Why you can’t get a ticket to the NBA finals or other major events
theringer.com
theringer.com
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/27/196277836/kid-r...
TLDR; The best seats are raffle-only. The next best seats are market priced, all other seats are dirt cheap. Reselling dirt cheap seats is discouraged by offering slightly more events than there is demand for.
In other words, that strategy will have less (maybe even no) success for high-profile events which cannot offer more showings.
Bots COULD still kill you, but if everyone who wants a seat can get one, bots will disappear because no one will buy them.
Rather than raffle the best seats, sell a ticked that has an 50% chance of being a good seat and a 50% chance of being a dirt cheap seat and then decide on entry which seat you have. A true fan will be ok either way (they will of course be happier with a good seat), but the scalper won't be able to charge a premium for a good seat ticket.
Also, this system completely breaks down when you consider that people often go to venues in groups, which means they want to sit together, which means they need to buy their seats in a batch. If you don't know where you're actually sitting until you arrive, you won't end up sitting together.
There is no reason the allocation has to be 50-50. It could be 90-10 where the tickets are basically sold a little over the cheap price, but you have a chance on the night of being in the front row. The true fan is going to dream that they will be the lucky ones.
The group issue could be solved in a number of ways, but the simplest would be to just sell the tickets in blocks and allocate the blocks to the good or to the cheap seats.
Somewhat related to this topic the best concert I ever went to was the OK Computer tour by Radiohead (in 1998 from memory). A couple of friends and I decided at the last moment to go to the venue and hope that we could get some tickets off a scalper. Just as we arrived Radiohead released about 50 extra seats at rock bottom prices (less than $30) via the main ticket office. We end up in the second row of what was one of the concerts of the decade :)
But why set a price at all? Just auction off tickets in the first place. For popular events, don't set a price, just let the market decide. That gets tickets to the fans who value them the most, gives the venues/performers/athletes the money they should have been getting all along, and cuts out the resellers completely.
The solution is to go back to the old days:
1) have only live, in-person purchases at authorized retailers and list all sale locations clearly.
2) limit ticket quantities per-person and per-turn-in-line.
3) PDF ticketing must end. It is a HUGE vector for fraud. Not only does it make duplication easy, it makes outright counterfeiting via modification easy.
4) (when needed) earmark the seats with buyer information and restrict entry to the actual buyer (e.g. use the purchase credit card, or photo-ID if cash purchase)
Now, brokers could still hire people to get in line, but there is insufficient payoff with a per-turn limit: the broker would end up with a lot of scattered pairs (assuming limit=2) of decreasing quality.
Or, quantity limits per purchased are relaxed after the initial sale surge is complete.
which was already proposed in NY, per the article, but lobbied against hard by, you guessed it, ticket agencies and major secondary sellers. Shocking, truly.
1) Dramatically raise the price of tickets
2) Prevent their transferability, requiring all buyers to buy from TicketMaster (or the equivalent)
3) Incidentally track the identities of all ticket buyers and event attendees.
It's for your own good, consumers.
Finally, perhaps you can find a more respectful way to address other people's ideas.
They are not selling healthcare or something else essential, for which distributing it based on buying power would be wrong. I'm not a free market fundamentalist but I think it works fine for concert tickets.
Super Bowl tickets cost $850 to $1850 in face value, but resold for an average of about $5000. If tickets cost $5000 minimum the game probably would still sell out at some point (though not immediately), but people would be even more angry about the ticket situation.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/03/news/super-bowl-tickets-pric...
Blaming it on "insiders getting tickets first" and "bots" is just a way of hiding the fact that it's very deliberately designed to be the best way of handling things now, it's just that nobody likes scarcity.
Seems like there are tickets to be had if you want them
Not sure why I should be upset people can't get below market prices
Uber is a perfect example of why no middleman is needed.
Most of the big mark up tickets are bought from season ticket packages, which include plenty of dud games that can only be resold at a loss
Averaged over all the games, whatever markup realize can probably be accounted for as taking risk of not selling tickets off the primary sellers (the teams) (especially the hard to sell games on Wednesdays in January when the team isn't the best team in the league)
High prices induce ticket holders to sell, which does free up supply.
If you threw fewer of those around and instead put them up for public sale there would be more inventory for fans (or at least for fan club).
Also its one thing to stand in line and not get a ticket. Another thing entirely for scalpers to cut to the front of the line and buy everything up. You dont even have a chance (or much much less). People are angry about that too.
I'd much more happily pay market price directly on Ticketmaster than to some random seller on a secondary site.
