Nothing new here. I remember when the Cubs stopped selling tickets via a line wrapped around Wrigley to a wristband "to cut down on scalpers". I lucked out and ended up 57th in line. You could only buy 4 tickets per game so in theory only 240 tickets would have been sold by the time I got to buy. I was only looking for bleacher seats (cheap and fun at the time) and there were about 5000 seats available. By the time I got to buy every weekend bleacher seat was sold out with the exception of April, May and September. Who bought the other 4700 seats? The answer of course was the scalpers. Back then (90's) bleacher seats were $12 and the ball park was down the block so it was a nice option on the weekend to go see the game, have a few beers (4 for $18), it wasn't much more expensive than going to the movies. Now it's $35 for the same seat and beers are $18 each, Wrigley is still down the block but at those prices I'll just catch the matinee for $12 and a $12 popcorn.
Based on nothing, I think tickets for high-demand events should be allocated: 1/3 first-come first-serve for in-person sales (you pay with your time), 1/3 random assignment (you have to get lucky), 1/3 auction to highest bidder (pay with your money).
The article addresses the problem with random assignment: each scalper can enter the lottery hundreds of times, but each regular person can enter only once.
Good points. Then, I guess the solution is that only auctioned tickets can be anonymous, whereas queued and lottery tickets must be sold to the real name of the person who requested it.
Make the tickets named, and require ID upon entry. Completely kill the resale market.
If people can’t make it, they can return the ticket for the same amount of money they bought it, up to one week before the event. Or they can get cancellation insurance just like some would on holiday plane tickets. Returned tickets go back on sale into the main pool.
As far as I can tell, the scalping problem would be gone instantly.
But there’s a reason nobody is doing it: they’re making money hand over fist.
I've been exposed to precisely this mechanism at "mom & pop" venues; it works great, and no one's upset (there's a loss of last-minute transfer between friends, but that's the cost). Ticketmaster self-scalps: it's in their best interest not to have this mechanism.
The problem is legitimate ticketholders don't like this. You're going to a concert with your SO that you had to buy tickets for six months in advance, then you break up and get together with someone else. Now instead of transferring the ticket you paid for to your new SO, you're stuck either going with your ex (that'll go over well) or going by yourself. People don't like this.
I’ll take not having shared seating with a potential future partner due to the breakdown of my relationship with my current partner over spending $450/person to see a band I liked back in high school.
But you still don't even get to see the band, because if they sell the tickets below the market clearing price they sell out before you can get one and then aren't available at any price.
That doesn't work for honest people when the person who used their ID is the one who can't go.
And you now have a new scalping model where you create a website for people to submit their IDs ahead of time and pay a fee to have someone try to get them a ticket in the two seconds before they sell out, but they buy 2-4 tickets per ID and resell the others.
Simple fix for that: require the concertgoer to physically present the ID when arriving at the concert.
They can also just disallow multiple tickets per ID.
To clarify the proposed process: you buy one or more tickets online, and you're required to put full names to those tickets when you purchase them. You are not permitted to change those names later. You can return the tickets (minus some "restocking" fee), but that's all you're allowed to do; no transfers.
When the time comes to attend the concert, everyone brings their ID, and the ticket checker matches the names on the IDs with the names on the tickets. No match, no entry.
There is certainly one hole: tickets are still scarce, so someone could set up a website where they claim they'll guarantee you a ticket (because they have fast internet connections and legions of low-paid grunts clicking furiously at the website), and then charge a large premium on top of the ticket price in order to do so. You either give them your Ticketmaster (or whatever) account credentials, or they even "give" you an account after buying the ticket for you, all with your name on it. I do think this would inflate some ticket prices, but I feel like the situation would still be much better than it is now.
On top of that, the ticket seller can just ban these sorts of websites. Again, not perfect, as they'll do everything they can to circumvent the ban, but you can probably make things difficult enough for them that their value prop doesn't really work out all that well, and they fail to get tickets often enough that they end up with a bad reputation.
Really, ticket scalping should just be illegal, and law enforcement should crack down hard on these kinds of outfits.
> Simple fix for that: require the concertgoer to physically present the ID when arriving at the concert.
That doesn't fix it. The person whose ID it is actually wants to go to the concert. They show up with their ID and activate the other tickets sold by the scalper.
> you buy one or more tickets online, and you're required to put full names to those tickets when you purchase them.
Then you're back to pissed off customers because they have multiple tickets they actually want to use and can't change who gets to go when one person can't.
> I do think this would inflate some ticket prices, but I feel like the situation would still be much better than it is now.
A lot of things like this work okay the first time you try it, then entrepreneurs find a way to improve the efficiency of the market.
Fundamentally the problem is that you're trying to violate the law of supply and demand. If you want scalpers to stop existing, raise the price of tickets to match what people will pay for them. If you want prices to go down, move to a venue with more seats.
> You’re missing the point: every ticket has a name. Not the same single name on 4 tickets. Every ticket is personalised.
At which point you can no longer exchange one for a different name and have pissed off legitimate customers. That was the point of the suggestion that you could get 2-4 tickets in the same name -- so that you could change 1-3 of them in case of a conflict. But then scalpers can too.
So what? People will always be pissed off. Millions are pissed off today because they had no chance to afford tickets to popular shows thanks to scalpers.
Plane tickets are all virtually as this person described. Someone in your party can’t go to Jamaica with you because they got sick/broke up with you/whatever? Nobody cares, AND no refunds. This Names-and-IDs policy is actually much nicer than plane tickets, because refunds at face value would be allowed. If you’re lucky you might even be able to rebuy the same ticket for your new gf if you’re quick.
> Millions are pissed off today because they had no chance to afford tickets to popular shows thanks to scalpers.
They had no chance to afford tickets to popular shows thanks to artists not providing enough seats or dates. If there is more demand than supply then your options are high prices or shortages.
> Plane tickets are all virtually as this person described. Someone in your party can’t go to Jamaica with you because they got sick/broke up with you/whatever? Nobody cares, AND no refunds.
People do in fact care, it's a common gripe about airlines screwing you, and the people who care a lot pay extra for a transferable ticket -- which are available. Which in turn allows the airlines to point to that and say you should've bought the more expensive ticket. But you can only say that if it's available, and if it is then the scalpers just buy those.
Wouldn't this account for well under 10% of potential ticket buyers, though?
Sure, if you're in a relatively new relationship, planning anything at all 6 months out is a gamble. That's just life.
At any rate, you'd still have the option of returning your ex's ticket, and buying a new one in your new partner's name.
Or you can return both tickets, and buy a new pair that are guaranteed to be seated next to each other. Sure, presumably you didn't get full price on the ticket return, but, again, that's life.
The funny thing is that, while on occasion this situation might come up, and someone will end up paying a little more to see the show, overall they (and everyone else) will pay less to see shows in general, since scalping has been (in theory) eliminated. So for most people who see a show every now and then, they'd still come out ahead under this system.
> Wouldn't this account for well under 10% of potential ticket buyers, though?
For this specific example? Sure. But then people have other kinds of conflicts with other people.
And pissing off even 10% of your customers is bad.
> At any rate, you'd still have the option of returning your ex's ticket, and buying a new one in your new partner's name.
By then they're sold out. You can't get any other tickets. If you could exchange the ticket you have for one in another name then so can a scalper.
> The funny thing is that, while on occasion this situation might come up, and someone will end up paying a little more to see the show, overall they (and everyone else) will pay less to see shows in general, since scalping has been (in theory) eliminated.
The problem in this situation is not that you have to pay more, it's that you can't go to the concert with your current SO even though you have two tickets. You can get a refund for one or both of the tickets, but you don't want a refund, you want to go to the concert with your new SO.
Their operations were much smaller, though, and arguably they affected overall ticket prices much less. There are only so many hours in the day for you to wait in line (or pay someone else to wait for you) to get tickets. And standing outside the venue for hours trying to sell your tickets is a high-touch, labor-intensive process.
Some of these scalper sites sell tickets that they don't even have yet, which helps give them the capital to actually buy the tickets later.
It's been a long time since I did that but they also had a deal where if you ran a certain number of local NY races you got the chance to buy a bib number. Come to think of it I think you can also get a chance to buy if you have a fast enough time in a qualifying race.
Why do the organizations putting on events like these leave so much money on the table? Why don't they just charge the market-clearing price themselves, leaving no room for scalpers to make any profit?
Artists generally want to have a diverse crowd in terms of disposable income, they don't want to have a crowd of just the people who can/will pay the most.
Touring artist’s absolutely have a say in their ticket prices, after all it directly correlates to how much they will be paid. Once tickets are handed over to promoters and distributors then it becomes out of their control.
Festival appearance rates are agreed on in advance of ticket sales, so tickets prices are the responsibility of festival organisers.
They're going to pay thousands of homeless people to register for the fan clubs of how many artists? Nevermind the logistics of the hiring, the payment alone eats into the margin.
This gets more complicated as they may go after gig economy workers first. They're a perfect target: the scalper's deal would have better reward/effort ratio than Uber, DoorDash, Deliveroo, et al.; gig workers look "normal" in ways homeless don't, and are desperate for cash to keep them from becoming homeless.
At that point, would scalper's contribution be net positive? Net better than it was? I'm not sure how to answer that.
Run it like an airline, where your name is on the ticket and you don't get in unless it matches your ID. Either that or your ID is the ticket. Just bloop that big barcode on the back of your ID with your phone when you buy the admission, then let the guy bloop it again at the door when you go to the show. That would make some scenarios harder, like the trope about your boss handing you two extra tickets she can't use, but there's probably some way to bloop around that without giving the scalpers unfettered bloops.
1/ attending a concert is not a civil right
2/ can't emphasize enough, but _get an ID_. While ID posession was used to discriminate against groups of people, the real problem here is "why doesn't everyone have an ID"?
Is it? In the US, I'm not aware of any way someone can legally drive, be employed, have a bank account, or get a cell phone without having an ID. At the same time, as long as you were registered at birth, getting an ID from scratch is a little bit of legwork and probably less than $100, and that's probably subsidized if you don't have income. The number of people walking around without an ID and no way to get one has to be vanishingly small. I'm sure there's a certain fringe of people who are undocumented, on the run from the law, or otherwise encumbered in their ability to get one, but how far should we bend over to get a ticket fee from those people?
Edit: Dang it, the best answers always come after I close my laptop. "It would be discriminatory if the government didn't provide people a way to get ID. As a business owner, that's beyond the scope of my responsibility. Same as if someone showed up without $5 and wanted to buy a sandwich." ...is another way to look at it.
Every action directed at making tickets more affordable will have the opposite effect of making scalping more profitable. Im amazed that a reverse auction style approach hasn’t caught on, when you are capacity limited it seems nearly optimal for extracting profit and kills the ticket scalping business model.
>it seems nearly optimal for extracting profit and kills the ticket scalping business model.
Also seems nearly optimal for alienating all but your richest fans. The extra profit you might extract from the concert might not actually put you ahead in the long term when fans stop caring about you because of your profit maximizing business practices.
What good is that when the scalpers and not your fans are the ones to benefit? All you're doing is screwing your fans even more because now they have to risk getting ripped off by a scam since tickets are only available from shady third party jerks.
If demand is so high that people can't afford tickets and you want to do something for the fans, put the game in a bigger stadium.
So hire some designated middleman to wear a villain mustache and claim to be taking a huge cut on paper while actually giving all of the money back to the artist under NDA.
The theory seems to be that they give the money to the venue instead of the artist, which causes the artist to not have to pay for the venue. Which is totally different, as you can imagine.
> It has been long known among industry figures that artists regularly move tickets through backdoor channels to directly profit from resale marketplaces while shunting blame to “scalpers” when fans are unable to get tickets at face value. Ed Sheeran’s management admitted the practice itself just last year, while rumors have swirled about other big names doing the same via their own held-back tickets that fans never have a shot at. The same regularly happens with professional sports teams.
> Barry Kahn, of Texas-based dynamic ticket pricing consultancy Qcue, doesn’t believe artists should be judged for using tactics including scalping their own tickets (or it’s newer twin, “Platinum” and dynamic pricing to demand). “The issue is the transparency,” he told Billboard. “If they get caught doing something they have said is wrong, then they are deceiving their fans.”
> In this specific instance, Billboard says that Metallica’s management moved up to 4,400 tickets per show over 20 concerts on the tour through intermediaries, masking the process by packaging the tickets as if they were held back for a sponsor.
Take it worth a grain of salt, I have no idea how true it is but it's at least a plausible explanation as to why artists may not want scalpers eliminated.
As opposed to alienating fans who don't know how to use bots, or fans who don't have the time to buy tickets the moment they drop, or fans who are unlucky.
> It’s funny, but “extracting maximum profit” isn’t the only motivation some people have in life.
[citation needed]
More seriously though, it's true that people - arguably most people - have other motivations than purely materialistic ones. But, like every market, cultural events are a dynamic system. It follows a trajectory over time.
