"Tickets are now sold out through January 2017, according to Ticketmaster’s website."
and THIS is why ticket scalpers suck. Literally the only options to see Hamilton any time this year are to pay ridiculous rates ($1000-2000 each for good seats) to a scalper, or enter the same-day lottery and pray.
I predict it's only going to get worse now that Hamilton has grabbed 16 Tony Award nominations (and is likely to win a truckload of them).
Staging is usually the same, or not noticeably different (especially if you didn't see the original), and maybe I didn't get to see Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick in "The Producers" on tour, but Jason Alexander and Martin Short were pretty damn good substitutes.
I bought tickets from Stubhub 2 months ago on the very low end of that range. And they were very good seats for a Saturday night show that I bought day of. I would have assumed that less good seats on other nights of the week would be much cheaper?
Or maybe prices have risen significantly in the last two months?
I just picked a random date in June (Tuesday the 14th). Single orchestra tickets range from $931-$3712 through ticketmaster resale, or $1350-$3300 on stubhub.
You might be able to find better prices for, e.g. a Sunday matinee when LMM isn't performing, I suppose.
That's not really the ticket scalper's fault, is it? If the tickets were only sold at the low face-value price, they would still be sold out, and your only option would still be the same-day lottery. This way, people who really want to see the show at least have an option to pay extra to see it.
It depends on what percentage of tickets the scalpers are buying for each show vs. how many are available to actual fans. The article says in one case, a ticket broker managed to buy 20,000 tickets.
What are effective methods for stopping ticket scalpers? Heavily penalizing resale is kind of a crappy route but for a show like Hamilton I wonder what the legitimate person resale case is. Has any artist fended off the scalpers successfully?
Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails) would reserve a block of tickets at each show for his fan club; the tickets were tied to your name, and you had to show your ID to get in with them. No transfers were possible.
Raise the price. Scalpers are taking advantage of a market where price is not equal to what people are willing to pay. Be more dynamic with ticket prices, and scalpers have no margin to keep.
I disagree with that. There are many reasons artists want to keep prices low. In this case maybe you don't want to reserve your ticket a full year in advance. An artist might also want their work to be accessible to more people than those that can afford a $1000 ticket. Raising the price is too simplistic an option.
The problem is that they aren't keeping prices low. They are setting an artificially low face value, and then letting scalpers capture all the excess value. The real cost to see Hamilton right now is $1000+, not whatever (lower) number is on the ticket.
By not allowing incredibly devoted fans to participate in an auction for tickets, they are actually making shows less accessible for the people who want it most. It's unfair that you can get to see a performance for $50 because you happened to get a ticket, but I am unable to even if I'm willing to pay $500.
This ideal world where the everyman can buy a ticket for a low cost doesn't exist, though. The scalpers buy up a huge chunk of the tickets, which takes away a large number of tickets that could have been bought by "real people". The reason the show is booked until 2017 is not because people have bought all the tickets, it's because the scalpers have.
You disagree with what? You wanted a way to stop scalpers and he gave it to you. Artists might prefer to reward luck over purchasing power but so what? In a situation where multiple people have competing interests, I hardly think it's obvious that we should just be going with "it's a problem that artists don't get everything they want."
Let's say the market will pay $1000 for a ticket. The show would like to see the tickets be $100, so that people who only have $100 can see it.
Tickets go on sale for $100, and 100 are bought by a single scalper for $10000. The scalper now needs to sell only 10 tickets at the market rate to break even. Since he only needs to sell 10, he starts by trying to sell them for $1500, knowing he'll initially have few sales, but that he can lower his price later if he needs to.
Now what you have is tickets being sold for $1500, and likely empty seats in the theater. The show is making 1/10 the income it might have made and won't be able to run as long, so even fewer people can see it.
The larger the margin between market rate and actual rate, the fewer people who will see it, the shorter the show will run, and the more expensive tickets will be for normal people.
The smart move is for the theatre to sell all tickets at a falling price: every day, tickets for the show on day X are cheaper than they were yesterday by an amount determined by how many tickets were sold. All seats will be sold at the market rate and scalpers have little margin to take.
Or, from the other side of the problem, raise supply. Hire a second cast and do more shows.
Problem is that everyone wants to see the major stars and won't be as interested in a different cast. Or maybe they will. The touring show opens in Chicago this fall. We'll see.
Technical solutions are unnecessary. Just make the tickets non-transferrable, and have the ticket holder produce ID confirming the name on the ticket matches the person. Plenty of music festivals, Vegas nightclubs and other places already employ this strategy very effectively.
