Why You Can’t Get a Ticket to the NBA Finals
theringer.com
theringer.com
I recently bought NBA tickets to Game 3 of the Western Conference Finals (Oklahoma City Thunder vs. Golden State Warriors), and I was absolutely pissed off at the whole process.
I went on a small Twitter rampage to vent about it, with a picture that shows NO TICKETS available LITERALLY THE SECOND they went "on sale" (10AM Thursday May 19, 2016), and then beside it another screenshot of ALMOST 1,300 TICKETS FOR RESALE at the exact same time.
https://twitter.com/vlucas/status/733315798068953089
I learned the system was rigged against me the hard way, and it totally sucked. It was painfully obvious that all the tickets were sold out well before the game, and that a whole lot of scalpers were making lots of money on reselling tickets that were not fans, and never had any intention of going to the game in the first place. The kicker is that the system actually seemed designed intentionally for this to happen, screwing the actual fans in the process.
Not only were they sold out within seconds, I also got the impression the process was designed to make sure anyone with an automated process would "win". Being a developer and knowing how people would use a system like theirs, it blew my mind they took basically no precautions to stop automated buyers from buying everything immediately.
Someone is making lots of money.
A couple of my friends are scalpers. They said there's a limit of 8 tickets for most shows per address, but if you walk in with thousands of dollars in cash that limit goes away. Online it's a little different since you need to put your address in for your credit card, but there's plenty of ways to get multiple addresses with your name for credit cards.
They make more than me as a software engineer, but they can easily lose thousands if a show doesn't pan out. They follow tours across the US and hope they find "the one" that makes them rich.
my sister had a friend from college who grew up on the upper east side who in turn had a friend from childhood who 'invests' ~10,000$ every year by buying tickets to broadway shows and reselling them
when we went looking four tickets were offered to us for free because 'i've made 4000x on this show already'
That way more tickets will be sold, the artist can't be accused of being greedy, there won't be much profit in the resale market, and everyone who attends the show will have paid an amount they thought was reasonable during the bidding process.
Whether a lottery would be more fair depends on your point of few. Many would certainly say no because the artist or sports team would make less money than they could and people willing to pay a lot of money to get tickets would lose their ability to do so.
Others like me would consider it more fair, it is a kind of failure of the free market and favors rich people just because they are rich. I would argue that one should actually favor the poorer people because being able to go to a concert or game for a reasonable price may add lot more value in terms of quality of life for them as compared to rich people already having access to all kinds of niceties.
Also, while you can't clone Taylor Swift and put on 10 shows at once, if the full market value for popular tickets went to the people creating that value (instead of resellers), there are actually lots of ways the market could respond to increase supply. Taylor Swift could do more shows per city. Or more shows per day. Or livestream to multiple venues. Or build extensions on the venue. Or build new venues specifically for this kind of thing. The list goes on.
A giant band can't be duplicated exactly, but they do have lots of competition. They compete with other bands, the movie theater, a quiet night in, the bowling alley, etc. It's entertainment. So if floating ticket prices put the tickets out of reach of most fans, the market will find a way to increase supply. Otherwise the average fan goes bowling, and long term you lose your core fan base. The supply will increase to meet the demand. Maybe via one of the ideas above, and maybe via something that we can't even think of right now (and which someone will get rich for figuring out).
Only given that there a lot less rich than poorer people it seems pretty unlikely that badly wanting a ticket would correlates with being able to spend a lot of money on a ticket. And I would actually suggest that the extend to that people would like to buy anything is mostly independent of their wealth. Why would a poor guy be less interested in owning a private island than a billionaire? There are just a lot more things in front of an island that they have to take care of first.
[...] and to whatever extent it might be gameable, the poor will always be the least well-equipped to game it.
Certainly true but that is not an argument against a lottery because it applies to most if not all systems.
Also, while you can't clone Taylor Swift and put on 10 shows at once, if the full market value for popular tickets went to the people creating that value (instead of resellers), there are actually lots of ways the market could respond to increase supply. Taylor Swift could do more shows per city. Or more shows per day. Or livestream to multiple venues. Or build extensions on the venue. Or build new venues specifically for this kind of thing. The list goes on.