Edited to add: I know that StubHub "guarantees" the tickets. But the compensation is less than the hassle and disappointment of potentially missing out on an event I want to see. Especially if it comes in the form of getting to the door only to find out that the tickets are fake or duplicates (which does happen).
"Sorry, your tickets were verified to be false. Here's a refund and $50 in credit for your next StubHub purchase."
rather than "we reached out to the Warriers (because oh shit, you have more than a quarter million followers) and got you better tickets".
Sorry, maybe that's the cynic in me...
All the guarantee says is that if the tickets are no good, they can (their choice) either (a) give you different tickets that they call "as good or better" or (b) just refund your money, and you're SOL (too bad if you've already spent hundreds to thousands on travel and such).
They will do (a) only if they have cheaper inventory (again, unvetted, so you face the entry-denial risk all over again) still available on the site. This strategy usually works, as 90+% of events experience price drops as the event nears.
It seems odd at first that certain ticket sites are the exclusive ticket dealers for some venues. It would seem that in a competitive market where you can spin up a whole fleet of machines to handle the public sale onslaught that used to be nothing short of a ddos against your ticketing site, there would be competition across ticket vendors and that would drive down those service fees.
It's not a competitive market though. Ticket vendors realize the difference between face value and market value is uncaptured consumer surplus. To capture some of it away from the second-hand dealers, they vary the service fees for venue to venue and show to show.
That's the expected part.
The (admittedly I-don't-have-a-citation-for-it) interesting part is a portion of that service fee is a direct kickback to the venue. Some of it may be to cover the performer's higher-than-the-sum-of-face-value-tickets performance fee mentioned in the article, but some of it is to make sure The Venue deals exclusively with Large Ticket Site and ignores offers from small ticket.ly startup armed with some EC2 autoscaling groups.
After all, why go for a more efficient operator when Large Ticket Site offers you a guaranteed percentage of the uncaptured consumer surplus? That's a service you would almost pay a fee for!
The only solution is to sell the tickets at market value from the start. Then there is no profit to be made by resellers.
Edit: Well there might be still some "market making" business in buying and selling, since inevitably there will be people who end up not being able to use the tickets they bought but don't want to stand outside the venue trying to sell them themselves. But the margins will be much smaller.
Seats at performances are scarce resources. We have an efficient and fair mechanism for allocating scarce resources: the market. Raise ticket prices to the market-clear price and be done with it.
Charging market rates for the tickets means some popular events will go for thousands of dollars. Artists don't want their fan demographics to get skewed by that.
The point is to get the tickets to the people who want them the most. I think a lottery does a poor job of that.
In that case you can't have a happy, fair solution. There is always a competition. That is how sharing too limited ressources works. Think about you and your brother sitting in front of the dinner table and there is one piece of the cheese left that you both love. Competition is fair!
And honestly I like the competition about relationships, about money, about speed, and about smarts (=who writes the best bots). There are different options. If you are not good at relationships maybe you can find a way to earn more money, for instance. And none of the given options includes opening the head of a competitor with a broadsword, or barbequing him with a flamethrower. Sounds like a good and healthy competition to me.
First, the converse is that very few events actually sell-out. Just the hit ones.
Second, you've got a million Warriors fans from the bay area alone. Yes, it's going to be hard (but hardly impossible) to get 1 of the 20,000 tickets.
If necessary you could stagger your sales so the cheap seats don't go on sale at all until the price for the expensive seats drops below some threshold.
Because as you yourself pointed out, theyre maximizing income by taking guarantee pay days above face value of all tickets. And by performing fewer shows they drive up value per show.
With streaming they actually think there is money left on table. Thus boycott temper tantrum to try to force spotify to cough up more money.
I get the sense that most people go to popular music acts to check in on Facebook. That's not a crowd you wanna fight for tickets. Support small artists.
I hate baseball, football games...you sit in one spot, probably in nosebleeds unless you have a lot of money. You watch one single game, pay out the nose for food. For those other sports I much prefer to watch at home where there are commentators, instant replay, friends and family, and eat and drink to my hearts content. Oh, don't need to fight the crowds!
The Warriors' solution seems to have been to set face value to be as high as possible since this year's finals tickets are notably higher than last year.
That's surprising. They only lost by 5 on the road!
Same results for the World Series and NHL Finals. Resale prices for Game 3 in San Jose have dropped significantly. Resale prices for the 2012 NLCS Game 6 dropped a lot after the Giants fell behind 3 games to 1. etc. etc.
LA fans are notoriously fickle, but still, I know several Blazers fans who took the opportunity to fly down and go to a game (albeit where they were in the vast minority).