Slightly more greedy people have better outcomes than slightly less greedy ones. The least successful get filtered out. Iterate that over time. What results do you expect?
And yes, this is a general argument of why the market first makes things better, then makes them all go to shit. And it is confirmed by real world. Exceptions involve some factors that counteract the dynamics described above. Do you see such factors at play in entertainment event industry? I don't.
> Slightly more greedy people have better outcomes than slightly less greedy ones. The least successful get filtered out. Iterate that over time. What results do you expect?
Define "better outcomes" and "Least successful".
The most coveted and arguable most successful music festival in the UK, Glastonbury, operates in the way I described. A variety of other festivals in the UK do too, often due to the politics of the organisers (see, for example, Beautiful Days)
> Do you see such factors at play in entertainment event industry?
Yep, where people make it happen I see them at play and working well to create systems that both the organisers and the public want, and which lock out the third-party profiteers. It would be nice to see such things become more widespread. Though I agree we are less likely to see that where 'the industry' is in control, rather than artists or passionate individuals.
I don't know if artists negotiate ranges on ticket prices. But I assume most would want to make an acceptable amount of money and allow most of their fans to afford tickets, not just the rich ones.
Most of their fans aren't going to the show at all. Demand far outstrips supply.
In effect the number of less wealthy fans who can get into a show is a lottery. Ideally you would do just that, lottery off some tickets at affordable rates and sell the rest at market rate.
But the market has adjusted to that too and re-sellers dominate such lotteries. If you offer the opportunity for arbitrage, the market will take advantage of that opportunity.
So just sell at market rate, cut out the re-sellers entirely.
It’s a perfect case for market segmentation - cheaper “less desirable” tickets that are NOT transferable (eg., tied to ID somehow, I could see them being cryptographically tied to a Apple Pay account, for example) and more expensive transferable tickets designed to soak the rich.
Ticket revenue is just one source for the artist who is betting they make more from the lifetime value of a fan buying their brand (merch and historically listening to their music, but I don’t know if streaming changed those numbers). It’s like a giant advertisement for their brand - early on in a band’s life, it can even be a loss leader after all the crew is paid.
A key part of that concert experience is other people’s excitement too. For one extreme, a Grateful Dead show was basically a mini festival with one act. The crowd before, after and during is an integral part of the experience. Empty seats don’t tell others about the event or participate with the other ticket holders, degrading the value for artists and many concert-goers.
So, a Dead show that sells just a few hundred many-many-thousand-dollar tickets might sit on a maximum supply / demand curve for the venue or scalpers just looking at ticket revenue, but could destroy much of the value of the event for the band and it’s everyday fans who want the event experience and want it for as many people as possible.
For the same reason why artists use Ticketmaster. Do you think they are stupid and just hand over ticket distribution to a company that routinely charges 30$ fees to a 40$ ticket?
No, artists and producers aren't stupid, they get the most of the money from the Ticketmaster "fees". But when a fan sees a 70$ ticket, they'd may decide Bruce Springsteen (net worth 650$ million) isn't a man of the people. When they see a 40$ ticket and a 30$ ticket, fans just swear at Ticketmaster.
I'm confident in a few years we'll read about how scalping enterprises do profit sharing with artists and producers.
Yes, most go to the venue, which the artist/producer would have had to pay for (from the ticket price) otherwise. Because money is fungible it doesn't really matter if they pay the artist, or if they pay for the artist's expenses.
What matters is how much fees they charge and how much do they keep. Can't find it right now, but I remember an article claiming they rarely keep 50% of their fees.
I don't have a source but I've read the same thing; that a lot of what ticket master takes in is getting bounced around. It's a view I find very plausible intuitively. The artists (esp. the "name" artists) have all or nearly all of the leverage - whatever the ticket costs above what you'd paid if you bought at the gate is money they're leaving on the table.
Generally there's a promoter in the middle. They sign the artist and then have a deal signed with their ticketing partner. They'll then sign contracts with venues for the given tour. The contracts between promoters and ticketing agencies vary a lot depending on the country but that's how it often works in the states.
The "face value" (base price) will usually be determined between the artist and promoter, the venue will apply a fairly generic fee on top, as will the ticketing provider.
How much of the face value goes to the artist will depend on their leverage in the contract with their promoter. This is usually best improved by the confidence that the venue will sell out, meaning artists with bigger audience and social media presence will usually get the best terms.
I don't have a paper or article I can link to as a source, but I have experience in the industry.
No. LiveNation is mostly in the business of signing deals with large venues to be the exclusive promoter of shows, and Ticketmaster thus is their exclusive ticket seller. Ticketmaster also sign deals with other promoters to be their exclusive ticket outlet, so even in instances where LiveNation isn't the promoter, you may have to deal with TM.
This is not how concerts work, and artists and producers don't get any money from Ticketmaster fees. In most cases, a promoter pays an artist a flat fee to perform. The promoter then markets the show and gets the ticket sales, and Ticketmaster gets Ticketmaster fees.
Unfortunately Ticketmaster is owned by LiveNation, and they are far and away the biggest promoter. They sign exclusive rights with large venues. My local 25,000 seat amphitheater has a deal with LiveNation. I can only get tickets to shows there through Ticketmaster.
Artists hate Ticketmaster too (some have sued them) but if you want to do an arena tour, good luck avoiding them. Artists use them because they don't have a choice. The number of large venues that don't use TM is growing, my local basketball arena uses SeatGeek.
The one concession TM makes is to their fan clubs. Artists get to sell tickets directly to a limited number of fans. If you love an artist, joining their fan club will probably save you the annual fee back in one show.
> Unfortunately Ticketmaster is owned by LiveNation, and they are far and away the biggest promoter. They sign exclusive rights with large venues. My local 25,000 seat amphitheater has a deal with LiveNation. I can only get tickets to shows there through Ticketmaster.
So mostly what GP said. This is not an accident, and everyone is in on it.
I don't think it's the same at all - the crucial point of difference is whether artists deserve to get blamed for this situation. Various people in the thread have claimed that they do, that they're receiving kickbacks from scalping or a portion of Ticketmaster fees on resales, but your parent comment claims that this is not the case and misrepresents the ticket sale structure.
I think that's a critical difference, because if the current situation is actually a big reputation laundering scam by artists, there's not much we can do about it without regulation. If it's not, if in fact most artists are as unhappy about the situation as their fans, there's quite a lot they can do about it and should be encouraged to do so even if it makes getting a ticket significantly harder (e.g. showing ID for purchased tickets at the venue and only allowing 1:1 refunds, not resales of tickets).
Of course, if producers are receiving a significant portion of earnings on resales, some of that does "trickle down" to artists in the form of higher performing fees on the basis of anticipated resales. But that's a small fraction of added value for most artists, and it's coming at a level of indirection that means ticket sellers are incentivized to raise fees to their highest possible levels after artists get paid, because that's pure profit for them. I think it's entirely reasonable to believe that artists aren't happy about this payment structure, even if they do see slightly higher show income as a result, and want a range of fans to be able to attend their shows.
I understood there is no difference between what the comment I replied to is describing and what its parent is, because of the (brought by others elsewhere in the thread) fungibility of money. Whether the artists get their cut directly, or just enjoy cheaper venues because Ticketmaster happens to be owned by the same party that owns the venue, that's literally the same benefit - just instead of being paid directly, the artists get their expenses covered. That's my understanding of what's going on with plenty of those deals.
Artists don’t pay for venues, promoters do, so they’re not cheaper, but your point that Ticketmaster has more revenue (and thus more to pay the artist) so they may get paid more indirectly is valid. But also, Ticketmaster has a monopsony. Or nearly so. One might argue (and many artists have ) that the artists would get paid more if there were a market for their tour rather than one company owning the vast majority of large venues.
The only things I’m sure of are that A. consumers would benefit if there was an actual market and B. It is hard to imagine one happening without government intervention.
> One might argue (and many artists have ) that the artists would get paid more if there were a market for their tour rather than one company owning the vast majority of large venues.
I think that's where the "reputation laundering" angle comes into play. With its unique position, Ticketmaster gives artists plausible deniability. "Nothing we can do about it", "evils of capitalism", "a monopolist captured the market, government doing nothing", etc. - say artists, for whom the image they project is a core part of their market value. With a properly functioning competitive market, those same artists would have to either get much less, or answer some inconvenient question about ticket pricing.
Yes that’s true but also, one may argue, as Pearl Jam did in court, that Ticketmaster has a monopoly on ticket sales and this hurts Artist revenues. Artists would get more from those fees if they could negotiate with multiple different ticket sellers. And that was before TM merged with Live Nation which is also now the exclusive promoter at most of the biggest venues in the world, and by most, I mean over 2/3.
It’s a monopsony.
The only real winners are Ticketmaster live nation
Nope Ticketmaster shares fees with its clients, this is from the Ticketmaster help...
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The standard tickets sold on Ticketmaster are owned by our clients (venues, sports teams or other event promoters) who determine the number of tickets to be sold and set the face value price.
...
Ticket fees (which can include a service fee, order processing fee and sometimes a delivery fee) are determined in collaboration with our clients. In exchange for the rights to sell their tickets, our clients typically share in a portion of the fees we collect.
...
Service Fee and Order Processing Fee
In almost all cases, Ticketmaster adds a service fee (also known as a convenience charge) to the face value price, or in the case of a resale ticket to the listing price, of each ticket. The service fee varies by event based on our agreement with each individual client.
In addition to the per ticket service fee, an order processing fee is typically charged. Unlike the service charge, which is added to each ticket, the processing fee is charged once for each order. The processing fee offsets the costs of ticket handling, shipping and support and as a result, the processing fee is generally not charged on in-person box office purchases. In some cases, Ticketmaster's order processing costs may be lower than the order processing fee. In those cases, Ticketmaster may earn a profit on the order processing fee.
In both cases, these fees are collected by Ticketmaster and typically shared with our clients.
Right, their clients aren’t artists. They’re the venues or promoters who signed with them, and the promoter is usually LiveNation, who owns them. Sometimes the venue is too.
That’s exactly what I said. They pay for exclusive ticket sales. They’re just defining “client” as who they pay and notice they do not say artist, which they surely would if they ever did.
Because, ironically, a show that only rich people can afford to attend will be pretty terrible. Rich people tend not to loudly enjoy the show, so the atmosphere isn't there. This is bad for the rest of the audience and for the performer. It's hard to put 100% in when all you can see is a bunch of people staring solemnly at you.
It happens in football (soccer for my American friends) for clubs like Man Utd (and probably Man City now) where ticket prices are out of reach of working class fans. The visiting fans make a point of trying to out-sing the local support then insulting them for only being there because the club is winning trophies. All football fans know the song "where were you when you were shit!"
That's the difference between being almost, but not quite at the top, vs. actually being there. Dean would've fared differently if he won first, and then did his scream.
But either way, both Dean's and Ballmer's examples are marketing stunts, a calculated performance - that's entirely different to rich people honestly letting loose at a concert.
Poorer people who would just stare do not buy tickets. Simple as that. When the price gets very high, you are filtering attendees by who has a lot of money - not by enthusiasm.
If the ticket is cheap for me, I can go even if I don't like the band too much. And with very expensive tickets, many enthusiasts won't pay while rich non-enthusiasts are bigger part of audience.
Meanwhile, if tickets are cheaper but you have to jump hoops to get them, you get enthusiasts.
Toronto Maple Leafs games too, if you're watching wearing a suit because you're actually using it as a client bribe, then you're not as into the game as you could be.
You can do dynamic pricing. Have a reasonably strong identifier ticket app that is tied to a device, ip address, voice print id, and phone number. Have people put in bids for the ticket (with a minimum floor price), weigh each bid by some determination of "fan strength", like willingness to travel larger distance to see a show, then select winners based on a bell curve distribution of bids.
More detail: he doesn’t sell them, he has his crew go pull excited fans from the regular admission area and bring them to the front, where they’ll be even more excited. He doesn’t leave the front row empty.
> Rich people tend not to loudly enjoy the show, so the atmosphere isn't there
Citation needed.
Rich people are the main audience at all organized events of all kinds. Do you think you can take you and your kids to an NFL game if you're poor? The main attendees of Taylor swift? Women in late 20s - mid 30s working corporate jobs.
Billy Joel: “I’d look down and see rich people sitting there, I call ’em ‘gold chainers.’ Sitting there puffing on a cigar, ‘entertain me, piano man.’ “They don’t stand up, make noise, [they just] sit there with their bouffant haired girlfriend lookin’ like a big shot. I kinda got sick of that, who the (heck) are these people, where are the real fans?”
Says Billy Joel most likely far richer than at least a typical front row seat buyer. Btw while I would consider myself a fan I'm not obsessed with Billy Joel and also he has certainly how do you say 'his issues' (ie addictions and so on).
Also who is to say because they don't act ridiculous or obsessed they aren't 'real' fans. What is a real fan anyway? I hadn't heard there was a universal accepted definition.
