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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

> The scourge of ticket bots and the immorality of the shady ticket scalpers using them is conventional wisdom

I very much disagree.

If I am willing to pay the asking price for tickets, I should be able to buy them. If you're offering them so cheaply that I will happily buy all of the tickets then you're offering them too cheap and you can't really complain if I buy them.

If it weren't for ticket-scalpers, die-hard fans who are willing to pay extra to secure a place would have no option. Thanks to ticket-scalpers, it is possible for die-hard fans to ensure they can get one even if the tickets are "sold out" by just offering more money.

This is a classic case of an inefficient market being made more efficient.

Without ticket scalping: the original seller sells all the tickets. Some fans get to watch the gig, and others don't, and the availability of tickets bears no relation to how much you're willing to pay to get hold of one, only to how quickly you decide to book one.

With ticket scalping: the original seller sells all their tickets more quickly. The fans who want to see the gig the most get to see it, with less chance of tickets being made unavailable by people who don't want to see it as badly (i.e. don't want to pay as much money), and the ticket scalper makes a profit. Everyone's a winner.

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You reasoning is a pretty good example of why the median person should be very wary of anyone saying that free markets and their "efficiency" are a good thing, or will result in good outcomes for them. They will result in good outcomes for the richest, sure. We can agree to that.

You are conflating die-hard fans with die-hard wealthy fans which is a little silly. Not all fans have the same marginal value of pocket change. One median-income fan may be easily be more die-hard than another more blasé millionaire fan, yet he is also a die-hard fan of feeding his children. Just because he is unwilling to sacrifice his children to go to the concert does not mean he is less of a fan. The millionaire is not really a die-hard fan, but can easily pay, so he does.

So no, the fan who wants to see the gig the most does not get to see it. That's only true if everyone has the same amount of disposable income. They don't.

For the median person, "the free market" just means "the person with the most money gets to make all of the decisions." So much so that a person who cares much less can affect an outcome he hardly cares about, because he also does not care about the money involved, because he has so much of it relative to the median person.

"I mean, it's one banana, Michael. What could it cost? $10?"

Isn't this easily solved with a fan club that any member gets up to 2 tickets that are non transferable (physical printed tickets only via mail)? The benefit of being in the club is to getting access to these. Rich has a lot less to do it and then there are a lot less for the bots anyway.

People are lazy and will always choose the easiest option. If the only way to get good seats and cheap tickets is a fan club (e.g.) and you make that simple, people will change their behavior. If you can only get good seats on StubHub, that's where you'll go.

Scalpers join fan clubs and have people on the inside who can do name changes for them

However justifiable it might be, this ticket gouging is the reason I haven't seen a concert in almost a decade. Maybe I'm a cheap bastard because I refuse to pay hundreds for the few decent artists I've seen on tour, but it's not that I don't have the money.

The first NIN concert I went to, I only had to steer clear of certain mosh-pits. The last one I had to put up with a sea of "brighter than the stage" phones upheld to block my view. I don't particularly care if everyone knows I was there, and I can watch incredible videos from home while drinking Rhinegeist.

I do think Kid Rock's approach to sales (tickets and beer) is awesome, and I grew to respect him for thinking outside the box. It's just a shame that I'm not a fan by any means.

Your first two paragraphs seem to contradict each other. Is it the prices you're bothered by or the phones you're bothered by? They're two very different issues. Indeed I suspect if the primary market prices were higher we'd see less use of phones.

It's not contradictory at all. He's complaining about the prices, and then pointing out that the concert experience, even after paying a boatload for tickets, is very sub-par because of the bad behavior by other concertgoers.

If the high ticket prices guaranteed him a first-class concert experience (no bright cellphones in the air, etc.) then at least the high prices would have some justification. But as it is, they don't when the experience is so poor.

Usually, with other luxury goods and services, the prices are outrageous, but at least you can count on a premium experience. You're not going to buy a Bentley car and get the same crappy treatment you get at a Chevy dealership, for instance.

and so the tickets go to people who are willing to pay the price and enjoy the show, and the market continues to function effectively.

Thank you for explaining it better than I can apparently. I might have went off on a tangent, but you hit my meaning. Live events, at least where I live, have been increasingly meaningless when you go under the impression you're paying for a unique experience. I paid too much for NIN floor tickets in the past, but I walked away with no regrets.

This may be beside the point to market demand for tickets, and more of a systemic problem for lots of things. Maybe there's an increasing number of people who just need to appear awesome on social media, and are willing to pay more of a premium for second-hand, blurry proof of attendance. I know it's a cliche at this point, but with concerts it makes me particularly sad that people can't just be where they are.

> drinking Rhinegeist.

fistbump for a fellow Cincinnatian. I feel the exact same way about football (especially the Bengals). I can buy 10 cases of beer for what it would cost me to freeze my ass off at the stadium, and they are going to bungle it anyway. =D

Awesome, I was genuinely curious if anyone would recognize the beer. I've been seeing it further and further away from Cincy.

Ya their growth in reach has been amazing. Rhinegeist's biggest innovation that allowed them to explosively scale was actually around distribution. I've heard that it pissed a lot of other distributors off, who then lobbied the state org in KY and closed the loophole that they discovered.

Are you on the Cincinnati Tech slack channel? [0] Based on your comment history, I'm curious if I've run into you at a tech meetup at some point.

[0] http://cincytech.herokuapp.com/

Wow, I guess I'm really out of the loop on what they were up to. I've just become a big fan of Cougar, and being able to find it everywhere. No, I haven't been, but I will be now. Thanks for the heads up.

> I do think Kid Rock's approach to sales

Kid Rock is one of the few artists to actually solve the problem (if you view it as one) of a secondary ticket market. It's a market, it responds to supply and demand. He just increases supply until demand falls. For example, he's playing Detroit for 6 consecutive days in 2017. He did similar in the past.

You'll still have some premium tickets being resold over cost, but he's neatly solved the problem of fans not being able to make it to the show by actually addressing the underlying economics.

