Hacker News Reader

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".

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

> 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.