Reminds me of John Lennon’s famous cheeky jibe at the Royal Variety Performance:
“For our last number I’d like to ask your help. Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewellery.”
Did you not hear the super bowl team chants played on the speakers? Atmosphere of a snooze fest. That show is way too far in the exclusivity direction to allow any fun at all.
I can’t speak to the USA sports, I’m specifically talking about English football which is generally quite affordable for most working class people. I’ve bought tickets to games myself.
They might be doing that already by acting as scalpers. I don't see why the solution isn't simply what airlines are doing where you register a ticket to a name and it's non-transferable.
Well, one reason is that it would let venues in for a lot more work to properly check everyone's ID. At an airport, Homeland Security pays for that part
Both venues and airlines normally segment the market by how good a seat you get.
A lot of venues already check a id’s at the entrance for alcohol sales, and that doesn’t seem to hold up the line, especially with modern machine readable id’s. No reason why that couldn’t be applied to name checks too.
The flying public pays Homeland Security / the TSA a $5.60 fee to check ID and perform screening.
The cost to the concert going public of ID verification would probably be a lot lower than the costs scalping imposes. And the concert venues could certainly capture more than $5 per concert goer by raising prices closer to what the typical person actually pays.
Not with digital ticketing. No ID is necessary. It is a rotating code so you can't just ship someone a screenshot. You have to have the Ticketmaster app, logged into your account. Unless scalpers want to start giving away their entire Ticketmaster accounts, it would stop it easily.
At Hamilton shows, ticketmaster used the payment card as the ticket, you simply swipe the card used to buy the tickets at the entrance and it pulls it from that data. Seems like a fair compromise, assuming it’s actually secure.
Same number but not same the community, since this pushes out anyone who can't afford it. Artists are usually not MBA types trying to minmax profit and want to appeal to more than just the privileged Coachella crowd.
The artists may not be MBA types but their managers are. If the artists really cared they could do like Garth Brooks (?) and book repeated nights in one venue until the shows no longer sell out.
(I may be wrong about the artist but recall reading about at least one act that toured like this).
Which, honestly, is a much more pleasant experience than going to the concerts under discussion. I don't enjoy the music as much, but I also don't have to jump through hoops, compete with scalpers, or put up with the rank smell of weed hanging over the concert venue.
Weed smell is awful. That's the worst part about decriminalization. I can't wait for society to treat burned weed with the same shame and looks of distaste as they do with burned tobacco.
I smell it everywhere now. It makes me furious when I'm in a public park with my kids and clouds of nasty smoke are wafting around.
Yeah. I've always been all for legalizing weed. Hell, I've been for legalizing all drugs because I don't think the government should police what adults put into their bodies. But the ridiculously thoughtless behavior of people smoking weed in my state (CO) has really made me question those positions. In theory we should trust adults to make their own choices, but in practice it seems that enough people are antisocial assholes that maybe we shouldn't trust. I am sick and damn tired of being unable to even go run errands sometimes without having to put up with the smell of weed. Which is awful, like you said - I have no idea how anyone can stand to smoke the stuff.
This seems to be a general rule: if some problem is annoying to people with money and clout, and it persists for long, then perhaps it's not actually a problem for those people, but rather a money maker they perpetuate.
I think live performance music is still one of the few things in this hyper capitalist world directed by the performers. I base this absolutely no information expect the interviews I've seen, but it's my impression that performers are heavily involved with everything in a live performance, including the price setting.
That is to say. I think the artist just like the idea of the tickets being affordable to allow their younger and less well off fans access.
I think any argument here has to acknowledge the artists rights in this. Charging more might alleviate the issue, but if private ownership of the performance is to have any meaning, it must include the right to set a price below the market rate. If the artist wants to be "economically inefficient" we as a society must protect that right.
That club down on the corner where the cool touring bands play? They take a 15-20% cut on the hands merch in exchange for the oh so vauablr service of providing maybe a beat up old folding table.
From a cynical marketing standpoint, the perceived composition of the audience is part of the product. The same is true, oddly enough, for universities. Whom you're sitting next to matters, or whom others think you're sitting next to.
Great point. Harvard could charge $500K per year and easily fill out their classes, but they never will because their value proposition epends on being perceived as the smartest, not the richest.
Then the view of greed falls on the organization and the artists instead of on scalpers.
It also is up in the air of the market value is really what people are paying or if it’s being inflated by scalpers. Some people will pay it but I don’t think it’s an accurate view of what the price should be in that situation.
But we saw exactly this with the recent Lorcana release. Local game stores acted like scalpers charging scalper prices, it is hurting the perception of the game of what normal prices are.
When you consider how fashion- and trend-driven music is the optics of tickets getting slashed in price because they haven’t sold for a month are terrible.
There is nothing embarrassing about a Dutch auction. What's the point of generating hype by selling out tickets? All of the tickets get sold out either way, it's just that now more fans end up with tickets instead of scalpers.
The next location or tour people are highly incentivized to snap up the tickets as soon as possible rather than waiting. This can't be the first you've heard of such a strategy.
If it sells out either way, then you will want to buy it before it sells out in both scenarios. It's just in the action scenario you can be sure you will get a ticket.
Buyers do not behave rationally. Without the induced sense of urgency some portion of buyers are going to think better of the purchase. So there is a risk it will not sell out either way.
Have you seen how the dutch flower auctions do it?
Those guys have something like 30 seconds max to hit their mark.
Now those are professional buyers. I think for your amateur crowd you would have to provide a bit more time. perhaps a week. just make it clear what is happening.
And that big clock, have you seen the big clock? if I ever made a dutch auction ticket site A big clock would feature predominantly in the ui. Unfortunately I don't think the flower auctions use the big clock anymore. which is a shame.
Dutch auction + no reselling, or only reselling at the exact price bought or lower. Otherwise scalpers just buy them all as soon as they’re released, and now they do whatever kind of auction they want, with the (previously) max price as the floor.
>Otherwise scalpers just buy them all as soon as they’re released
Scalpers would end up holding the bag if they did that. If no one is willing to pay $10k for a ticket, but then scalpers buy every ticket for $10k each they aren't going to me able to find anyone to resell the tickets to and will end up losing money.
Anyone can protect themselves from being scalped by just participating in the auction.
The scalpers can only charge what people buy it for though. So whatever the scalpers are paying are what the people are willing to pay on average. (This assumes there are any successful scalpers and it’s not just a continuously losing game)
This can't make sense. Then where is the profit for the scalper coming from?
Its also a bit untrue. Its true that yes, people _will_ pay it, but did they need to get that high? Scalpers are like auction bots - not always going to win, but will raise the prices for those who would have bought at an otherwise lower value.
You do understand that scalpers are trying to make money right? That means whatever they pay the venue is less than what they can sell it for. So whatever scalpers pay is still clearly less than what people are actually willing to pay.
Agreed. With the recent Taylor Swift fiasco, if she charged $2k a ticket, she would be viewed as some nightmare of capitalism. Instead, she gets to hide under the guise of ticketmaster since she sold tickets at a lower dollar cost only to be resold at a market clearing price. I have anecdata to say some people won the initial lottery and paid a few hundred for floor seats when the large majority needed to pay the market clearing price on the secondary market. I'd posit this is the real purpose of ticketmaster's monopoly: In exchange for their exclusivity agreements with large venues and artists, thus filling stadiums and providing kick backs, they allow themselves to become the target of venom from the larger market instead of the artists themselves.
How much "view of greed" has fallen on airline companies for fluctuating the price of their seats based on demand?
Sure thing it makes buying air tickets a lot more stressful, but we do get low cost trips if we plan ahead, or a much-needed last time seat if we can afford it.
Because people will pay huge amount more regardless.
Kind of like how when the 4090 released and was being instantly scalped at every website it popped up on then resold for double to triple retail, and yet thousands of redditors were magically “just stumbling on to one totally randomly, oh and my 2050 also sold for $1200!!”
Because while the point is to make money, the point is not to maximize the earnings for tours. Instead, it's to make enough to make it worthwhile, while giving fans "what they want". Artists care about doing fun/good/cool stuff!
This is similar to stuff like auctions to have dinners with certain successful people. Those people have many dinners where they don't ask for a bunch of money from the participant, because then they would only have boring dinners!
The cynical side of me says that they do this to minimize what they have to pay the band for touring - some dodge where perhaps they only pay the band based on what the face value of the tickets are.
Not every event is Taylor Swift and prices are dynamic.
Great example: I bought a bunch of tickets to take my little league to a Mets game, which turned out to be the game where David Wright retired. I sold the leftover tickets, which I purchased for between $12 and $30, for a minimum of $350. We built a batting cage with the proceeds.
On the other side, whenever I’m in the city for a few days, I’ll try to score a cheap premium ticket from a season ticket holder who can’t make the game - and frequently do.
IMO the biggest issue with tickets is that it’s 2023 and we live in a pseudo libertarian business climate. It’s a market that should be regulated, as the ticket platform has an incentive to optimize their own self-dealing. The platform gets a vig for each transfer, so maximizing transactions is the optimal path. I worked for a company whose successful entry into event ticketing prompted a buyout by Ticketmaster.
I was thinking about this recently, and came up with two possible reasons:
1. The enjoyment of attendees can be partly dependent on the enthusiasm of other attendees. Consider the extremes: an audience entirely comprised of people who hardly know the artist, but can afford it Vs an audience comprised of only die-hard fans, irrespective of their ability to afford a ticket. The first has a flat atmosphere, the second, a special one.
2. A simple desire by the artist to make their show available to a cross-section of society (this could be viewed as altruistic, since most other products/services don't usually offer the same thing at a lower price just to help those who can't afford it).
A possible solution to problem 1: If the goal is to ensure that only die-hard fans get the tickets, why not use their spotify/apple music/other histories to work out who's really a fan of that artist? It should be trivial to get a very high degree of accuracy, and would be costly for scalpers to imitate (they'd need a subscription and to listen to random music years in advance).
Also I suspect that it would be trivially easy to script your client to open up spotify and play a never ending stream of Taylor Swift, dumping the audio to /dev/null, and to have multiple tabs playing other popular artists using other accounts, so that at least one account always looked like a superfan.
Alas, every metric that isn’t “paying more money” can be horrendously gamed and corrupted. This is why despite all its flaws, the “price signal” is still the tried and true “least bad way to allocate scarce resources” for most cases.
Also the fact that it's assumed that everyone attending wants to sit in the audience and go crazy and MAKE SOME NOISE. It can and is annoying to many people.
One other thing is artist may want an active crowd for their own benefit ie they are making a video live recording for further sale or to post to youtube whatever. (Point is good for artist but not for many all of those attending).
It’s really disturbing to pass a value judgement about what kind of fans are more desirable than others, and social-engineering it into the pricing structure.
> The enjoyment of attendees can be partly dependent on the enthusiasm of other attendees. Consider the extremes: an audience entirely comprised of people who hardly know the artist, but can afford it Vs an audience comprised of only die-hard fans, irrespective of their ability to afford a ticket. The first has a flat atmosphere, the second, a special one.
Higher ticket prices would lead to more diehard fans
> A simple desire by the artist to make their show available to a cross-section of society
But if scalping is a problem then making tickets cheap doesn’t accomplish this.
In total, this seems to point towards raising initial prices with negative consequence.
> Higher ticket prices would lead to more diehard fans
no? personal utility doesn't work that way in the real world... We have such drastic inequality that $200 is literally impossible for a huge fraction of the population wheras to some people its an afterthought to spend for a laugh. You can literally notice it in a venue when ticket prices are higher, the atmosphere is different, the clothing is different, the energy of the dancing, the singing
profile of somebody with money to spend: 40+, knowledge worker, drained of energy, has a lot of things going on in life
profile of the kind of fan that makes your show trendy: <30, sporadic employment, excess energy, impulsive, carefree
> Ticketmaster now requires text message phone number verification, but they can bypass this by buying “Mobile Virtual Network Operator” phone numbers in bulk from eBay
I’m surprised SMS verification is this ineffective at testing for “human-ness”.
SMS are plaintext that can be obtained via web API. It seems on the face of it to be just about the least effective possible means of verifying human-ness.
The reason SMS verification is popular isn't because it's effective against sybil attacks. It's not. You can get access to phone numbers in bulk for little money.
It's because most honest users only have one phone number, which makes it a useful unique ID for tracking the honest users. Anyone using it should immediately be under suspicion of selling you out.
Well, I mean there's no way I can prove this but I think it has more to do with the fact that compared to email verification ($0.002/hotmail address), CAPTCHA ($0.003/reCAPTCHA), it substantially raises account creation costs because real US/EU phone numbers will be at least a couple cents per verification.
There are a bunch of services that put any SMS received by a bunch of phone numbers on a public website, and they change the phone numbers all the time. You can go to any one of them and use it to create an account for free.