That is probably the most free-market way to solve the problem: just increase supply until you can sell to everybody who wants to buy.

No real market can ever be built on the idea of guaranteed sale. The idea that someone wants something is not sufficient to mean they can have it. Concert tickets are limited in number by venue and artist.

I disagree with the assertion that result is good outcomes for the richest. Many concerts, store sales, and such, also have people camp out for access.

Online systems have no person to person interaction requirement which makes it ideal for automated systems. So the real result is, when up against a machine bidding for a service or item you want of limited supply you will lose.

To prevent that might require limits based on some form of personally identifying the buyer and then restricting use to only that person. A bit privacy invading but it could be done. The only way it will get done is for the artist involved to force it.

Maybe that would be a better way to do it[1], but that's not actually what happens.

Buyers will still pay $500. They will just pay it to middlemen instead.

Fans will not "get to trade their time waiting in line" for tickets, so that the golden admit-one is rationed by die-hardness. Instead, such fans will be right there in line with those choking said lines for money. And which they're also better at.

Sellers could move to what you suggest. They could do a lottery, and they could lock the winners by ID to their purchase, completely non-transferrably. But none of them do it, because they aren't optimizing for what you claim they are.

If and when they start doing that way, those would be applicable points to raise in defense of that practice.

[1] i.e. if you replaced "charge $500 to the N highest bidders" with "charge $10 to N randomly-chosen chosen people".

> are a good thing, or will result in good outcomes for them

No one says that all individuals will be benefited by an efficient market. But they are a "good thing".

> Not all fans have the same marginal value of pocket change

Yet money is worth the same to the band anyway.

I want a Ferrari, but I'm not wealthy enough to afford one - who should be discounting my Ferrari?

> One median-income fan may be easily be more die-hard than another more blasé millionaire fan, yet he is also a die-hard fan of feeding his children

millionaires are also pretty rare, are there that few bands, playing that few concerts that millionaires get all the tickets?

What is I really really want a Ferrari, more than that lackluster millionaire - then do I get a discount?

Why are music concerts different to any other limited-supply product? It's entirely fair that "the fan who wants to see the gig the most" is not considered, because how, exactly, does anyone prove this is actually true?

> the person with the most money gets to make all of the decisions

The person willing to risk the most value. You want to make decisions without risking anything? Without having to work in advance to have enough to risk?

> because he has so much of it relative to the median person.

A wealthy person's money should only be able to buy things no one cares about?

Except that the system being discussed works as if ferrari released their new cars at $5000 -specifically to allow people with less money to afford it-

But released far fewer than people that wanted to buy a ferarri.

naturally a market of dealerships would snap up all the ferraris and sell them and much higher prices right? but that's not quite what ferrari intended when selling their cars at $5000. How they can get the cars into the hands of truly random people instead of always to the dealer is the problem here.

> that's not quite what ferrari intended when selling their cars at $5000

If this is what they intend, they could go about it differently; other posters suggest venues happily allow touts to take the risk away from the venue. A random lottery would be perfectly legal, and allow the ticket distribution to be random, if the venues desired this.

I'd also note, any company that actually did this, might not be able to maintain shareholders, since some companies aren't supposed to be anything but self-interested by design. Bands could always insist, though.

> If I am willing to pay the asking price for tickets, I should be able to buy them. If you're offering them so cheaply that I will happily buy all of the tickets then you're offering them too cheap and you can't really complain if I buy them.

And if I'm an artist who wants to ensure that fans without a lot of money can see me? Should I be allowed to offer a concert where tickets cost 20% of market value, or should "the market" step in and say "no. I'm the one in charge, and I say that once you reach a certain level of fame, only rich people are allowed to see you live. sorry, but you've outgrown your original fanbase."

That feels like kind of a sick attitude.

The solution here is either the invisible hand of the market, OR tight controls exercised at the artist's discretion.

>And if I'm an artist who wants to ensure that fans without a lot of money can see me?

Either run background checks on fans and only allow people without a lot of money to take those seats, or throw large enough events such that there's enough supply to meet the demand at your preferred price.

This really feels like treating the invisible hand like a religion. At all costs, price controls must be avoided! The will of the merchant is irrelevant! The only thing that matters is maximizing profit- any other solution would commit the heresy of denying power to wealth!

Seriously - either background checks, or rent out yankee stadium? No solutions in between?

What will of the merchant here is being thwarted? The question was how to fulfil the merchant's desires, and I gave several possible answers.

As long as there's more demand than supply, some mechanism will allocate the scarce supply to the buyers who want it most in the sense of being willing to pay the most for it. Any other system cannot be pareto-optimal.

> What will of the merchant here is being thwarted?

Allowing poor fans the opportunity to get in to a show.

> I gave several possible answers

No, you gave two. And the background check one was so ludicrous that you probably should have kept it to yourself. And you missed the most obvious, don't allow ticket resale. No need for hundreds of expensive financial investigations, and you don't have to rent out a stadium. Dedicated fans can still get a ticket, regardless of their wealth. Mission accomplished.

Why can't they meet the demand by renting a larger venue?

Banning ticket resale is also expensive at scale.

At some point, there's a limit to practical venue size. Football stadiums are probably the most common large venue readily available to rent, and that will only hold at maximum 60-100K. Large outdoor venues can hold a lot more people than that, but the logistics probably are a lot harder (most large outdoor events go for the "festival" approach, for all I know it is not worth it to do that scale for single artist events).

TBH I imagine (as implied in the article) scalping is "tolerated" a bit by venues because some of the risk of a dud event is offloaded to the scalpers. The main problem with high priced concerts is probably more in artist image. It's harder to have a "mass market" friendly image if your concert tickets are not really accessible to the "mass market". Branding is critical for artists; if chasing the short term dollar is bad for the brand, it may not be the best thing to do long term.

Allocating a section of low cost tickets via ID based lottery (ala Hamilton) is a great solution for this in my opinion.