Although I usually hate non transferable tickets this would definitely solve the scalping problem. I'd much rather this than have people throw their money at middlemen who add no additional value.
Scalpers provide this value from buying up many more tickets than an individual would, and individuals who cannot go will still sell their tickets, which is usually for a more reasonable price since they want to get rid of them.
This also makes the tickets less valuable to begin with: more risk involved. I'm not going to buy tickets on a whim if I can't resell them if my schedule changes.
Just allow the buyers to return the tickets to the venue for a refund, minus a processing fee. Then the venue can sell any refunded tickets at the box office on the day of the show
The venue (more likely a legitimate third party) could also run its own marketplace for pre-bought tickets, so the venue wouldn't have to just repurchase tickets and risk leaving a seat empty.
Why not combine solutions; similar to airline seats - the cheap saver version, non-changeable, non-transferable, and non-refundable also must show original ID and credit card to enter and then the super-flexible scalper-special with two wildly different price-points. You can also have a wait-list on the night for those who bought the non-refundable and are no-shows.
It's such an obvious solution that there must be a good reason they're not doing it already. I refuse to accept that they simply have not considered that.
My guess is it's something in the "that's just not the way it's done" family... Perhaps their venue controls ticket sales and doesn't care, or they have an intermediary like Ticketmaster who doesn't care.
Or maybe it's more of a logistics concern, like they just think that doing such a thing would necessitate too big a change to entry procedure, likely slowing entry down too much? Or a more general logistics concern of they're not set up in person or online to do it that way, and changing now would be more trouble than it's worth?
Dave Chappelle had a 2-ticket limit, where the purchaser and a guest was allowed. The tickets were purchased via Ticketmaster, and whomever was at the door was checking the tickets against our IDs. As a matter of fact, they went through the line ahead of time to match tickets to IDs to ensure we could get in quickly. Just adding this, so as to point out that it's even possible via TM.
Ticketmaster gets paid when the tickets sell. Ticketmaster has absolutely zero interest in stopping scalpers, because scalpers make sure TM makes money.
They have to pretend to care to keep the public from rioting, but they clearly do not.
I wouldn't be surprised if a significant proportion of their business was executive gifts and company bennies, where the whole point was to hand the ticket to someone else.
The Hamilton lottery is not worth your time if you're only going to try it once. 100+ people competing for 12 seats (where each lottery winner can get 2 tickets). And now there is an online component, which means you are competing against even more people.
Scalping was made legal in New York a few years ago, pushed by a legislative leader just sentenced to 12 years in prison for bribery and extortion.
The old law barred resale for profit, which kept scalping underground and prices under control.
Now you have conditions where a monopolist (Ticketmaster), who also operates a scalping^H "resale" site who (shockingly!) is having trouble stopping bulk buyers. I'm sure the usurious fees they earn on ticket purchase and resale encourages them to halt the process.
I'm not sure that any anti-resale laws would have reduced the scalping or the scalped prices noticeably, considering just what a hot ticket show this is. I've been in NYC for over 10 years and I've never seen such buzz about a Broadway show as this.
I don't live in NYC anymore, but I did for a little over a decade. I recall The Book of Mormon had an enormous buzz as well. I had friends stay at my place a couple times so they could come to town to see the show.
all those other businesses add value to the supply chain. While ticket resellers can add value but when they purchase a large portion of the ticket supply they are adding little value.
Does anyone honestly think the performances can only sell out because of scalpers willing to nobly buy large quantities for resale?
I strongly suspect they want it this way: promoters and performers like the aura of hard-to-get tickets, long lines, and sold-out shows. Plus, they can risk public derision and boycotts if they actually tried to sell at the market clearing price -- people are more tolerant of paying a big markup from some random guy for the exclusivity than buying it openly at the same huge markup from a faceless corporation.
I was informed at some point recently that a lot of the reselling is in fact done by the theatre. This allows them to make more money on crowded showtimes without looking like the bad guy.
>The Broadway hit “Hamilton” is making millions. It could be making millions more if not for scalpers snapping up seats and hawking them for $2,000 a piece or more.
bingo: I'd feel much better about paying $1000 for a ticket if I knew it was going straight to LMM and the rest of the show's cast/creative, instead of some random dude on StubHub.
I think what the writer is trying to say is that the musical is leaving money on the table by not charging the market rate. The wording make it sound like it's the scalpers' fault, but they've helped to reveal the price buyers value the tickets. So, they could up their premiums.
"It’s become such a problem that the show’s producers are considering almost doubling premium-priced "Hamilton” tickets to $995 to keep more of the profit for themselves, according to the New York Post."