Of course, this is another reason why the practice is harmful -- legitimate users with a legitimate desire to be anonymous will do this, and then if you use the number provided for account recovery, someone can steal their account after the number gets recycled. (This also happens to normies when people change their phone number and don't update it with your service; don't use phone numbers for password recovery. The near-100% probability of being reissued is a disaster.)
But what happens at scale, for actual wholesale-level spammers? They get a contact with a phone carrier who lets them use all their unissued numbers. They operate one of these public SMS websites, which not only doesn't cost them money but turns a small profit because of the ad revenue. They do the same thing, but privately, and sell the availability of thousands of phone numbers to other spammers. Then they resell the SIMs to recover the money because they never actually used any of the prepaid data. Which makes offering the service to other spammers cheap, which keeps the price low if you want to be a buyer instead of a seller. The more people who try to do this on their service, the better this scales, because the customer base increases.
It's just not meant for this and the inconvenience and privacy invasion to legitimate users is unreasonable.
The problem is that we're not testing for human-ness, we're testing for uniqueness. What we want is a button that, when pressed by a particular person, gives them one ticket, and then stops giving them tickets. This requires positive identification of each person buying tickets, which means spending lots of money to prevent people from obtaining multiple identifications.
I suspect verifying government IDs would be a viable uniqueness criterion, except the only thing those IDs can buy you is voting rights in a particular country, which are usually worthless, so these systems aren't attacked. Now imagine if we decided that Taylor Swift ticket purchases had to be verified with ID. You could see, say, a particular country in the global south deciding they're going to just invent people on paper to go buy Taylor Swift tickets specifically so they can scalp them on the open market.
The underlying problem is that so long as a particular economic opportunity exists, whoever is trusted to stop that opportunity from being exploited has an incentive to stab you in the back. Mobile network operators were never intended to be a 2FA code delivery system or Sybil resistance system, so they will totally just let people SIM-swap you or sell numbers in bulk to spammers, because not doing so was never in their job description and their business is not built to defend against such things.
a) is not required to vote in many places (and pushing for that requirement is, in fact, one of the major methods of classist/racist voter suppression), and
b) is required to do various other things, like purchase alcohol, drive, or buy plane tickets.
Due to (b), there is already a thriving black market in fake IDs for various reasons, and of various qualities.
Government-issued ID systems are absolutely attacked, fairly aggressively.
It depends on how much money there's to be made, just like every other counter-abuse measure.
Proof of work is useful for protecting things worth like a thousandth of a cent per transaction. Captchas for something worth 1/10th of a cent. Phone number verification for something worth $0.1-$1. Real-world presence and real-world id checks for things worth $100.
The amount of money you can make scalping tickets is way higher than that, so it's not a useful defense. Doubly so when the cost of the phone verification isn't even per-transaction, but once per account.
For the ticketmaster case, I think what you'd want is some kind of proof of stable liveness at every transaction. It's easy enough to game proof of liveness, or proof of unique identity, at account creation time. Just the classic method of paying people at a parking lot $5 to pass a "wave to the webcam" captcha. But they can't get those same people back for another captcha every time they want to use that account for another ticket. (Though it's possible that deepfakes have rendered webcam captchas effectively worthless in the last year or two, I don't know where the state of the art on deepfake detection for this kind of usecase is.)
I'm pretty sure they do this so they can sell your personal information.
I avoid them whenever possible, but I recently bought a ticket for an event weeks after they went on sale (there was essentially no activity on the map of available tickets that day).
They "unknown error"'ed me at the end of the purchase flow (inside their reservation timeout window). 60 seconds later, the tickets I had tried to purchase were being resold by a scalper.
So, whatever their API is, it allows scalpers to get a feed of tickets that are in the middle of being purchased, then to buy them in the reservation window and offer them for resale with super human speed.
That company is clearly run by crooks. They've repeatedly been brought under investigation for exactly this behavior (for over a decade), so presumably, they are also good at paying out bribes.
I would take off the "/s", because I agree with your statement at face value.
If there are a limited number of tickets but many thousands of fans who are willing and able to pay, then naturally the price goes up. And whether you like it or not, people are either paying with money, or paying with time (e.g. waiting in line), or paying with frustration (e.g. going through opaque scalping networks).
The root cause of the problem isn't scalpers; it's the original concert seller either setting too low a price or too low a quantity.
> The root cause of the problem isn't scalpers; it's the original concert seller either setting too low a price or too low a quantity.
Imagine viewing a pricing scheme that allows more socioeconomic groups access to the arts as the core problem.
We're experiencing a great decline and fall as social services are failing, wages stagnating, and common cultural experiences are being squeezed for profit, only enabling the richest among us to experience any kind of common social event.
And of course, the response is "keep increasing prices until its unbearable", just like we're doing with rent and housing prices, and calling this efficient.
Inflating prices until few can afford it isn't efficient, its just short sighted greed.
Finding a way to suppress prices and remove scalpers is a net benefit for the artists, venues, and patrons.
Access to arts and culture is broader now than it has been ever before in human history. If I want to listen to any Olivia Rodrigo song, I can go to YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Music, search for “Olivia Rodrigo”, and be set. Other than the price of internet access and a device that can connect to the internet, it costs literally nothing, unless maybe I want to pay extra to get rid of advertisements.
Few people think it's good that this is how things work. It would be great if artists could set affordable prices for their concerts and anyone who wanted could come! The contention is simply that that's not how it works, that supply and demand is a law not a guideline we can opt out of if we think it's inconvenient. It would be great if we could all just flap our hands and fly wherever we wanted, but gravity has something to say about that just as economics has something to say about "irrationally" priced tickets. Inventing the aeroplane is a laudable goal but go into it with clear eyes, not wishful thinking, and don't think you can keep gravity at bay by shaming it.
I'm flummoxed by this view but at least empathetic when it comes to food and shelter. When it comes to Olivia Rodrigo tickets I'm legitimately confused.
If Rodrigo decided to abandon her career and only do private shows for Bill Gate's who's business would that be but hers? I think there's room for either disdain or pity for the person who cares about nothing other then money but who's going to make that judgement about another person's motivations? And who would jump in take action on that judgement?
The core problem is reality. Scarcity is reality. Free market economics, supply and demand is reality.
You can try to ignore the equilibrium price point, just as you might ignore gravity, but reality will assert itself. Scalpers will always exist to rebalance the supply and demand equality.
If you want to make something available to more socioeconomic groups, increase the supply. Simple as.
The problem with raising the prices is that people are willing to pay so much for a ticket exactly because they're difficult to get.
If the tickets were actually easily obtainable but more expensive then paradoxically people wouldn't be willing to pay as much for the ticket because of a perceived loss of value.
And as mentioned in the other reply, many people disagree with the "greed is good" philosophy, hence the /s.
The root cause of scarcity here is the number of seats available. The biggest tours routinely book stadiums and arenas with tens of thousands of seats, and despite the scalping and high prices these venues usually sell out. It’s not like they’re all playing tiny downtown clubs. So how exactly are you going to make tickets easier to get?
Scarcity - exactly. Say that an artist is holding a concert and 20 thousand seats are available. But she has 50 million fans all over the world. How do you allocate these 20 thousand seats - who will get them? You can either satisfy the highest bidders, the first in line, or a random lottery. But you cannot choose to disappoint no one. Economics is all about making hard choices, and you can't simply wish them away.
In the past I would routinely pay ticket brokers so as to have a better selection of seats, and to not have to deal with the "on sale" crush. Yes, of course I paid more, and I paid for the convenience, but I don't think I ever paid more than 50% of the face value.
I was a dedicated concert goer back in the day, having spent a lot of time in ticket lines. By time I started, "sleeping overnight" was pretty much over with as an hour or so before the sale, the staff would come out, hand out wrist bands, and then say "#123 is the front of the line" with the 123 being some (I guess random) number from the range of wrist bands they gave out, and everyone else would line up, with #122 wrapping around and being behind whatever the highest band that went out. The premise being there was no reason to show up much more than just before the onsale time, since your arrival time was no guarantee of line position.
Similarly, at one venue, they simply handed out numbers, low number wins. After we picked ours up, there was a guy on the edge willing to buy low numbers.
I was once first in line, but the tickets I got were underwhelming, which made me more cynical about the buying process.
Then, there was that one time, my poor wife, bought us some tickets. There was no way she could have known. There was no way anyone, really, could have known. It was a typical amphitheater layout, and she got the last row of the middle section. When you buy tickets during the mad rush of the opening sale, you just get what they give you, there's really no time to pick or choose.
Amphitheaters tend to be reasonably steep, with the seat in front of you lower, by, perhaps, a foot, so as to offer mostly unhindered sight lines to the stage. But the venue, at some point added a row of seats that were directly behind the row in front of it, with no offset, essentially offering NO view of the stage. It was just awful, and there's nothing she could have done about it.
In the end, I just learned to use a broker for most of the shows I saw. It was a much saner experience, I could pick seats, I could judge value, I could apply intangibles.
Thankfully, the bands I see today are cheap and unpopular, and the sports tickets I just buy from the stadium.
This is the way. There are a ton of bands you've never heard of that are really good, they just aren't popular because only very few acts are ever popular. You can absolutely see good live music cheap.
The problem is that the first hand the ticket touches is a reseller instead of a person that genuinely wants and enjoys the concert.
If the price is set from the Artist, venue, Ticketmaster at prices from $50-200 then they have made that decision.
The local mini libraries on the sides of streets have free books. You could take a book and sell it, but you are not the intended person. The intention of the transaction is for the genuine reader to read the book, put it back, or give new books. This intention is set by the originator of the transaction.
If the Artist wanted the most money, they would set the price accordingly.
Why not raise prices until you hit the supply demand cross? Yes you will visit one event out of three (just as today), but the dignity will remain with you.
I posted this elsewhere in the thread[0], but tldr I believe that concerts give value to fans and artists beyond the ticket price as a giant ad for the band’s brand and a community that forms around it, both pressures that put the optimal price for fans and artists below the market for it as a one time entertainment option. The optimal price point for the artist playing a repeated game is therefore lower than the optimal price point for an event venue or scalper.
Given the tickets often are going on sale a year ahead of the events, they have plenty of time to just price them high and adjust prices down (or up) to satisfy or drive demand. The concept that the tickets all have a face value that’s fixed for all seats (or a couple grouping of) is kinda the weird part to me. The pricing should work like plane tickets. It’s not a market in its purest form and I think that’s ok. I see that coming with lots of issues too.
Protip I've used the last couple years (worked before that as well, but not as much need) - just check StubHub or other second hand markets a week or so before the show.
Generally the scalpers over buy and will start to panic and unload tickets at very good prices the closer the show gets.
It all comes down to whether or not there's enough demand to fill the venue.
If there's plenty of demand, StubHub prices will remain much higher than face value. They absolutely do not ever become available at good prices.
On the other hand, if the venue is larger than demand, then yes -- you can easily score half-price tickets a few days leading up to the show.
But good luck trying to figure out which one will be the outcome. If you delay purchasing, prices are just as likely to keep going up as they are to go down.
I guess this sort of advice is good for the kind of person who sees a show coming up, and thinks it would be cool to go, but is completely fine missing it if the price isn't on the lower end.
Yes if it's a large/unlimited capacity venue this is a good approach. I was at an outdoor festival recently and people were basically giving away tickets on the day of the show.
I don’t know if I buy the premise of the article. We were able to have an opportunity to buy tickets after being waitlisted (I think it was 48-72hrs after the initial presale). But the tickets were extremely expensive. Ticketmaster was scalping not the scalpers.
We did buy Taylor Swift tickets for next year however it was $1k for three tickets.
If I understand correctly, the definition of scalping is to buy and sell quickly in the hope of a profit. Ticketmaster is the originator of the tickets (it is not reselling from anyone else), so it cannot be a scalper.
You can't just make up meanings and assume that scalping means selling at an uncomfortably high price.
IMO, Comic Con has done a pretty fine job at eliminating scalpers. They do this in a few ways:
- Random selection over an hour at ticket sale time that is unique per device, with some 'are you human' checks along the way to make it more difficult to bot.
- Requiring physical delivery of the badge with a maximum number per address, or government issued ID to pick it up in person.
- Random ID checks during the con.
- The first round of sales goes exclusively to people who had a badge before. I.e. you need a code from the back of the badge. So even if you bought it from a scalper, you would now have the code for next year's presale.
None of these are perfect, but it's still the best ticketing process I've seen in recent years.
> So even if you bought it from a scalper, you would now have the code for next year's presale.
i would imagine a scalper would record the code from the badge as well, before giving it to you. So this means they're going to be able to buy just as well, and may be invalidate the code before you get to use it!
Both the scalper and the buyer might be attempting to use the same code in the presale in that case. I'm not sure how they handle that but I imagine that invalidates it for both parties.
Once a venue/promoter/whatever has your money they do not want to give it back. They're not concerned with the secondary market so long as tickets sell. A venue is in the venue business, not the convention of concert business.