> Why can't they meet the demand by renting a larger venue?

For a variety of reasons. If Sting reunites with The Police and goes on tour- sure, rent a football stadium. Some bands prefer smaller, more intimate venues. Some may have a hard time competing for the limited spaces at larger venues. Some may choose to avoid that level of fame. Who knows? It's none of my business.

Bands are always free to chase as much fame as they want, and to make their own policies about pricing or resale or whatever. I just think it's a little dystopian to say they're required to zealously follow some sort of capitalist ideal.

> Banning ticket resale is also expensive at scale.

Checking tickets at the door doesn't get much more expensive if you also require showing an ID with a name that matches the name on the ticket. You can even use the barcodes on most IDs, no fiddly reading required! Remember, you're trying to keep out the people who capitalize on scale, so if somebody sneaks in with a resold ticket and a corresponding fake ID, who cares? A 99% solution is fine.

>require showing an ID with a name that matches the name on the ticket

Then scalpers would just pre-sell tickets and buy it in the given name. There's an arms race and it's not easy to fight the market.

No, you show ID to buy the tickets too. This isn't brain surgery, folks- plenty of venues already do this. It's not perfect, but it's good enough to make scalping not worth the effort.

> And if I'm an artist who wants to ensure that fans without a lot of money can see me?

Which fans without a lot of money? How do they get picked? Lottery? Who can click the fastest? Who has no job and can stand in line for days?

> Which fans without a lot of money?

If you have more fans than seats, some people will be unable to attend. That's unavoidable. But the constraint you're replying to says "ensure that fans without a lot of money can see me", not "ensure that all fans get to see me". So your criticism is a little off target. Yes, those fans willing to show the most dedication might have an advantage.

But we can solve the majority of the "disproportionate power to the wealthy" by the simple expedient of only allowing one or two tickets per person, and matching ID to purchasers of the ticket at the door.

Release a gratis band-themed mobile game, with user ID tied to the phone owner.

In this app, allow the user to collect a free sweepstakes entry, with a 60 minute cooldown timer, to a maximum of 8 entries per calendar day. Whenever concert tickets go on sale, reserve a block on the floor from the Nth row to the back of the floor. (We all know that the spots all the way up front are for the groupies, superfans, and rich people.)

Allow users to allocate their entries to specific shows/venues on your tour. Hold a lottery for each show, and allow the users that are drawn to buy 2 tickets for $2, and an exclusive concert tee for $21. Allow a few winners to get gratis superfan passes, to meet the band, collect autographs, get the gratis ultra-exclusive VIP concert tee, scream and collapse on the fainting couch, or whatever it is your hardcore fans would most like to do. Close to concert time, if the venue is not actually sold out, do another lottery and make a second-chance offering to get any previously unsold tickets for $1 each. Any user that does not or cannot buy tickets can then spend their entries to get gratis/discounted merch or media files, or just get their remaining sweepstakes entries back, perhaps to try again on the next show.

The user arrives at the venue, and presents a certain screen of the app on their phone to be permitted entry.

This rewards dedication to the band (and its licensed merch). In order to maximize your chances, you have to check in every hour that you are awake and not at work or in school. You can't get those tickets any other way, and if you don't make the effort, someone who is more into the band will.

Also, the app itself can recruit and assimilate new people into your fanbase. And you can make sure that the band's own holding company controls the IP and app-based revenue, not the record label, promoter, or distributor.

Buy a bunch of cheap phones, farm out or automate playing the app. Sell the winning phones for profit.

Use app activity to scale the reserved bloc of tickets. Dedicated fans still get to attend shows. The goal isn't to maximize ticket revenue, but to fill venues with a quorum of fans and sell them status-signaling merch.

You can realistically expect your real fans to buy one tee per tour. Farmer accounts will likely show maximum sweepstakes entry activity and no game-play activity until winning a lottery, then will refuse all the merch upsells and never be active again. You can just dump those user ids into the "ignore" bucket and rescale your reserved bloc so that there are still enough seats for the real fans.

In any case, why would anyone buy a transferred fan club burner phone instead of a transferable dollar-priced ticket from a scalper? Why crack the proof-of-fandom test for a single artist, when you could break the CAPTCHA for all of Ticketmaster? The hypothetical attack you imagined requires greater effort and produces less profit than if you were just a regular ticket scalper.

How many artists, do you think, value their fans over money?

Plenty, I'd bet. I'd certainly expect the concentration of people with such ideals to be higher among the population of artists vs. the population of armchair economists.

But I think a better question is, how many artists should be free to value their fans over money?

It's not a question of "should". You can't beat the market. You can fight it, but you will lose. And so will your customers, most likely.

Ticket scalping hurts artist exposure by finding an equilibrium point on price alone, where many artists may really want to maximize audience size and not earnings from tickets. Concerts are like promotional events for their brand and many people buy albums, swag, post on social media about the event, and that's all beneficial to the artist. Ticket scalping removes the ability of the artist to maximize attendance (and potentially limits the groups in attendance to ones outside the bands core marketing demographics)

I think it is more complicated than treating tickets as widgets to be sold.

Solution: when buying a ticket, you pay an additional amount in deposit, which you receive back when you actually arrive at the venue.

This is easily circumvented because the deposit will simply be priced into the scalped price...

But it will become much harder to hoard lots of tickets. And it will be expensive to not be able to sell them all. It guarantees that all seats (for which a ticket has been sold) are actually filled.

That adds a lot of overhead (who is responsible for marking attendance? How is the refund managed, especially in the case of cash payments?), opens up new forms of abuse around how you count attendance, but most importantly doesn't prevent scalping from finding an equilibrium above the ability of a demographic to pay, and I am not even convinced it will stop scalpers from finding price points that have profit for them but lower attendances.

I mean, should you need a staff economist to price your concert tickets?

> I mean, should you need a staff economist to price your concert tickets?

If you want to avoid your tickets going to the people who are willing to pay the most for them then yes you're going to need an economist, and even then you will likely fail. (As you should, IMO)

Maximize audience size by renting a large enough place to meet demand at the price you want to sell at.

