024, 214 held a paid membership in 2023. Of the 213 flagged in 2025, 128 were 2024 members. Benefits are continuing after a membership ends rather than being handed to people who never had one — though 240 customers across the three years appear on no membership list at all.

It is also highly concentrated. Ten customers account for 63% of the 2023 discount, 59% of 2024 and 71% of 2025. This is a short list to work through, not a systemic leak.

Read this as a list to investigate, not a list of errors. A membership bought or renewed mid-year can land in a different year's export, a guest seat on a member's order can record under the guest's ID, and a membership that lapsed partway through a year still shows benefit used before it lapsed. The workbook below has a blank Customer Name column so names can be attached before anyone is contacted.

Master Data Workbooks

These workbooks contain full customer records. Confirm access control before this page is shared — see the note beneath the tiles.

20232023_Master Dataset 20242024_Master Dataset 20252025_Master Dataset DiscrepanciesMember Discrepancies_2023-25 HiveHive Contact Export_CustID

The five tiles are already pointed at these filenames: 2023_Master Dataset.xlsx, 2024_Master Dataset.xlsx, 2025_Master Dataset.xlsx, Member Discrepancies_2023-25.xlsx and Hive Contact Export_CustID.xlsx. Drop those files into the same folder as this page and the icons work — the names must match exactly, including capitalization. If a file is saved as .xlsm or .csv, change the extension in the link to match.

Or point them at the club's own storage instead by replacing each href with a SharePoint or Drive link. No size limit, access control already in place, and the records stay in the club's custody. Recommended for the master datasets.

Before customer records go in this folder: Cloudflare Pages accepts files up to 25 MB each, so the combined 2023–25 workbook must be split by year, and Cloudflare Access must be switched on for this project first. Until it is, every file here is downloadable by anyone with the link.

Key

Members: A-Train members holding a paid membership, counted as unique customer IDs within the year.
Membership revenue: Dues recorded, counted once per customer per level. Duplicate entries in the source data are excluded — see the method notes.
Member revenue: Includes tickets and F&B purchases — the money members actually paid, on top of dues.
Gross member revenue: Membership revenue plus member revenue, before any benefit is subtracted.
Benefits given: Calculated from non-member ticket prices at the same price level, and the reported discount applied (10% or 100%). Two parts: ticket benefit, and the 10% food and beverage discount every level receives.
F&B discount: Recorded in-venue spend is money taken, so it is already net of the 10%. The discount given is the recorded amount divided by 0.9, less the recorded amount — one ninth of what members paid.
Net member revenue: Gross member revenue less benefits given.
Cost per member: Benefits given divided by the number of members at that level.
Free tickets used (qty): Seats taken on a member ticket at no charge. Total tickets used adds seats bought at the 10% discount and at full price.

Method and Data Notes

Two corrections applied to the source data. The 2023 and 2025 transaction exports each contained a single food-and-beverage row of roughly $7.8M and $7.5M — grand-total rows captured during export. Each year also contains about 20,000 rows with no customer attached, which are anonymous table checks. Both are excluded here. Figures computed by summing those columns directly will be materially overstated.

The value of additional free seats is the 2,181 seat increase from 2023 to 2025 priced at the 2025 average non-member value of a free member seat, $43.62. Valued at 2023 prices the figure is $88,028. The total value of all free seats given rose further than this, from $378,104 to $503,761, because per-seat prices also rose over the period.

Benefit is counted only on A-Train price codes. A member buying at the standard price contributes no benefit. House comps and non-member promotional codes are excluded, so this is A-Train benefit specifically rather than all discounting.

Benefit is valued as given, not as permitted. Each free seat is valued at the non-member price charged for that performance, whether or not the seat was eligible under the ceiling. Capping every seat at $50 or $100 would report what policy allowed rather than what was given, and would understate 2025 benefit by roughly $7,665.

Full price for a member seat is the median price paid by non-members for that same performance and price level. Where a performance has no standard sales, the median for that price level in that year is used. On tiered shows this means a seat can be flagged above a ceiling when the tier sold was under it — the trend is firm, individual counts approximate.

The food-and-beverage discount assumes it was applied. Counted on all member in-venue spend, $44,957 in 2025. Nothing in the export records whether a server applied it on a given tab, so this is the policy-compliant figure and a ceiling on the real one.

Duplicate membership rows removed. The membership tabs contain more rows than customers — 659 rows for 610 members in 2025. Every duplicate is the same customer at the same level for the identical amount (39 pairs at $250, 6 at $3,000, 2 at $1,500, 1 at $750), which is a double entry rather than a second payment. Counted once per customer, dues equal rate × members almost exactly at every level; counted at every row, none of them reconcile. Dues here are deduplicated, which reduces recorded dues by $5,000 in 2023, $3,750 in 2024 and $31,500 in 2025. Any figure that sums the membership rows directly will be higher by those amounts.

The Member Disc. tabs are not used. Between 99.4% and 100% of their rows already appear in the Etix&POS tabs, so they are a filtered extract rather than additional records. Including them would double-count roughly 2,100 member seats a year.

Membership revenue is dues recorded, counted once per customer per level.

Food and beverage includes only spend attached to a customer ID on a ticketed order, so member F&B is a floor rather than a total.

Ticket revenue is the base ticket amount, excluding convenience fees.

Modeling seats above an allowance. When an allowance cuts a member's free seats, the remainder is treated as purchased at the 10% member discount, per the club's published rule. The second slider controls what share of those seats is assumed to be bought at all.