As far as I can tell being on tour is a really tough job. They could maybe have two or three sets of the equipment with separate crews and cut down the time between shows but that will take you only so far. Also being close to the stage is very different from being a hundred meters away or only looking at a screen. There is certainly some room but I don't think it is that much. And in the case of sports events it is certainly even worse, you can't have games every day or so.
Besides that, the argument that a smaller share for resellers and a larger share for the artists could help in the way you mentioned is not limited to any specific distribution strategy and applies as well to a lottery-like scheme.
A giant band can't be duplicated exactly, but they do have lots of competition. They compete with other bands, the movie theater, a quiet night in, the bowling alley, etc. It's entertainment. So if floating ticket prices put the tickets out of reach of most fans, the market will find a way to increase supply.
Sure, you can always do something entirely different, but we are discussing ticket allocation for a specific event. Doing something else if you can't get a ticket is not a solution to the problem.
Otherwise the average fan goes bowling, and long term you lose your core fan base. The supply will increase to meet the demand. Maybe via one of the ideas above, and maybe via something that we can't even think of right now (and which someone will get rich for figuring out).
As said before, I am not convinced that the supply side is elastic enough in this case. Personalized tickets and lottery-like sales are actually things that quite a few bands and events do in order to keep the price under control.
I'm mad that there's a class of a parasites getting rich off the backs of the artists and workers that create the value in the concerts.
I have no issue with poor people being unable to see live shows.
Why don't we 1) make tickets non-transferrable (but refundable), 2) start pricing half the tickets as what the person will pay via auction and the other half as a fixed-price lottery? I'm not aware of many other ways to make things fair when demand outstrips supply so much.
This is apparently what Louis CK is doing for his latest tour. I ordered tickets and I have to pick them up from the box office with ID starting 1 hour before show starts. Or I can request a refund.
Why does it need to be fair? It's a private business putting on an event that nobody needs to go to except as a luxury entertainment. It's not access to food and water. We don't expect that other limited luxuries should be available to everyone, so why concerts and sport events?
Surely tickets going to the people who'll pay the most is fair?
If you want to avoid a Hunger Games situation where only the rich and famous enjoy your product (the NBA and many musicians care about this) that sort of person needs to be provided for
Now some will argue this is not sufficient but the rub is, if your not going to support the team the full season then why should you have preference over someone who does?
So all teams provide for regular fans. However many people who do complain about the 'system' are fans of fancy, as in fans when the team wins and is in the playoffs.
There are similar passes and priorities for entertainment venues.
It's important to keep the sport seemingly accessible for the long term prospects of the sport.
Maybe if they charged market rates for tickets the taxpayers wouldn't have to pay for the stadium.
People would think it was very strange if BMW made available a proportion of their cars at a lower price, or if people got angry at swiss watches being resold at a profit.
It's not so much about the price as it is about the product being dangled in front of your face and then snatched away whenever you try to grab it.
https://louisck.net/tour-dates : 'Regarding ticket resale: we take great efforts and have many methods of finding out what inventory is being sold on "broker" sites like Stubhub and Vivid Seats and immediately invalidating those tickets.'
These fans seems to be asking for Right to watch live. What if less popular artists/sports teams ask for Right to Audience? I think government should start looking into that also after all there must be lots of mediocre artists/sports persons/chefs etc looking for patrons.
Other examples include "Who's willing to wait in a 15 minute line for the water fountain," "Enter a lottery for the limited number of season football tickets," and "Only people with an even numbered license plate can buy gas today."
I think there are longer-term factors for the NBA here. If your fans can't get reasonably priced tickets to any of the games they're excited about because of scalping, some percent of them are going to get fed up and do something else with their lives. The NBA gets long term value out of fans being able to connect with their brand at the prices that the NBA is setting, but scalpers are scraping up the benefits from both sides and pocketing it.
NBA doesn't get the money that they could have earned by charging higher prices, and fans don't have a shot at affordable access to events.
I'm more curious why they have to be sold on a FCFS basis rather than an auction or via random selection.
You have bad friends.
Edit: Aren't scalpers viewed as the scum? Why the downvotes?
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837077 and marked it off-topic.