That's a better solution imo, but that assumes a perfectly flexible supply of venue space that often isn't there in practice. When it is, I also imagine the price is free to scale exponentially with venue size.

Also, say there simply aren't enough teenagers to make it reach an equilibrium point on price alone. This method still ignores the fact that the artist might want to optimize for something other than ticket revenue. A sold out venue of trendy twenty-something's is can be worth much more than a handful of rich die hard fans willing to pay tenfold.

Finally, it requires a really good handle on what that expected audience is going to be, not just what they can pay, which is hard to do.

>Also, say there simply aren't enough teenagers to make it reach an equilibrium point on price alone.

If there are scalpers, that means there are more people who want to come than seats available. If the price is, say, $50, then there's a certain number of people who would buy at $50. If that number of seats is made available, then the scalper incentive disappears.

>A sold out venue of trendy twenty-something's is can be worth much more than a handful of rich die hard fans willing to pay tenfold

I mean, if you want younger people, just make age restrictions. But you can have both by just getting a larger venue.

>Finally, it requires a really good handle on what that expected audience is going to be, not just what they can pay, which is hard to do.

Well that's where scalpers make the market more efficient, by having a lot of experience knowing what the expected audience will be.

It makes the market for the tickets more efficient, but that isn't what the artists are optimizing for. They want to be able to sacrifice ticket revenue for exposure. Maybe they want to select their audience for hardcore fans willing to spend time on getting tickets rather than money, maybe that translates into better brand referrals because it selects more devoted fans.

You're more okay with barring people over 25 and allowing scalping than disallowing scalping? Ideally, yes, the venue would resize to meet the needs of the artist, but this has already become a very complicated calculus, one possibly without the same solution space since there are a small number of fixed sized venues. It could simply be impossible to get the same audience by these methods.

> If the price is, say, $50, then there's a certain number of people who would buy at $50. If that number of seats is made available, then the scalper incentive disappears.

Right, but this assumes that there isn't an equivalently sized population of people willing to pay more that will buy them instead. My argument is that audiences aren't interchangable and that real harm is done when you force the artist to select the audience on ability to pay alone, as you are proposing.

Also, nothing says the scalpers get it right. They just go out of buisiness or make a loss if they don't. That doesn't stop them from getting it wrong and hurting the artist and the fans in the process.

>Right, but this assumes that there isn't an equivalently sized population of people willing to pay more that will buy them instead. My argument is that audiences aren't interchangable and that real harm is done when you force the artist to select the audience on ability to pay alone, as you are proposing.

The set of all people willing to buy at $50 is at least as big as the set of all people willing to buy at more than $50. Demand curves slope downwards. If you supply enough to meet all demand at $50 and price at $50, then everyone who would buy at $50 does and there's no extra seats.

There are several hypothetical problems with this in practice I can imagine.

First, it's still a problem of finite space. It is not going to be practical to scale out until supply reaches demand in many locations. There are only so many Friday nights in a month, which also makes fungible repeat shows finite, and repeat shows cost time that could be better spent increasing global coverage.

Second, price and venue-filling are signals of quality, so there may actually be some people who do not purchase tickets that appear to be too cheap or do not go because they do not feel invested when the ticket price is low. Then this results in empty seats which negatively impact the artists publicity.

Third, the discriminator when you have a low price point but low supply is the willingness to get in line. This can be a valuable metric to select audiences. Removing it makes it harder for artists to select their audiences.

>Third, the discriminator when you have a low price point but low supply is the willingness to get in line.

Not when they're selling online.

> It makes the market for the tickets more efficient, but that isn't what the artists are optimizing for.

As soon as you are selling tickets, you no longer have full control over that. If you want to optimize your audience, you need to make allowances, and that may mean a lottery of will-call tickets or something. You don't get to make money on those tickets by selling publicly and also have the the ability to fully craft who goes. That goes out the window once you decide you want to sell publicly, and IMO that's the way it should be. That's how markets work.

Bigger venues have different acoustics. Not all music genres are suited to big venues.

Then do more shows in the same place until demand is met.

But when everyone and their dog can attend, as opposed to just the <deserving demographic of hardcore fans>, the event stops being exclusive. What's the point of going, then?

Sure, it's exclusive when tickets are only available at high prices, but surely, you understand that to be the wrong kind of exclusive!

That's part of why the existing equilibrium of cheap prices+scalping=expensive prices exists.

This is partly why the ticket prices are so damn high - manufactured exclusivity. IMO a "true" fan is there for the music and performance, not so they can brag about their manufactured exclusive moment on social media.

The artists will pretend like they're performing for the fans, being the good liberals that they are - in reality they're rich partly because of exclusivity.

> What's the point of going, then?

Most people go to a show to enjoy the show, not to revel in exclusivity.

Also, it's weird to use "minimise audiences for exclusivity" in a thread started by "maximise audiences for side-channel sales"...

> where many artists may really want to maximize audience size and not earnings from tickets.

Then get a bigger venue or how about stay in a location doing shows each night until they do not sell out. The artist can absolutely change the supply to meet the demand if they so chose.

>Concerts are like promotional events for their brand and many people buy albums, swag, post on social media about the event, and that's all beneficial to the artist.

This isn't true. These days, musicians make the vast majority of their money in touring, from both ticket sales and merchandise (t-shirts) at the venue. They don't make squat from album sales. Notice how many old 70s-80s-era classic rock bands are out there touring. They aren't selling brand-new CDs; they're making money with ticket sales. Come to think of it, this is likely why concert tickets are so much more expensive than they were decades ago.

you'd also be surprised how much venues charge, worse than rent.

Not that the sales occur on premises, but the sales are spurred afterwards, much like how a television advertisement works.

> Everyone's a winner.

Except perhaps those die-hard fans who do not have the extra money available to see what may be a once-in-a-lifetime show.

Perhaps a more correct ending would be "Everyone who has enough disposable income is a winner."