Is there some reason a scalper can buy tickets before you? I assume they are camping out to grab the tickets as soon as they are on sale. No reason you couldn't do the same and score a few.
Now, if you don't want to sit in front of your computer at 5am to buy tickets before they sell out, then the scalper is offering to do that for you for a price.
Yes because scalpers buy as many tickets at one time as they can, lowering your chances of getting tickets even if you are up at 5am trying to buy them. “Brokers snatch up at least 50%, if not more, of these tickets,” says Josh Baron from: https://www.buzzfeed.com/perpetua/6-reasons-why-its-so-hard-...
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadand THIS is why ticket scalpers suck. Literally the only options to see Hamilton any time this year are to pay ridiculous rates ($1000-2000 each for good seats) to a scalper, or enter the same-day lottery and pray.
I predict it's only going to get worse now that Hamilton has grabbed 16 Tony Award nominations (and is likely to win a truckload of them).
I bought tickets from Stubhub 2 months ago on the very low end of that range. And they were very good seats for a Saturday night show that I bought day of. I would have assumed that less good seats on other nights of the week would be much cheaper?
Or maybe prices have risen significantly in the last two months?
You might be able to find better prices for, e.g. a Sunday matinee when LMM isn't performing, I suppose.
By not allowing incredibly devoted fans to participate in an auction for tickets, they are actually making shows less accessible for the people who want it most. It's unfair that you can get to see a performance for $50 because you happened to get a ticket, but I am unable to even if I'm willing to pay $500.
The person who can only afford to pay $50 might consider it unfair that they can't get to see it just because you can afford to pay $500.
Tickets go on sale for $100, and 100 are bought by a single scalper for $10000. The scalper now needs to sell only 10 tickets at the market rate to break even. Since he only needs to sell 10, he starts by trying to sell them for $1500, knowing he'll initially have few sales, but that he can lower his price later if he needs to.
Now what you have is tickets being sold for $1500, and likely empty seats in the theater. The show is making 1/10 the income it might have made and won't be able to run as long, so even fewer people can see it.
The larger the margin between market rate and actual rate, the fewer people who will see it, the shorter the show will run, and the more expensive tickets will be for normal people.
The smart move is for the theatre to sell all tickets at a falling price: every day, tickets for the show on day X are cheaper than they were yesterday by an amount determined by how many tickets were sold. All seats will be sold at the market rate and scalpers have little margin to take.
Problem is that everyone wants to see the major stars and won't be as interested in a different cast. Or maybe they will. The touring show opens in Chicago this fall. We'll see.
It's in the shows interest (energy, PR, etc) to have all seats consistently full.
http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Giants-Web-site-facil...
Could there be something else stopping ticket sellers from doing the same?
edit: a word
My guess is it's something in the "that's just not the way it's done" family... Perhaps their venue controls ticket sales and doesn't care, or they have an intermediary like Ticketmaster who doesn't care. Or maybe it's more of a logistics concern, like they just think that doing such a thing would necessitate too big a change to entry procedure, likely slowing entry down too much? Or a more general logistics concern of they're not set up in person or online to do it that way, and changing now would be more trouble than it's worth?
They have to pretend to care to keep the public from rioting, but they clearly do not.
Why not auction all tickets, and if you want to give people the chance to see it for cheap, have lottery tickets which require ID?
Scalping was made legal in New York a few years ago, pushed by a legislative leader just sentenced to 12 years in prison for bribery and extortion.
The old law barred resale for profit, which kept scalping underground and prices under control.
Now you have conditions where a monopolist (Ticketmaster), who also operates a scalping^H "resale" site who (shockingly!) is having trouble stopping bulk buyers. I'm sure the usurious fees they earn on ticket purchase and resale encourages them to halt the process.
The industrial scalping market has effects all over the place. Good "Lion King" tickets in Schenectady, NY sold for $500 recently.
How much money do staffing agencies, warehouses, ecommerce sites, and the entire middle man industry make each week?
I salute the ticket resellers. Thank you for creating a secondary market for tickets.
I strongly suspect they want it this way: promoters and performers like the aura of hard-to-get tickets, long lines, and sold-out shows. Plus, they can risk public derision and boycotts if they actually tried to sell at the market clearing price -- people are more tolerant of paying a big markup from some random guy for the exclusivity than buying it openly at the same huge markup from a faceless corporation.
That makes absolutely no sense.
"It’s become such a problem that the show’s producers are considering almost doubling premium-priced "Hamilton” tickets to $995 to keep more of the profit for themselves, according to the New York Post."
Now, if you don't want to sit in front of your computer at 5am to buy tickets before they sell out, then the scalper is offering to do that for you for a price.