The reason why artists don't sell all tickets to rich people is because they think poor people deserve nice things too, so they lower the price. But surely all poor people deserve nice things, not only your fans? Why not sell tickets to rich people and then donate the proceeds to help poor people? It seems to me that this way everyone wins: artists take the same monetary hit they would've taken anyway if they lowered the price, but the difference goes to poor people instead of scalpers.
Because they don't want to donate abstract money to abstract people in the third world, they want to see and talk to their most active and passionate fans
I think unique identity is worth something. This is what the government (federal, state, local, doesn't matter) ought to have a role in protecting. If we had laws that said, for example, you must have proof of identity in the country or state or region where the arena is located, would that not solve this? We used to do it in the 90s by using phone area codes, and this worked pretty effectively: the early 90s was a golden age of low concert ticket prices.
So tell international fans to f*ck off, right? I know many friends who fly to Japan to attend concerts because they genuinely like those artists. Way to stifle free trade and trample on people's preferences.
This seems like a situation ideally suited for biometrics at time of purchase. It limits/complicates the hoarding of tickets and is likely something many actual fans would accept in order to secure tickets for an event.
I’m not going to speak on how this could be hard to implement in other countries, but in my country selling a ticket above the price it was bought for is illegal, and as a result (maybe there is other factors in in play but) it’s basically a non-issue here
Norway! I think it’s somewhat similar in the nearby countries, but I don’t know for sure. You’re not even allowed to add the ticketmaster fee to your reseller price, so it’s techincally cheaper to buy it second-hand
In addition to being generally legal in the US, in key markets, resale cannot legally be constrained. A venue or artist cannot legally institute policies or practices to prohibit resale.
Even if resale were prohibited or technically impossible, it will not necessarily be any easier to get tickets to a high demand event as resale is only a factor when an event has enough demand to sell out far in advance of playing.
Resale is prohibited for (some?) ticketmaster events, unless you resell through Ticketmaster, allowing them to double-dip on the transaction fee.
So, it would be hard for them to make the argument you are making. They directly profit from resale (that they “can’t legally ban”) because their ban on resale is legal.
Make tickets online $500. When you arrive you're given a special ticket-locked voucher that lets you go back to the website and get $480 back (assuming tickets are still $20 like when I was 20 years old).
The idea here is that the scalped ticket would not get the refund.
Scalper pays with their card
Someone purchases the ticket from the scalper
Venue distributes special code (short like 2 letters) that gets tied to your ticket.
If you go back to the website, and enter the code, it's not benefiting your credit card, but the scalpers. So if you purchase from an unauthorized person, you have no reason to enter the code.
Wrong code entered twice - lose your 480.
Numbers could be adjusted to make more sense for more people, as long as it makes the scalper ticket seem ridiculous.
I quickly scanned the article, so I might have missed this, but can someone explain how sites like StubHub get away with what they do? As soon as I found out about them, I immediately thought "aren't these people just scalpers that offer tickets on the internet instead of standing out in front of venues?" If the argument is that they're not scalpers, they're resellers, then I'd like to try selling some concert tickets in a parking lot and see what happens if I made the same claim.
OK but the tickets are going to different people. In most cases (music, sports) you want your tickets going to your best fans because the energy of the crowd improves the performance. We’re not selling wheat futures here. If the tickets instead go to rich people who may or may not show up, it could harm the event.
You're right, the future looks grim. Who knows how many layers of the reseller parfait you have to go through just to get a ticket? At some point it becomes prohibitively expensive and there won't be enough people that can afford to attend events.
I wonder how much of this could be alleviated by selling a certain percentage of tickets at the box office only? I worked in operations for a pretty large concert venue several years ago, and the Jonas Brothers were going to play there (this was at their peak). I remember a good chunk of tickets were only sold at the box office and there was a limit per person (maybe 5 or 6)? I know it's annoying to drive somewhere and wait in line for hours, but I'm sure there are folks out there that would prefer to do that instead of paying a 500% markup on the original ticket price.
It’s the correct move economically, why the hell should scalpers earn that $800 for being parasites, but people are very economically-illiterate so they’ll always see that move as greed.
Very true, but very annoying for the person that wants to attend the concert. You can pretty much flush your chances of getting tickets directly from Ticketmaster right down the toilet.
The concert is the product. A ticket is one approach for artists to control access to the limited experienc, typically while maintaining substantial equity and equality of access.
Of course profit maximization is not the only (or even primary) goal, that's what makes this such a hard problem. If it were, ticket sales would be trivially solved - just auction each seat to the highest bider, close biding near the concert date and prevent any transfers. Of course that's a terrible idea.
The First Sale doctrine is fine, hoarding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding_(economics)) and price gouging not so much. Rights come with responsibilities. Maybe I can buy up a pallet of toilet paper in the middle of a pandemic, but people would be right to think I was a total piece of shit if I did.
Society's tolerance for parasites who do that kind of thing has a breaking point and when the people being negatively impacted get fed up enough to take action I'll have no sympathy for anyone who seeks to make others miserable just so that they can profit off of their suffering.
That’s the sophomoric take. The only reason you had the opportunity to buy a pallet during a shortage in the first place is due to idiotic “price gouging” laws.
During the pandemic the price of toilet paper should have been increased by an order of magnitude at the store level. This would prevent hoarding and it would make sure people who desperately wanted it could get it. Additionally, it would have incentivized producers and sellers to fill demand.
Price controls are the equivalent of rations. They don’t solve anything because they remove all of the incentives.
> and it would make sure people who desperately wanted it could get it.
I fail to see how making toilet paper cost hundreds or thousands of dollars per roll would ensure that everyone who needed it would be able to get it, since many of those who desperately wanted to wipe their ass were unable to work and going into record amounts of debt just to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads.
Producers and sellers were already fully incentivized to sell their goods, as they always have been. They know people want their product and will pay them enough that they can turn a profit. There's no reason to turn toilet paper into an luxury item which only the wealthiest people can afford leaving the majority priced out.
Price controls and rations have their place. Like all tools, the key to is make sure that they are used correctly.
None of what you said makes any sense. Who would pay thousands per roll? Why would the price be that high?
Also, you’re incorrect about producers having the right incentives. They are incentivized by money, not a higher calling to wipe ass.
Price controls have no place at all other than appealing to people’s emotions. They cannot fix or hide supply problems. They can just shift the price signal to lucky intermediaries (scalpers) rather than to suppliers.
You said: "the price of toilet paper should have been increased by an order of magnitude at the store level. This would prevent hoarding". How high do you think the price per roll would have to be to ensure that no one (not even rich people or a small group of rich people working together) could afford to buy up a pallet of toilet paper to try to resell at a higher price? It'd have to be pretty damn expensive. Expensive enough to price out most people since a millionaire can afford to pay so much more than someone making below minimum wage
> Also, you’re incorrect about producers having the right incentives. They are incentivized by money, not a higher calling to wipe ass.
Read my comment again, I never said anything about a "higher calling". I explicitly said that their incentive was profit.
An order of magnitude literally means 10. Not 100,000. Usually it costs like $1-2 a roll, so it should have gone to $10-20 a roll as soon as shelves emptied the first time. That would have meant that people would have bought only what they need (they would not have seriously spent $1000 on TP), but nearly all people could have afforded say $40-50 to get a 4-pack to get them by a week until more were delivered. That minimizes consumers’ excess hoarded inventory— which is where all the TP was.
Instead, IRL, anyone who could find them were buying up several massive packages because it was only the normal ≈$20 for 20 rolls situation, so “heck, buy 60, 80, maybe 100 rolls! Who knows when I’ll get this lucky as to find it again?” Meaning suddenly everyone was buying and warehousing way more TP than they needed in 6 months. Not adjusting prices literally caused the shortage.
It’s incredible how dumb the jump is from “the price shouldn’t be kept at what the pre-pandemic levels were” to “the poors don’t deserve to afford toilet paper”.
Were you alive and shopping for toilet paper during covid? The wealthy could already purchase it whenever from scalpers (a.k.a Amazon resellers). Normal people had to drive from store to store hoping their ration came in and they timed it right.
The hyperbolic interpretation of price controls is, “the poors don’t deserve toilet paper at all unless they win a lottery”.
Most economists believe that price gouging is completely fine. Anti-price gouging laws lead to a misallocation of resources and lower supply where it's needed.
It shouldn't surprise us that people who want to be able to exploit others for profit, or who advocate for those who do, would claim that exploiting others is somehow a virtuous act.
So venues take bribes in the from of kickbacks to look the other way when stubhub commits illegal acts? or does stubhub not operate in states where scalping tickets is a crime?
> to look the other way when stubhub commits illegal acts?
Scalping is only illegal in certain jurisdictions (usually state level, iirc). Presumably stubhub intentionally does not operate in those jurisdictions.
They could sell to people in those jurisdictions, but you could make people sign a thing saying that they actually bought the tickets from another area. Someone could probably come after them, but there's enough plausible deniability to keep it tied up in court for a while, and nobody is going to do that for low level scalping offenses.
Just a theory, and I only scanned the article too, but I think they’ve all learned that this aftermarket stuff is good for their business. At least now that things are digital and have fees attached, because they make money whenever tickets change hands. They get to claim it’s a service as they’re providing liquidity to the market.
Ignoring how Ticketmaster is complicit in all this... it makes me really sad for humanity that people choose a "job" that is 100% about exploiting people. And that's it entirely legal and "normal" for the most part.
A decade ago or so I went on a first date with a woman who was a professional scalper. Unfortunately I didn't have the balls to ask her about the ethics of what she does. (I expect it would have been something like, "if I don't do it, someone else will".) But it really grossed me out; I just can't respect someone who does something like that.
If it's only the worst .01% of humanity, you're talking about 80,000,000 people on the planet.
The Internet has a remarkable way of introducing you to the absolute dregs. It's like computer security: everything not 100% locked down perfectly will belong to someone else minutes later. And even a gigantic corporation with intense experience handling money cannot lock things down 100%.
Most of humanity is ok. But the parts that suck, suck so hard that on the whole I think it averages out to really bad.
My impractical solution: no resale of tickets, and check of ID at the door. It’ll slow things down for check in, and people sick will miss out, but it will collectively bring prices down and increase seat availability.
The last Nine Inch Nails concert I went to was like this. Fans on the email list got advance sales for the event, and you could buy up to two tickets, and had to have your ID match the tickets. It was great, I was able to watch right from the front of the pit, I didn't have to fight through any weird browser nonsense, and I paid exactly the price of the ticket, no more, no less.
This is the only true solution. There’s a few things to work out legally - but they are all solvable. Perhaps there should be a seat transfer portal that opens 24-48 hours before (or at some specified time) for those true extenuating circumstances so family members or friends could get access to tickets. Otherwise, first principles says end transferability to end the secondary market.
That's not what it is now. Right now the scalper gets the difference between the ticket price and what the highest bidder pays. In an auction all that money would go to the artist.
I don't see any reason why platform and artists are alright with tickets reselling, it's madness to me that no artists "consortium" has demanded a change already.
In France, a famous youtuber has partnered with the major platform to forbid any ticket resell for their show, and it worked pretty well. But still it was only one time.
In the US, the ticket selling platform (tickemaster) and the venue (live nation) are usually the same company.
The sale is set up so that ticket resale is forbidden, except that scalpers can resell them via ticketmaster. Ticketmaster gets to charge a second transaction fee when the scalper resells it.
Artists don’t have enough market leverage to bypass this. (Pearl Jam famously tried and failed at the top of their career.)
So, it’s a combination of auction fraud (building a platform for scalpers while pretending to enforce anti-scalper policies) and monopoly power (colluding with venues and probably agents to depress first-sale ticket prices).
I tried to figure out if ticketmaster also owns and operates the scalping companies (allowing two-sided auction fraud). I came up with a firm “maybe”.
If you do, you have to allow a random back off before the tickets are made available for resale. Otherwise there will be “transfers” through sale / purchase.
Treat them like an airplane ticket, you don't see others getting on when it isn't in their name, do you? I don't see people scalping flights to shady people for the past 20 or so years, so it's possible.
Ticketmaster simply won't take the measures, as they have absolutely no financial problem with the way it is now or throughout the history of them existing. Their only problem is trying to figure out how to get scalper prices themselves, which they've already tried and gotten backlash for.
I hate this, but unless your solution can sufficiently answer the question, "How does this benefit Ticketmaster?", it will never happen so long as they have a monopoly on ticket sales.
It's not impractical at all. It effectively combats any scalping and makes ticket sales honest and fair. I've managed ticket systems for large festivals and this is how we did it.
This has been the same scam for decades, there's always motivation, financially, for people to subvert the rules, and ticketmaster wins either way. After stubhub/ebay basically legitimized scalping, it was all over.
Know how I dealt with ticket scalping? I stopped going to shows like that in the 90's, then stopped buying cd's, and eventually stopped supporting the music industry (and media cartels in general).
Could Ticketmaster have any incentive to permit scalpers?