If they're too cheap, then it would be everyone with enough disposable time to sit in queue and grab them before they sell out.

This is another reason scalpers are bad. Botting the process gives an edge in both speed and tenacity over legitimate fans sitting in the queue. Ticket allotment limits are only affecting legitimate users, as those scalpers who use bots can get around this with multiple sessions.

Time is distributed a lot more equitably than money, so people tend to find this sort of thing to be more fair.

> Time is distributed a lot more equitably than money

How so?

If you compare the ratio between the 90th percentile and 10th percentile of "wealth," when it comes to time then that ratio is around 1.5-1.7 for Americans (the 10th percentile male lives about 55 years, female 62 years; the 90th percentile is 93/96). If you look at income, the ratio between 90th and 10th percentile is over 10. If you look at net worth, the ratio is actually negative, because the 10th percentile has less than zero net worth.

If you expand it out to the 100th percentile then the difference is even more stark. The 100th percentile income is many orders of magnitude higher than the 10th percentile, while the 100th percentile time is less than 3x higher than the 10th percentile.

> when it comes to time then that ratio is around 1.5-1.7

If I employ someone, their time was mine; If it wasn't, they could use it to stand in line for tickets. This is a different thing from 'mortality', although I assume the wealthy have both better medical care, and quality of life beyond average male/female lifespans.

Even if you restrict it to free time, the disparity isn't that great. If time were distributed like money, then the average person would have only a few seconds of free time per day.

Only because personal free time is capped. But if you include work-hours, there is a discrepancy.

What do you mean by "the average person"? The median wrt wage? Because the average wage will be the same regardless of distribution.

What do you mean, if you include work hours? I can't think of any way to analyze a person's time which results in the many-orders-of-magnitude inequalities we see with money.

For "the average person," pick any reasonable meaning you like. I think they'll all work about the same in this context. The person who makes the most money makes orders of magnitude more than the average. The person who has the most free time has, at most, 168 hours of free time per week. If the inequality there were similar, than the average person's free time would be measured in seconds.

> What do you mean, if you include work hours

If I employ someone to do something, they are acting on my behalf, as proxy. These lose the free time I pay them for, and I gain it. Hence an individual that employs people maybe have more than 24 hours a day; e.g. If I pay someone to wait in line for an hour (for a ticket), so I don't have to, then I just bought an hour of free time.

> I think they'll all work about the same in this context

It sounds like you're just guessing then. I tried working it out, but it depends on what you are trying to measure.

Are you arguing that a person might have 1,000 hours of time each week if he hires a bunch of people to do work for him? That is not how it works.

I mean, you can define it that way, but then you and I are just talking about completely different things that happen to use the same spelling, and this discussion is pointless.

> That is not how it works

It depends on what you're trying to achieve. That time is a poor metaphor for distributable currency?

It still leaves healthcare and QoL as issues.

Who said anything about time as a metaphor for currency?

Health care and quality of life disparities still won't get you anywhere near the level of inequality seen with money.

> Who said anything about time as a metaphor for currency?

I did. You talk about distribution of time, then definite as an un-distributable thing.

What has mortality got to do with wealth inequality, if it isn't a metaphor?

Two different meanings of "distribution." Think "probability distribution," not "transfer."

A metaphor is when you literally talk about one thing, but are actually referring to something else. I'm not doing that here. When I talk about time, I'm actually talking about time. I'm comparing it to money, not using it as a metaphor for money.

As for what they have to do with each other, it's simple:

The usual way to allocate scarce goods is to use supply and demand to set an equilibrium price, and then let people spend money in order to obtain it. Another way to allocate scarce goods is to require people to spend time in order to obtain it.

People tend to consider the first way to be unfair, especially for goods with high emotional value, and whose cost to produce is not connected to the price. People tend to consider the second way to be more fair, because time is more equally distributed among humans.

The first paragraph is fact. The second paragraph is observation and speculation. No metaphors in sight.

A metaphor according to dictionary : "A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.". If you don't consider time to be transferable, talking of it in terms of a currency is exactly this.

> People tend to consider the first way to be unfair

Time and money are linked, so I see both ways as the same. I disagree with the above, some people thing this, but I have no idea what %.

I'm not talking about time in terms of a currency....

All I'm saying is: requiring people to give up time to obtain a scarce good tends to be seen as more fair, because time is more equitably available to people than money.

I can't understand why you keep thinking I'm somehow using time as a metaphor for money.

> I can't understand why you keep thinking I'm somehow using time as a metaphor for money.

I said currency. If you exchange one thing for another (or talk abstractly in terms of this), it's a currency.

> requiring people to give up time to obtain a scarce good tends to be seen as more fair

People too poor to take time off work, or with high-paid careers that leaves them little free time won't have time to spare.

People who are wealthy with no associated constraint on their free time (e.g inherited wealth, or retirees), the unemployed and children/students have plenty free time.

Why does the latter group deserve tickets more than the former?

> time is more equitably available to people than money

Time is more 'equally' (but not necessarily more 'fairly') distributed than time, but what does that matter? Daily toe-nail growth is more evenly distributed than money, and maybe more evenly distributed than time too, so should we ditch time in favor of exchanging good for toenails?

There's no exchange when you ask people to give up time in order to obtain something. That time is just lost. If it was a currency, then the people selling the goods would receive the time you spent.

Your toenail hypothetical, and much of the rest of your comment, entirely misses my point. I'm not saying we should do this or that. I'm merely saying that people find it to be more fair when there's a time requirement. That's not the same thing as "we should require people to spend time."

Yes there is, although it's not the same as a physical exchange.

If I initiate an electronic transaction, where my bank balance goes down by $10, and yours up by $10, that's an exchange, even though nothing physically passed between us.

If I solicit you to do something for me (in exchange for money) that means you spend an hour doing something (therefore not having that time free, but freeing me from having to do it (therefore freeing up an hour of my time), a similar exchange has taken place.

