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Comment by Pigo | 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.

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> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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