(Besides the potential for personnel to be bribed individually. I'm wondering about whether there's hypothetically an angle for the company to permit scalpers. Maybe to be involved in scalping, as a kind of double dipping.)
Ticket marketplaces take fees on every transaction, so incentivizing multiple transactions on a single ticket is in their interest.
Additionally, resale fees tend to be higher, on a percentage basis, and prices tend to be higher on resale tickets for high demand events.
But this does not mean ticket marketplaces are incentivized to sell to resellers initially instead of actual event-goers.
Primary prices and fees are lower because artists and venues demand it. Ticketmaster's continued ability to source tickets to high demand events is more important than marginal revenue from resale on even a large number of those tickets.
The sky is blue and Ticketmaster is a monopoly and crime syndicate.
There are 2 overall approaches: law enforcement by making resale illegal or doubling-down on capitalism by auction sales rather than enabling arbitrage.
Either way, ticket marketplace(s) must do more to assure limits of tickets and verifying the uniqueness of individuals through technological and physical delivery controls. Since this is a widespread consumer rights issue, it could be grounds for hauling TM before a Senate subcommittee inquiry.
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[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 603 ms ] threadYou can pay people to wait in line for you
> 1/3 random assignment (you have to get lucky)
Scalpers have the means to can create hundreds of accounts
If people can’t make it, they can return the ticket for the same amount of money they bought it, up to one week before the event. Or they can get cancellation insurance just like some would on holiday plane tickets. Returned tickets go back on sale into the main pool.
As far as I can tell, the scalping problem would be gone instantly.
But there’s a reason nobody is doing it: they’re making money hand over fist.
And you now have a new scalping model where you create a website for people to submit their IDs ahead of time and pay a fee to have someone try to get them a ticket in the two seconds before they sell out, but they buy 2-4 tickets per ID and resell the others.
They can also just disallow multiple tickets per ID.
To clarify the proposed process: you buy one or more tickets online, and you're required to put full names to those tickets when you purchase them. You are not permitted to change those names later. You can return the tickets (minus some "restocking" fee), but that's all you're allowed to do; no transfers.
When the time comes to attend the concert, everyone brings their ID, and the ticket checker matches the names on the IDs with the names on the tickets. No match, no entry.
There is certainly one hole: tickets are still scarce, so someone could set up a website where they claim they'll guarantee you a ticket (because they have fast internet connections and legions of low-paid grunts clicking furiously at the website), and then charge a large premium on top of the ticket price in order to do so. You either give them your Ticketmaster (or whatever) account credentials, or they even "give" you an account after buying the ticket for you, all with your name on it. I do think this would inflate some ticket prices, but I feel like the situation would still be much better than it is now.
On top of that, the ticket seller can just ban these sorts of websites. Again, not perfect, as they'll do everything they can to circumvent the ban, but you can probably make things difficult enough for them that their value prop doesn't really work out all that well, and they fail to get tickets often enough that they end up with a bad reputation.
Really, ticket scalping should just be illegal, and law enforcement should crack down hard on these kinds of outfits.
That doesn't fix it. The person whose ID it is actually wants to go to the concert. They show up with their ID and activate the other tickets sold by the scalper.
> you buy one or more tickets online, and you're required to put full names to those tickets when you purchase them.
Then you're back to pissed off customers because they have multiple tickets they actually want to use and can't change who gets to go when one person can't.
> I do think this would inflate some ticket prices, but I feel like the situation would still be much better than it is now.
A lot of things like this work okay the first time you try it, then entrepreneurs find a way to improve the efficiency of the market.
Fundamentally the problem is that you're trying to violate the law of supply and demand. If you want scalpers to stop existing, raise the price of tickets to match what people will pay for them. If you want prices to go down, move to a venue with more seats.
It doesn’t matter that one person can’t come. All the others can go. If you can’t go, you still can get refunded for your ticket cost.
If one person buys multiple tickets, they need to provide all the names of the people who are going. Just like when you book a plane ticket.
At which point you can no longer exchange one for a different name and have pissed off legitimate customers. That was the point of the suggestion that you could get 2-4 tickets in the same name -- so that you could change 1-3 of them in case of a conflict. But then scalpers can too.
Plane tickets are all virtually as this person described. Someone in your party can’t go to Jamaica with you because they got sick/broke up with you/whatever? Nobody cares, AND no refunds. This Names-and-IDs policy is actually much nicer than plane tickets, because refunds at face value would be allowed. If you’re lucky you might even be able to rebuy the same ticket for your new gf if you’re quick.
They had no chance to afford tickets to popular shows thanks to artists not providing enough seats or dates. If there is more demand than supply then your options are high prices or shortages.
> Plane tickets are all virtually as this person described. Someone in your party can’t go to Jamaica with you because they got sick/broke up with you/whatever? Nobody cares, AND no refunds.
People do in fact care, it's a common gripe about airlines screwing you, and the people who care a lot pay extra for a transferable ticket -- which are available. Which in turn allows the airlines to point to that and say you should've bought the more expensive ticket. But you can only say that if it's available, and if it is then the scalpers just buy those.
Sure, if you're in a relatively new relationship, planning anything at all 6 months out is a gamble. That's just life.
At any rate, you'd still have the option of returning your ex's ticket, and buying a new one in your new partner's name.
Or you can return both tickets, and buy a new pair that are guaranteed to be seated next to each other. Sure, presumably you didn't get full price on the ticket return, but, again, that's life.
The funny thing is that, while on occasion this situation might come up, and someone will end up paying a little more to see the show, overall they (and everyone else) will pay less to see shows in general, since scalping has been (in theory) eliminated. So for most people who see a show every now and then, they'd still come out ahead under this system.
For this specific example? Sure. But then people have other kinds of conflicts with other people.
And pissing off even 10% of your customers is bad.
> At any rate, you'd still have the option of returning your ex's ticket, and buying a new one in your new partner's name.
By then they're sold out. You can't get any other tickets. If you could exchange the ticket you have for one in another name then so can a scalper.
> The funny thing is that, while on occasion this situation might come up, and someone will end up paying a little more to see the show, overall they (and everyone else) will pay less to see shows in general, since scalping has been (in theory) eliminated.
The problem in this situation is not that you have to pay more, it's that you can't go to the concert with your current SO even though you have two tickets. You can get a refund for one or both of the tickets, but you don't want a refund, you want to go to the concert with your new SO.
Some of these scalper sites sell tickets that they don't even have yet, which helps give them the capital to actually buy the tickets later.
Festival appearance rates are agreed on in advance of ticket sales, so tickets prices are the responsibility of festival organisers.
That's really what money is - a transferable token to persuade other people to do stuff on your behalf.
At that point, would scalper's contribution be net positive? Net better than it was? I'm not sure how to answer that.
Namely, if you are aware of intergroup variability in ID-having rates, is choosing it anyways a conscious discriminatory choice?
What I brought up was, knowing this, is still using ID discriminatory?
Edit: Dang it, the best answers always come after I close my laptop. "It would be discriminatory if the government didn't provide people a way to get ID. As a business owner, that's beyond the scope of my responsibility. Same as if someone showed up without $5 and wanted to buy a sandwich." ...is another way to look at it.
Also seems nearly optimal for alienating all but your richest fans. The extra profit you might extract from the concert might not actually put you ahead in the long term when fans stop caring about you because of your profit maximizing business practices.
If demand is so high that people can't afford tickets and you want to do something for the fans, put the game in a bigger stadium.
> Barry Kahn, of Texas-based dynamic ticket pricing consultancy Qcue, doesn’t believe artists should be judged for using tactics including scalping their own tickets (or it’s newer twin, “Platinum” and dynamic pricing to demand). “The issue is the transparency,” he told Billboard. “If they get caught doing something they have said is wrong, then they are deceiving their fans.”
> In this specific instance, Billboard says that Metallica’s management moved up to 4,400 tickets per show over 20 concerts on the tour through intermediaries, masking the process by packaging the tickets as if they were held back for a sponsor.
- https://www.ticketnews.com/2019/07/live-nation-admits-artist...
Take it worth a grain of salt, I have no idea how true it is but it's at least a plausible explanation as to why artists may not want scalpers eliminated.
Some festivals avoid it by requiring ID to be linked to the ticket and banning resale (though they may allow refund).
It’s funny, but “extracting maximum profit” isn’t the only motivation some people have in life. Especially when it comes to cultural events.
[citation needed]
More seriously though, it's true that people - arguably most people - have other motivations than purely materialistic ones. But, like every market, cultural events are a dynamic system. It follows a trajectory over time.
Slightly more greedy people have better outcomes than slightly less greedy ones. The least successful get filtered out. Iterate that over time. What results do you expect?
And yes, this is a general argument of why the market first makes things better, then makes them all go to shit. And it is confirmed by real world. Exceptions involve some factors that counteract the dynamics described above. Do you see such factors at play in entertainment event industry? I don't.
Define "better outcomes" and "Least successful".
The most coveted and arguable most successful music festival in the UK, Glastonbury, operates in the way I described. A variety of other festivals in the UK do too, often due to the politics of the organisers (see, for example, Beautiful Days)
> Do you see such factors at play in entertainment event industry?
Yep, where people make it happen I see them at play and working well to create systems that both the organisers and the public want, and which lock out the third-party profiteers. It would be nice to see such things become more widespread. Though I agree we are less likely to see that where 'the industry' is in control, rather than artists or passionate individuals.
In effect the number of less wealthy fans who can get into a show is a lottery. Ideally you would do just that, lottery off some tickets at affordable rates and sell the rest at market rate.
But the market has adjusted to that too and re-sellers dominate such lotteries. If you offer the opportunity for arbitrage, the market will take advantage of that opportunity.
So just sell at market rate, cut out the re-sellers entirely.
A key part of that concert experience is other people’s excitement too. For one extreme, a Grateful Dead show was basically a mini festival with one act. The crowd before, after and during is an integral part of the experience. Empty seats don’t tell others about the event or participate with the other ticket holders, degrading the value for artists and many concert-goers.
So, a Dead show that sells just a few hundred many-many-thousand-dollar tickets might sit on a maximum supply / demand curve for the venue or scalpers just looking at ticket revenue, but could destroy much of the value of the event for the band and it’s everyday fans who want the event experience and want it for as many people as possible.
No, artists and producers aren't stupid, they get the most of the money from the Ticketmaster "fees". But when a fan sees a 70$ ticket, they'd may decide Bruce Springsteen (net worth 650$ million) isn't a man of the people. When they see a 40$ ticket and a 30$ ticket, fans just swear at Ticketmaster.
I'm confident in a few years we'll read about how scalping enterprises do profit sharing with artists and producers.
What matters is how much fees they charge and how much do they keep. Can't find it right now, but I remember an article claiming they rarely keep 50% of their fees.
Many “event platforms” allow you to add fees that cover the credit card percentage, but if they’re higher you just get to keep the extra.
The "face value" (base price) will usually be determined between the artist and promoter, the venue will apply a fairly generic fee on top, as will the ticketing provider.
How much of the face value goes to the artist will depend on their leverage in the contract with their promoter. This is usually best improved by the confidence that the venue will sell out, meaning artists with bigger audience and social media presence will usually get the best terms.
I don't have a paper or article I can link to as a source, but I have experience in the industry.
Unfortunately Ticketmaster is owned by LiveNation, and they are far and away the biggest promoter. They sign exclusive rights with large venues. My local 25,000 seat amphitheater has a deal with LiveNation. I can only get tickets to shows there through Ticketmaster.
Artists hate Ticketmaster too (some have sued them) but if you want to do an arena tour, good luck avoiding them. Artists use them because they don't have a choice. The number of large venues that don't use TM is growing, my local basketball arena uses SeatGeek.
The one concession TM makes is to their fan clubs. Artists get to sell tickets directly to a limited number of fans. If you love an artist, joining their fan club will probably save you the annual fee back in one show.
So mostly what GP said. This is not an accident, and everyone is in on it.
I think that's a critical difference, because if the current situation is actually a big reputation laundering scam by artists, there's not much we can do about it without regulation. If it's not, if in fact most artists are as unhappy about the situation as their fans, there's quite a lot they can do about it and should be encouraged to do so even if it makes getting a ticket significantly harder (e.g. showing ID for purchased tickets at the venue and only allowing 1:1 refunds, not resales of tickets).
Of course, if producers are receiving a significant portion of earnings on resales, some of that does "trickle down" to artists in the form of higher performing fees on the basis of anticipated resales. But that's a small fraction of added value for most artists, and it's coming at a level of indirection that means ticket sellers are incentivized to raise fees to their highest possible levels after artists get paid, because that's pure profit for them. I think it's entirely reasonable to believe that artists aren't happy about this payment structure, even if they do see slightly higher show income as a result, and want a range of fans to be able to attend their shows.
The only things I’m sure of are that A. consumers would benefit if there was an actual market and B. It is hard to imagine one happening without government intervention.