Time can perish, but it can still be used as a currency.

> I'm merely saying that people find it to be more fair

fair enough. Then I disagree that this is true, without proof, and also disagree this is relevant, without justification. I'd assume most people that thing this are part of a group with more time than money.

Sure, but some fan wasn't going to make it either way.

Why should the fan who is willing to pay more money have to miss out, in favour of a fan who is paying less money?

Why not? The only reason to believe this is to believe that having more money means you're inherently more deserving of things, no matter the wishes of the people providing those things.

It's not about deserving in any sort of moral sense. If I offer you $1000 for something you're selling, and someone else offers $2000, who are you going to sell it to?

He obviously is willing to give you more, so give it to him. That's fair. That's life.

EDIT: And if you sell it to me for $1000, don't be surprised if I turn around and sell it to the $2000 guy. He wants it more than I do, and he's going to get it one way or another.

Would your explanation still be as just-so if I chose to sell the item for <=$1000 to you because you are a friend or family?

There are numerous reasons why I could and would choose to go with the first person in spite of a lower offer.

But that's not the situation at hand.

It's three people offering me $1000 for something, I give it to you because you're the first person. Then, you turn around and say "hey, I'm selling this for $2000 because I never wanted it in the first place!"

The two other people who were waiting can't afford it. Some other guy comes along later who can afford it and pays up.

It's not fair, it's one of the nasty grimy sides of capitalism.

Scalpers are 100% middle-men who don't add value. The tickets would sell at base cost. All they do is artificially inflate the value of tickets.

> Scalpers are 100% middle-men who don't add value. The tickets would sell at base cost. All they do is artificially inflate the value of tickets.

Economic theory would say that

1) value, in contrast to price, is personal. Everything has a different value to everyone. For instance, it's a good bet French books have more value to me than to you, because I actually speak that language.

2) inflating value is impossible. Cannot be done

So scalpers inflate the price, not the value. And only because of an inefficient market. Why is a lower price market inefficient ? It's not at equilibrium. That means there are either shortages or oversupply. And indeed : your complaint points out exactly that : a shortage.

The scalpers actually do provide services for that profit :

1) they maintain ticket availability far beyond the original sale

2) they take risk away from the artist (some scalpers even in cooperation with the artist)

(I bet real scalpers would also point out that both of these, the investment and the extended availability involve actual work that needs to be done. As in answering mails, posting stuff online, going out to sell the tickets, ...)

So you're wrong on both fronts. They neither inflate value, nor do they lack services.

And frankly, the only person who can solve this for real is the artist : if they find a way to do enough shows so everyone can watch, that is (obviously) the only way to guarantee everyone can make it. This is not hard, but because of the risk rarely done. Ironically, more and earlier scalping is one of the things that would make it a lot easier for the artist to do this, at least financially. Some artists do this, but perhaps that is more work for less (average) reward for the artist.

Given these incentives, I would expect firstly that artists and venues would scalp tickets themselves, and secondly that all attempts at stomping out scalping will both make the problem worse and merely be a method to guarantee more profit for the designated scalpers. Of course in practice those are also exactly the people who don't want to take the financial risk, and so you'll have pussyfooting all around, lack of conviction, general complaints by everyone, and screwups.

Good post. Everyone also seems to forget that scalpers sometimes have to sell at a loss if the event is not as popular. This is why event organizers don't mind scalpers and only pay lip service to stopping them.

> 1) they maintain ticket availability far beyond the original sale

By artificially and significantly suppressing it in the first place.

Why do you think that ? They neither increase nor decrease the available places.

Ever try to buy a ticket from the proper vendor 10m after the tickets have been released?

Saying that they maintain ticket availability for longer, it's a zero-sum game. The only reason those tickets are around longer than they otherwise would be, is because alternate purchasers were unable to get them.

Put another way, if 100 tickets at $50 sell out in a day, and scalped at $500 sell out in a month, yes, the same amount of tickets is sold. But 'ticket availability lasting for a month' is only there because the scalper has removed the ticket availability for the $50 purchasers.

> Put another way, if 100 tickets at $50 sell out in a day, and scalped at $500 sell out in a month, yes, the same amount of tickets is sold. But 'ticket availability lasting for a month' is only there because the scalper has removed the ticket availability for the $50 purchasers.

Economic theory say that this isn't true. They should sell out at similar speed regardless of reselling happening or not.

And from personal experience: efficient markets are better than inefficient markets. I've seen quite a few inefficient markets and they're ... well they're stupid. They impose ridiculous costs (like having to F5 continuously so you can "deal" with the shortage, but that's quite a trivial one).

And yes, scalpers make the market more efficient.

The presence or absence of scalpers does not change the basic problem : not enough spaces for everyone who wants to go. That cannot be solved by introducing rules against scalpers. In fact, the opposite is true. Seriously, the opposite approach would likely improve matters far more : create a large-scale scalping company that would pre-purchase large amounts of tickets as an investment and resell them later. The presence of this company would massively improve ticket availability by enabling and incentivizing artists to make more spaces available, and this would make everyone's life better.

I don't see why that's "fair" - your definition of fair is entirely based on an assertion that someone with more money should be able to get more things at the expense of others, even when the person/entity providing those things doesn't wish that to be the case. Or, in other words, your assertion is that capitalism is inherently fair, because you're defining fair as anything that is the result of capitalism.

All the arguments along these lines with respect to scalpers get caught in the "is-ought" problem [1]. You are describing the economic situation and saying "This is the way things are at the moment, therefore this is the way things ought to be". It is a leap that you don't really justify.

If people want to take a libertarian approach, why don't you say it is the person selling the tickets prerogative to do every legal thing in their power to limit prices. It is their show after all.

It would be as if I started selling piggy back rides to my friends for $10. When some random guy realizes my friends really like piggy back rides (for whatever strange reason), so he buys all my piggy back rides. I'm all booked. He then turns around and tries to sell them to my friends for $20. What the scalper apologist arguments are saying is that any attempt by me to tell this scalper to get lost is somehow wrong, because I am disturbing the natural order of things. It doesn't take into account that I care who I carry.

To be clear, I'm not saying artists only selling to "poor people" is the sole right way or something of that sort. I'm just arguing against saying that second price auction is the only way to do things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

> If I offer you $1000 for something you're selling, and someone else offers $2000, who are you going to sell it to?

But audience are not fungible. If you are to spend an evening with someone there are more important considerations involved than who will pay you the most money to do it, and trying to buy their way to that privilege could be a strong negative indicator.

Well, why should the fan who is able to pay less money miss out in favor of the fan who has more? Are people fundamentally more deserving for having more disposable income?

The Artist (ie the provider of the 'value') is not making more profit, they have set what they feel their work is worth. Scalpers add no value and simply take. Automation of scalping is bad for everybody involved (edit: except of course the scalpers themselves), as typically bots will buy out tickets to popular events extremely quickly, leaving legitimate fans out in the cold.

Are some people fundamentally more deserving for having the time to wait in line outside a venue, or click reload on their computer for hours? It's funny that we implicitly accept that money is the way of assigning resources to their most valued use for most everything, but for some reason that logic doesn't apply to concert tickets.

If the performer were concerned about actually helping poorer people attend (rather than simply virtue-signaling), they could raise the ticket price to market value, and implement a lottery system for some block of tickets, similar to what the producers of Hamilton do. Best of both worlds!

This is just a concert we're talking about. Not healthcare. Not food. Not baby formula. Totally expendable and not crucial to life.

> Well, why should the fan who is able to pay less money miss out in favor of the fan who has more? Are people fundamentally more deserving for having more disposable income?

Yes, that's what money represents in the current society. You might as well ask whether people with higher income are more "deserving" of better houses, schools, cars, holidays, restaurants, airplane seats. I don't know why concert tickets should deserve a different treatment.

> Automation of scalping is bad for everybody involved (edit: except of course the scalpers themselves), as typically bots will buy out tickets to popular events extremely quickly, leaving legitimate fans out in the cold.

On the contrary, it's extremely good for legitimate fans who e.g. have a job and can't take time off to buy tickets at the exact minute they were released.

Why should the fan who is willing to pay more be prioritized over the fan who was prescient enough to buy tickets on time?

> Why should the fan who is willing to pay more money have to miss out, in favour of a fan who is paying less money?

They shouldn't necessarily have to. They should have to do the same amount of waiting in line, or struggling with whatever online box office system is in place.

Having more money doesn't imply being more deserving of going to an event. Without scalpers it would be more about the effort and desire to attend.

If you don't have time because you're working too much, consider that a sacrifice you're making to be more wealthy.

> If you don't have time because you're working too much, consider that a sacrifice you're making to be more wealthy.

Funny how we scramble to defend making anything that needs investment in time/effort/emotion/people, but can't be bought, into something that can eventually be purchased by someone with enough wealth. As if that's the most just state of affairs.

It sounds like you're saying it's humorous that we don't like rich people dropping loads of cash on things that should be fairly available to everyone?

I don't see the funny.

I'm saying it's funny how we tend to find excuses to justify and moralize that behavior. The top-level comment does this by explaining why driving up the cost of a commodity by creating scarcity is a good thing because rich people who don't want to wait in line can now cut it, while everyone gets to pay more assuming they can afford the new price.

By funny I mean tragic.

What's really funny is they argue against people being voluntarily able to enter in to other kinds of contracts (eg, requiring the name it's sold to match who attends) to do it.

They're not advocating a free market and society, they're advocating a serf market and society.

Scalpers don't create scarcity. They aren't buying tickets, and setting them on fire.

The artists are who create scarcity, by virtue of not having enough capacity to serve all fans willing the pay the retail price of the ticket. (Or by not doing tiered pricing, cheaper ticket distribution by lottery, etc.)

>> Except perhaps those die-hard fans who do not have the extra money available to see what may be a once-in-a-lifetime show.

The problem with this logic is that you assume since the "die-hard" fan does not have the money, he will simply give up and be shut out of being able to go.

As someone who was, and still is a huge music fan, I always plan the gigs I want to go see around when I was getting paid and my budget. I was able to balance seeing fairly unknown bands in small venues before they got big (once saw Korn and Marilyn Manson open for Danzig. Or HedPE, System of a Down and Static-X open for Fear Factory) with the larger, more expensive shows like Red Hot Chili Peppers, Linkin Park, or RUSH.

Most of my friends who are also rabid fans will know when a band is coming and plan accordingly. The whole idea that "die-hard" fans are being shut out is nonsense. We plan, we plot, and we scheme to see the bands we want to. I even took a gig at a CD shop so I could go see bands for free. I didn't care how much I was getting paid because the perks of seeing a national act for free with two of my friends was payment enough.

To me a "die-hard" fan will find a way regardless. I would categorize more fair weather fans with the attitude you're conveying. If they get a ticket to a "must see" show, then cool, if not, well, it's not a huge deal to them.

This is incorrect. There's a false equivalence between the fans who want to see the gig the most and the fans who are willing to spend the most. The current system means that people with lots of money who aren't super interested will out compete raging fans on low incomes.

I'm not suggesting that basing it on first come, first served is ideal, but I think it's probably fairer.

If an event organiser/ticketer wants to use dynamic pricing, that's up to them. Sometimes they don't want to be cause they'd rather build or reward loyalty. Maybe they want to make sure that low income households have a decent chance of getting tickets.

The system above is advocating for efficient markets over everything else.

> There's a false equivalence between the fans who want to see the gig the most and the fans who are willing to spend the most.

This is how scarce resources are allocated. There is no fairer way to decide who wants something the most than to ask who is willing to give up the most to acquire it.

> If an event organiser/ticketer wants to use dynamic pricing, that's up to them.

Absolutely. And if a third party wants to buy tickets at the offered price, that's up to them.