I think that's where the "reputation laundering" angle comes into play. With its unique position, Ticketmaster gives artists plausible deniability. "Nothing we can do about it", "evils of capitalism", "a monopolist captured the market, government doing nothing", etc. - say artists, for whom the image they project is a core part of their market value. With a properly functioning competitive market, those same artists would have to either get much less, or answer some inconvenient question about ticket pricing.
It’s a monopsony.
The only real winners are Ticketmaster live nation
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The standard tickets sold on Ticketmaster are owned by our clients (venues, sports teams or other event promoters) who determine the number of tickets to be sold and set the face value price.
...
Ticket fees (which can include a service fee, order processing fee and sometimes a delivery fee) are determined in collaboration with our clients. In exchange for the rights to sell their tickets, our clients typically share in a portion of the fees we collect.
...
Service Fee and Order Processing Fee
In almost all cases, Ticketmaster adds a service fee (also known as a convenience charge) to the face value price, or in the case of a resale ticket to the listing price, of each ticket. The service fee varies by event based on our agreement with each individual client.
In addition to the per ticket service fee, an order processing fee is typically charged. Unlike the service charge, which is added to each ticket, the processing fee is charged once for each order. The processing fee offsets the costs of ticket handling, shipping and support and as a result, the processing fee is generally not charged on in-person box office purchases. In some cases, Ticketmaster's order processing costs may be lower than the order processing fee. In those cases, Ticketmaster may earn a profit on the order processing fee.
In both cases, these fees are collected by Ticketmaster and typically shared with our clients.
That’s exactly what I said. They pay for exclusive ticket sales. They’re just defining “client” as who they pay and notice they do not say artist, which they surely would if they ever did.
It happens in football (soccer for my American friends) for clubs like Man Utd (and probably Man City now) where ticket prices are out of reach of working class fans. The visiting fans make a point of trying to out-sing the local support then insulting them for only being there because the club is winning trophies. All football fans know the song "where were you when you were shit!"
"Developers, developers, developers, developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers!!! Yes!!!"
But either way, both Dean's and Ballmer's examples are marketing stunts, a calculated performance - that's entirely different to rich people honestly letting loose at a concert.
Notice how he is at Clippers games.
Sure it is part stunt, part performance but it also personality.
If the ticket is cheap for me, I can go even if I don't like the band too much. And with very expensive tickets, many enthusiasts won't pay while rich non-enthusiasts are bigger part of audience.
Meanwhile, if tickets are cheaper but you have to jump hoops to get them, you get enthusiasts.
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/reason-why-billy-joel-refuses-s...
These people were so eloquently described by Manchester United captain Roy Keane, as 'the prawn sandwich brigade'.
Citation needed.
Rich people are the main audience at all organized events of all kinds. Do you think you can take you and your kids to an NFL game if you're poor? The main attendees of Taylor swift? Women in late 20s - mid 30s working corporate jobs.
Also who is to say because they don't act ridiculous or obsessed they aren't 'real' fans. What is a real fan anyway? I hadn't heard there was a universal accepted definition.
I suspect, though, he doesn't sit quietly in the front row of his own concerts, so that's not really relevant to the point he makes.
“For our last number I’d like to ask your help. Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewellery.”
I can’t speak to the USA sports, I’m specifically talking about English football which is generally quite affordable for most working class people. I’ve bought tickets to games myself.
Both venues and airlines normally segment the market by how good a seat you get.
The cost to the concert going public of ID verification would probably be a lot lower than the costs scalping imposes. And the concert venues could certainly capture more than $5 per concert goer by raising prices closer to what the typical person actually pays.
This damages the act's fan base, which in turn negatively affects future revenues via streaming, merchandise, co-branding, and future ticket sales.
(I may be wrong about the artist but recall reading about at least one act that toured like this).
I smell it everywhere now. It makes me furious when I'm in a public park with my kids and clouds of nasty smoke are wafting around.
This seems to be a general rule: if some problem is annoying to people with money and clout, and it persists for long, then perhaps it's not actually a problem for those people, but rather a money maker they perpetuate.
That is to say. I think the artist just like the idea of the tickets being affordable to allow their younger and less well off fans access.
I think any argument here has to acknowledge the artists rights in this. Charging more might alleviate the issue, but if private ownership of the performance is to have any meaning, it must include the right to set a price below the market rate. If the artist wants to be "economically inefficient" we as a society must protect that right.
Most venues ARE hypercapitalists.
That club down on the corner where the cool touring bands play? They take a 15-20% cut on the hands merch in exchange for the oh so vauablr service of providing maybe a beat up old folding table.
Fair is fair, right?
They do, they just price discriminate.
It also is up in the air of the market value is really what people are paying or if it’s being inflated by scalpers. Some people will pay it but I don’t think it’s an accurate view of what the price should be in that situation.
But we saw exactly this with the recent Lorcana release. Local game stores acted like scalpers charging scalper prices, it is hurting the perception of the game of what normal prices are.
Then use some form of a Dutch auction to sell them.
Those guys have something like 30 seconds max to hit their mark.
Now those are professional buyers. I think for your amateur crowd you would have to provide a bit more time. perhaps a week. just make it clear what is happening.
And that big clock, have you seen the big clock? if I ever made a dutch auction ticket site A big clock would feature predominantly in the ui. Unfortunately I don't think the flower auctions use the big clock anymore. which is a shame.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAdmzyKagvE (tom scott)
Scalpers would end up holding the bag if they did that. If no one is willing to pay $10k for a ticket, but then scalpers buy every ticket for $10k each they aren't going to me able to find anyone to resell the tickets to and will end up losing money.
Anyone can protect themselves from being scalped by just participating in the auction.
This can't make sense. Then where is the profit for the scalper coming from?
Its also a bit untrue. Its true that yes, people _will_ pay it, but did they need to get that high? Scalpers are like auction bots - not always going to win, but will raise the prices for those who would have bought at an otherwise lower value.
Sure thing it makes buying air tickets a lot more stressful, but we do get low cost trips if we plan ahead, or a much-needed last time seat if we can afford it.
Kind of like how when the 4090 released and was being instantly scalped at every website it popped up on then resold for double to triple retail, and yet thousands of redditors were magically “just stumbling on to one totally randomly, oh and my 2050 also sold for $1200!!”
How do you figure? Are you using a nonstandard definition of "market clearing price"?
> the scalpers would exercise perfect price discrimination if they could.
So what?
This is similar to stuff like auctions to have dinners with certain successful people. Those people have many dinners where they don't ask for a bunch of money from the participant, because then they would only have boring dinners!
Great example: I bought a bunch of tickets to take my little league to a Mets game, which turned out to be the game where David Wright retired. I sold the leftover tickets, which I purchased for between $12 and $30, for a minimum of $350. We built a batting cage with the proceeds.
On the other side, whenever I’m in the city for a few days, I’ll try to score a cheap premium ticket from a season ticket holder who can’t make the game - and frequently do.
IMO the biggest issue with tickets is that it’s 2023 and we live in a pseudo libertarian business climate. It’s a market that should be regulated, as the ticket platform has an incentive to optimize their own self-dealing. The platform gets a vig for each transfer, so maximizing transactions is the optimal path. I worked for a company whose successful entry into event ticketing prompted a buyout by Ticketmaster.
1. The enjoyment of attendees can be partly dependent on the enthusiasm of other attendees. Consider the extremes: an audience entirely comprised of people who hardly know the artist, but can afford it Vs an audience comprised of only die-hard fans, irrespective of their ability to afford a ticket. The first has a flat atmosphere, the second, a special one.
2. A simple desire by the artist to make their show available to a cross-section of society (this could be viewed as altruistic, since most other products/services don't usually offer the same thing at a lower price just to help those who can't afford it).
A possible solution to problem 1: If the goal is to ensure that only die-hard fans get the tickets, why not use their spotify/apple music/other histories to work out who's really a fan of that artist? It should be trivial to get a very high degree of accuracy, and would be costly for scalpers to imitate (they'd need a subscription and to listen to random music years in advance).
Also the fact that it's assumed that everyone attending wants to sit in the audience and go crazy and MAKE SOME NOISE. It can and is annoying to many people.
One other thing is artist may want an active crowd for their own benefit ie they are making a video live recording for further sale or to post to youtube whatever. (Point is good for artist but not for many all of those attending).
As if everything in our society is 100% ok.
Higher ticket prices would lead to more diehard fans
> A simple desire by the artist to make their show available to a cross-section of society
But if scalping is a problem then making tickets cheap doesn’t accomplish this.
In total, this seems to point towards raising initial prices with negative consequence.
no? personal utility doesn't work that way in the real world... We have such drastic inequality that $200 is literally impossible for a huge fraction of the population wheras to some people its an afterthought to spend for a laugh. You can literally notice it in a venue when ticket prices are higher, the atmosphere is different, the clothing is different, the energy of the dancing, the singing
profile of somebody with money to spend: 40+, knowledge worker, drained of energy, has a lot of things going on in life
profile of the kind of fan that makes your show trendy: <30, sporadic employment, excess energy, impulsive, carefree
I’m surprised SMS verification is this ineffective at testing for “human-ness”.
It's because most honest users only have one phone number, which makes it a useful unique ID for tracking the honest users. Anyone using it should immediately be under suspicion of selling you out.
Of course, this is another reason why the practice is harmful -- legitimate users with a legitimate desire to be anonymous will do this, and then if you use the number provided for account recovery, someone can steal their account after the number gets recycled. (This also happens to normies when people change their phone number and don't update it with your service; don't use phone numbers for password recovery. The near-100% probability of being reissued is a disaster.)
But what happens at scale, for actual wholesale-level spammers? They get a contact with a phone carrier who lets them use all their unissued numbers. They operate one of these public SMS websites, which not only doesn't cost them money but turns a small profit because of the ad revenue. They do the same thing, but privately, and sell the availability of thousands of phone numbers to other spammers. Then they resell the SIMs to recover the money because they never actually used any of the prepaid data. Which makes offering the service to other spammers cheap, which keeps the price low if you want to be a buyer instead of a seller. The more people who try to do this on their service, the better this scales, because the customer base increases.
It's just not meant for this and the inconvenience and privacy invasion to legitimate users is unreasonable.
I suspect verifying government IDs would be a viable uniqueness criterion, except the only thing those IDs can buy you is voting rights in a particular country, which are usually worthless, so these systems aren't attacked. Now imagine if we decided that Taylor Swift ticket purchases had to be verified with ID. You could see, say, a particular country in the global south deciding they're going to just invent people on paper to go buy Taylor Swift tickets specifically so they can scalp them on the open market.
The underlying problem is that so long as a particular economic opportunity exists, whoever is trusted to stop that opportunity from being exploited has an incentive to stab you in the back. Mobile network operators were never intended to be a 2FA code delivery system or Sybil resistance system, so they will totally just let people SIM-swap you or sell numbers in bulk to spammers, because not doing so was never in their job description and their business is not built to defend against such things.
a) is not required to vote in many places (and pushing for that requirement is, in fact, one of the major methods of classist/racist voter suppression), and
b) is required to do various other things, like purchase alcohol, drive, or buy plane tickets.
Due to (b), there is already a thriving black market in fake IDs for various reasons, and of various qualities.
Government-issued ID systems are absolutely attacked, fairly aggressively.
Proof of work is useful for protecting things worth like a thousandth of a cent per transaction. Captchas for something worth 1/10th of a cent. Phone number verification for something worth $0.1-$1. Real-world presence and real-world id checks for things worth $100.
The amount of money you can make scalping tickets is way higher than that, so it's not a useful defense. Doubly so when the cost of the phone verification isn't even per-transaction, but once per account.
For the ticketmaster case, I think what you'd want is some kind of proof of stable liveness at every transaction. It's easy enough to game proof of liveness, or proof of unique identity, at account creation time. Just the classic method of paying people at a parking lot $5 to pass a "wave to the webcam" captcha. But they can't get those same people back for another captcha every time they want to use that account for another ticket. (Though it's possible that deepfakes have rendered webcam captchas effectively worthless in the last year or two, I don't know where the state of the art on deepfake detection for this kind of usecase is.)
I avoid them whenever possible, but I recently bought a ticket for an event weeks after they went on sale (there was essentially no activity on the map of available tickets that day).
They "unknown error"'ed me at the end of the purchase flow (inside their reservation timeout window). 60 seconds later, the tickets I had tried to purchase were being resold by a scalper.
So, whatever their API is, it allows scalpers to get a feed of tickets that are in the middle of being purchased, then to buy them in the reservation window and offer them for resale with super human speed.
That company is clearly run by crooks. They've repeatedly been brought under investigation for exactly this behavior (for over a decade), so presumably, they are also good at paying out bribes.
If there are a limited number of tickets but many thousands of fans who are willing and able to pay, then naturally the price goes up. And whether you like it or not, people are either paying with money, or paying with time (e.g. waiting in line), or paying with frustration (e.g. going through opaque scalping networks).
The root cause of the problem isn't scalpers; it's the original concert seller either setting too low a price or too low a quantity.
Imagine viewing a pricing scheme that allows more socioeconomic groups access to the arts as the core problem.
We're experiencing a great decline and fall as social services are failing, wages stagnating, and common cultural experiences are being squeezed for profit, only enabling the richest among us to experience any kind of common social event.
And of course, the response is "keep increasing prices until its unbearable", just like we're doing with rent and housing prices, and calling this efficient.
Inflating prices until few can afford it isn't efficient, its just short sighted greed.
Finding a way to suppress prices and remove scalpers is a net benefit for the artists, venues, and patrons.
If Rodrigo decided to abandon her career and only do private shows for Bill Gate's who's business would that be but hers? I think there's room for either disdain or pity for the person who cares about nothing other then money but who's going to make that judgement about another person's motivations? And who would jump in take action on that judgement?
You can try to ignore the equilibrium price point, just as you might ignore gravity, but reality will assert itself. Scalpers will always exist to rebalance the supply and demand equality.
If you want to make something available to more socioeconomic groups, increase the supply. Simple as.
If the tickets were actually easily obtainable but more expensive then paradoxically people wouldn't be willing to pay as much for the ticket because of a perceived loss of value.
And as mentioned in the other reply, many people disagree with the "greed is good" philosophy, hence the /s.
I was a dedicated concert goer back in the day, having spent a lot of time in ticket lines. By time I started, "sleeping overnight" was pretty much over with as an hour or so before the sale, the staff would come out, hand out wrist bands, and then say "#123 is the front of the line" with the 123 being some (I guess random) number from the range of wrist bands they gave out, and everyone else would line up, with #122 wrapping around and being behind whatever the highest band that went out. The premise being there was no reason to show up much more than just before the onsale time, since your arrival time was no guarantee of line position.
Similarly, at one venue, they simply handed out numbers, low number wins. After we picked ours up, there was a guy on the edge willing to buy low numbers.
I was once first in line, but the tickets I got were underwhelming, which made me more cynical about the buying process.
Then, there was that one time, my poor wife, bought us some tickets. There was no way she could have known. There was no way anyone, really, could have known. It was a typical amphitheater layout, and she got the last row of the middle section. When you buy tickets during the mad rush of the opening sale, you just get what they give you, there's really no time to pick or choose.
Amphitheaters tend to be reasonably steep, with the seat in front of you lower, by, perhaps, a foot, so as to offer mostly unhindered sight lines to the stage. But the venue, at some point added a row of seats that were directly behind the row in front of it, with no offset, essentially offering NO view of the stage. It was just awful, and there's nothing she could have done about it.
In the end, I just learned to use a broker for most of the shows I saw. It was a much saner experience, I could pick seats, I could judge value, I could apply intangibles.
Thankfully, the bands I see today are cheap and unpopular, and the sports tickets I just buy from the stadium.
This is the way. There are a ton of bands you've never heard of that are really good, they just aren't popular because only very few acts are ever popular. You can absolutely see good live music cheap.
If the price is set from the Artist, venue, Ticketmaster at prices from $50-200 then they have made that decision.
The local mini libraries on the sides of streets have free books. You could take a book and sell it, but you are not the intended person. The intention of the transaction is for the genuine reader to read the book, put it back, or give new books. This intention is set by the originator of the transaction.
If the Artist wanted the most money, they would set the price accordingly.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=37624742&goto=item%3Fi...
Generally the scalpers over buy and will start to panic and unload tickets at very good prices the closer the show gets.
It all comes down to whether or not there's enough demand to fill the venue.
If there's plenty of demand, StubHub prices will remain much higher than face value. They absolutely do not ever become available at good prices.
On the other hand, if the venue is larger than demand, then yes -- you can easily score half-price tickets a few days leading up to the show.
But good luck trying to figure out which one will be the outcome. If you delay purchasing, prices are just as likely to keep going up as they are to go down.
We did buy Taylor Swift tickets for next year however it was $1k for three tickets.
If I understand correctly, the definition of scalping is to buy and sell quickly in the hope of a profit. Ticketmaster is the originator of the tickets (it is not reselling from anyone else), so it cannot be a scalper.
You can't just make up meanings and assume that scalping means selling at an uncomfortably high price.
Not all events have this though.
- Random selection over an hour at ticket sale time that is unique per device, with some 'are you human' checks along the way to make it more difficult to bot.
- Requiring physical delivery of the badge with a maximum number per address, or government issued ID to pick it up in person.
- Random ID checks during the con.
- The first round of sales goes exclusively to people who had a badge before. I.e. you need a code from the back of the badge. So even if you bought it from a scalper, you would now have the code for next year's presale.
None of these are perfect, but it's still the best ticketing process I've seen in recent years.
i would imagine a scalper would record the code from the badge as well, before giving it to you. So this means they're going to be able to buy just as well, and may be invalidate the code before you get to use it!
Put your name on the badge. If you want to sell it, they buy it back at face value minus a restocking fee, and then resell it at original price.
This would be much less of a pain in the ass for everyone involved.
With software there's no real need to take an admin fee...
Just in case, you know..
For example on this page: https://www.404media.co/ios-17-could-break-diabetic-glucose-...
They link to CNN using the same reference: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/07/health/abbott-recall-freestyl...
You can resell for the total price including fees, but no more.
https://www.consumereurope.dk/purchase-of-goods-and-services...
In addition to being generally legal in the US, in key markets, resale cannot legally be constrained. A venue or artist cannot legally institute policies or practices to prohibit resale.
Even if resale were prohibited or technically impossible, it will not necessarily be any easier to get tickets to a high demand event as resale is only a factor when an event has enough demand to sell out far in advance of playing.
So, it would be hard for them to make the argument you are making. They directly profit from resale (that they “can’t legally ban”) because their ban on resale is legal.
Scalper pays with their card
Someone purchases the ticket from the scalper
Venue distributes special code (short like 2 letters) that gets tied to your ticket.
If you go back to the website, and enter the code, it's not benefiting your credit card, but the scalpers. So if you purchase from an unauthorized person, you have no reason to enter the code.
Wrong code entered twice - lose your 480.
Numbers could be adjusted to make more sense for more people, as long as it makes the scalper ticket seem ridiculous.
A lot of the "solutions" presented end up making shows too expensive for a large portion of the artist's fans. That's not an outcome the artists want.
I wonder how much of this could be alleviated by selling a certain percentage of tickets at the box office only? I worked in operations for a pretty large concert venue several years ago, and the Jonas Brothers were going to play there (this was at their peak). I remember a good chunk of tickets were only sold at the box office and there was a limit per person (maybe 5 or 6)? I know it's annoying to drive somewhere and wait in line for hours, but I'm sure there are folks out there that would prefer to do that instead of paying a 500% markup on the original ticket price.
The artists have simply decided to sell $1000 tickets instead of $200 tickets that get scalped for $1000
The scalpers then create a secondary market where there is a supply and demand situation like you talk about.
Of course profit maximization is not the only (or even primary) goal, that's what makes this such a hard problem. If it were, ticket sales would be trivially solved - just auction each seat to the highest bider, close biding near the concert date and prevent any transfers. Of course that's a terrible idea.
Society's tolerance for parasites who do that kind of thing has a breaking point and when the people being negatively impacted get fed up enough to take action I'll have no sympathy for anyone who seeks to make others miserable just so that they can profit off of their suffering.
During the pandemic the price of toilet paper should have been increased by an order of magnitude at the store level. This would prevent hoarding and it would make sure people who desperately wanted it could get it. Additionally, it would have incentivized producers and sellers to fill demand.
Price controls are the equivalent of rations. They don’t solve anything because they remove all of the incentives.
I fail to see how making toilet paper cost hundreds or thousands of dollars per roll would ensure that everyone who needed it would be able to get it, since many of those who desperately wanted to wipe their ass were unable to work and going into record amounts of debt just to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads.
Producers and sellers were already fully incentivized to sell their goods, as they always have been. They know people want their product and will pay them enough that they can turn a profit. There's no reason to turn toilet paper into an luxury item which only the wealthiest people can afford leaving the majority priced out.
Price controls and rations have their place. Like all tools, the key to is make sure that they are used correctly.
Also, you’re incorrect about producers having the right incentives. They are incentivized by money, not a higher calling to wipe ass.
Price controls have no place at all other than appealing to people’s emotions. They cannot fix or hide supply problems. They can just shift the price signal to lucky intermediaries (scalpers) rather than to suppliers.
You said: "the price of toilet paper should have been increased by an order of magnitude at the store level. This would prevent hoarding". How high do you think the price per roll would have to be to ensure that no one (not even rich people or a small group of rich people working together) could afford to buy up a pallet of toilet paper to try to resell at a higher price? It'd have to be pretty damn expensive. Expensive enough to price out most people since a millionaire can afford to pay so much more than someone making below minimum wage
> Also, you’re incorrect about producers having the right incentives. They are incentivized by money, not a higher calling to wipe ass.
Read my comment again, I never said anything about a "higher calling". I explicitly said that their incentive was profit.
Instead, IRL, anyone who could find them were buying up several massive packages because it was only the normal ≈$20 for 20 rolls situation, so “heck, buy 60, 80, maybe 100 rolls! Who knows when I’ll get this lucky as to find it again?” Meaning suddenly everyone was buying and warehousing way more TP than they needed in 6 months. Not adjusting prices literally caused the shortage.
It’s amazing what tech bros making 6 figures will say from their ivory towers.
Were you alive and shopping for toilet paper during covid? The wealthy could already purchase it whenever from scalpers (a.k.a Amazon resellers). Normal people had to drive from store to store hoping their ration came in and they timed it right.
The hyperbolic interpretation of price controls is, “the poors don’t deserve toilet paper at all unless they win a lottery”.
Scalping is only illegal in certain jurisdictions (usually state level, iirc). Presumably stubhub intentionally does not operate in those jurisdictions.
They could sell to people in those jurisdictions, but you could make people sign a thing saying that they actually bought the tickets from another area. Someone could probably come after them, but there's enough plausible deniability to keep it tied up in court for a while, and nobody is going to do that for low level scalping offenses.
A decade ago or so I went on a first date with a woman who was a professional scalper. Unfortunately I didn't have the balls to ask her about the ethics of what she does. (I expect it would have been something like, "if I don't do it, someone else will".) But it really grossed me out; I just can't respect someone who does something like that.
The Internet has a remarkable way of introducing you to the absolute dregs. It's like computer security: everything not 100% locked down perfectly will belong to someone else minutes later. And even a gigantic corporation with intense experience handling money cannot lock things down 100%.
Most of humanity is ok. But the parts that suck, suck so hard that on the whole I think it averages out to really bad.
That is, even if you sell the account, the ticket is tied to the person.
Airlines arguably have the same type of selling situation and no one is scalping coach seats to Cleveland.
In France, a famous youtuber has partnered with the major platform to forbid any ticket resell for their show, and it worked pretty well. But still it was only one time.
The sale is set up so that ticket resale is forbidden, except that scalpers can resell them via ticketmaster. Ticketmaster gets to charge a second transaction fee when the scalper resells it.
Artists don’t have enough market leverage to bypass this. (Pearl Jam famously tried and failed at the top of their career.)
So, it’s a combination of auction fraud (building a platform for scalpers while pretending to enforce anti-scalper policies) and monopoly power (colluding with venues and probably agents to depress first-sale ticket prices).
I tried to figure out if ticketmaster also owns and operates the scalping companies (allowing two-sided auction fraud). I came up with a firm “maybe”.
You could in some circumstances return tickets to the theatre for a full refund, but couldn't resell them.
The buying credit card had to be shown at entry to make sure they hadn't been resold.
Afaik, they're still doing this.
Ticketmaster simply won't take the measures, as they have absolutely no financial problem with the way it is now or throughout the history of them existing. Their only problem is trying to figure out how to get scalper prices themselves, which they've already tried and gotten backlash for.
Know how I dealt with ticket scalping? I stopped going to shows like that in the 90's, then stopped buying cd's, and eventually stopped supporting the music industry (and media cartels in general).
(Besides the potential for personnel to be bribed individually. I'm wondering about whether there's hypothetically an angle for the company to permit scalpers. Maybe to be involved in scalping, as a kind of double dipping.)
Additionally, resale fees tend to be higher, on a percentage basis, and prices tend to be higher on resale tickets for high demand events.
But this does not mean ticket marketplaces are incentivized to sell to resellers initially instead of actual event-goers.
Primary prices and fees are lower because artists and venues demand it. Ticketmaster's continued ability to source tickets to high demand events is more important than marginal revenue from resale on even a large number of those tickets.
There are 2 overall approaches: law enforcement by making resale illegal or doubling-down on capitalism by auction sales rather than enabling arbitrage.
Either way, ticket marketplace(s) must do more to assure limits of tickets and verifying the uniqueness of individuals through technological and physical delivery controls. Since this is a widespread consumer rights issue, it could be grounds for hauling TM before a Senate subcommittee inquiry.