> There is no fairer way to decide who wants something the most than to ask who is willing to give up the most to acquire it.

What is 'the most' for one may be pocket change for another.

"...There is no fairer way to decide..."

Now, this seems unimaginative. Surely, especially given all the feedback and critique on this thread, you can come up with other factors besides price that should influence fairness in this transaction?

We may decide that introducing other factors (like band loyalty or degree of enthusiasm for the show) is difficult, impractical, or threatens entrenched interests, but that's another issue.

We can't let enthusiasm for the allocation properties of markets ("it's Pareto optimal!") bleed over into value judgements about the outcome ("...so we all agree it's most fair!").

> There is no fairer way to decide who wants something the most than to ask who is willing to give up the most to acquire it.

A $200 scalped ticket is a few hour's work for us in the IT bubble. A $100 original ticket is a few day's work for someone on the minimum wage. Who is willing to give up the most in this case?

Sorry for the iffy analogy, but the first thing that comes to mind is hedge funds speculating over food [1], and the real-world impact that has on poor people that clearly have no say in the game.

Scalpers are making a ton of money by creating an artificial shortage of tickets, not because there were already people willing to pay such a high price. If fresh water would cost $100 tomorrow, I'm sure people will still be willing to pay for it (because they really want it, and that's the only price they can get it for). Doesn't mean that it's fair in any way.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/jul/19/speculators...

Here's hoping a cabal of billionaires don't start applying this logic to things like food or houses.

I was saying that artists and ticketmaster and politicians are happy to sell the narrative that "ticket bots and scalpers are the problem and we can't do anything about it" when that is very much not the case. Lots of fans buy this, because they don't know any better. As a journalist, the writing I've seen about the ticket industry the last year has been so, so bad and so simplistic and so infuriating, so I decided to do this piece to fight a lot of these misconceptions

I'm glad you wrote it!

I was in quite a heated debate about this a few weeks ago, where everyone else in the room disagreed with me. Hopefully public opinion will start to reflect market reality in time :)

> If it weren't for ticket-scalpers, die-hard fans who are willing to pay extra to secure a place would have no option.

VIP tickets sold by the venue exist to solve the problem of "some fans might pay more than others to see the same show" and fans get extra value with their ticket purchase in the form of a VIP experience.

Tickets sold by scalpers don't have the added value beyond the value created by their artificial scarcity.

In my experience VIP tickets sell out faster than normal ones. I'm not saying I understand it, but there you go.

There is a middle ground of letting legitimate buyers purchase tickets and then selling them on the secondary market if they are unable to attend.

Automated bots/teams of people buying many tickets purely for the sake of profit doesn't benefit anyone other than the scalpers.

>Automated bots/teams of people buying many tickets purely for the sake of profit doesn't benefit anyone other than the scalpers.

He just told you - it benefits people who want to pay more but would otherwise have to rely on luck to buy the tickets - this is the entire reason the system works.

The people running the show could just sell the tickets using an auction mechanism. It doesn't make sense to let a middle man take a huge cut.

Well it probably does make sense for PR reasons. Nobody wants to be the band/team/event gouging their fans.

>Well it probably does make sense for PR reasons. Nobody wants to be the band/team/event gouging their fans.

Yes and this is why they exist :)

> There is a middle ground of letting legitimate buyers purchase tickets and then selling them on the secondary market if they are unable to attend.

And nothing stops those people from buying a ticket from someone who is no longer able to attend on StubHub. Bands aren't putting on a show so that their wealthiest fans can attend.

>And nothing stops those people from buying a ticket from someone who is no longer able to attend on StubHub.

And the difference between that and scalping to the buyer is ? If you can't bid on the price you're still relying on luck to get it which sucks if you want to pay more. So your argument was that only scalpers benefit - people who can now secure tickets at a markup also benefited.

The difference is that hundreds if not thousands of fans for a large event are not automatically pushed to the more expensive secondary market for no reason other than profit making by a few people.

It makes it nearly impossible for anything that isn't a machine to acquire retail tickets. When 496/500 GA tickets go to a bot, the scarcity and price are artificially inflated.

It's not "artificial" any more than the retail price was artifically low. It's a ticket, any price is artificial.

> it benefits people who want to pay more but would otherwise have to rely on luck to buy the tickets

Where I come from we call these "better seats" or "VIP passes" and they are sold directly through a venue. Not through middlemen that only add value through the scarcity they create.

> If it weren't for ticket-scalpers, die-hard fans who are willing to pay extra to secure a place would have no option.

This is fantasy free-market nonsense. Fan clubs routinely get a round of ticket sales before it's opened up to the general public. It's quite common for an event to have tickets sold in batches to different groups, and for there to be pre-event events as well. If you're willing to pay extra, join a fan club.

It's also faulty reasoning - if other die-hard fans have already bought the tickets from scalpers, you can't just offer more money to the scalper and get one of their tickets. You can, however, buy directly off that other fan, but you can do that already anyway.

>Everyone's a winner

Except the people who badly want to see a band but unfortunately do not work for a trendy startup and therefore cannot afford the tickets in their increasingly gentrified city.

> Without ticket scalping: [...] Some fans get to watch the gig, and others don't, and the availability of tickets bears no relation to how much you're willing to pay to get hold of one, only to how quickly you decide to book one.

How quickly one decides to book a ticket seems like a better way to define a die-hard fan than how much money one has available for a ticket.

Because bands make less money they produce fewer shows which is another net loss.

Further, it's not die hard fans that use scalped tickets it's people with disposable money. If anything fewer die hard fans get tickets because a fan will showup at 12:00 to buy tickets but they don't build a bot to get them in the next 0.1 seconds.

I completely agree. Only those with money should have the right to enjoy life. Or education. Or health services. Or their favourite bands, if that's the case.

Without education you accomplish much less than you otherwise would in life. Modern society is not sustainable without widespread education. Without health services your risk of death or disability increases. But if you can't see your favorite band live you substitute some other form of entertainment.

I'm hoping this post is satire.

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