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Comment by briffle | Hacker News Reader

I stopped using ticketmaster years ago, but it seems like a reverse auction would be the best way.

Start each ticket at $500. Every X minutes, knock the price down by Y percent.

How about everyone that wants to buy a ticket enters a free lottery and at the end of the week, winners are randomly selected and they then get to buy tickets. Any unsold tickets are then made available to the general public after the winners had a chance to look.

This is how the London 2012 Olympics worked, and it meant you didn’t have to try be refreshing your browser like mad the minute the tickets were released.

This is how the band Phish runs presales.

How do you prevent scalpers from stuffing the lottery with thousands of entries?

You need to show ID when entering the event that matches the ticket.

This is how a popular music festival does it in Germany to prevent scalping. There is no way to transfer tickets to other persons. Instead you can refund tickets up to a week before the festival which then go back into the lottery.

So only rich people should be allowed to see major artists in concert?

No. Rich people can allready afford a scalpers price, and dont really care if their tickets are 500 dollars or not.

In capitalism, high demand and limited stock means that you (as a seller) should set the price as high as you can, while selling all stock. If you set your price lower, you're loosing potential income

Sometimes people have interests other than or in addition to maximizing revenue.

Sure. Ticket master though?

that's what makes this so shitty - promoters are setting the prices initially and ticketmaster is trying to remove their choice by removing all the stock and reselling it at the maximum possible price

The alternative is what ? Someone buys them all and it's the same all over again ?

Or you put some safeties in place and only the fastest ones can have a ticket

Well, I think the alternative is the fan-to-fan resale service Ticketmaster is already preparing to launch (in the UK at least)

https://www.ticketmaster.co.uk/ticketmaster-resale

I mean artists are free to reserve discounted tickets for fans and sell them fcfs but they would be intentionally losing money by doing so. Sometimes this is a good choice because you don't want to make your fans mad.

It's just a system where people are incented to pay the most they're willing to. Pay before your price and you lose money, pay after your price and you risk the show being sold out.

Except it wouldn't be intentionally losing money. Long term fans are what make a band the most money - they buy tickets and merch, and albums (games, movies, etc). By cashing in on big gigs and maximizing the sales for those tickets an artist would potentially be giving up a lot more long tail revenue, and possibly killing their fan base altogether.

Maximizing long term profitability is often not the same as maximizing short term revenue.

There's an easy way to charge market prices and have them be lower. You can raise supply by playing more shows. And if a band values its long term fans, they should have an interest in getting as many people into their shows as possible. Just stay an extra night or two and play another show.

Use some of the extra funds to give away some free seats to fans.

I think identifying which fans are worthy of free seats is a very hard problem - particularly if using an online system.

Who's saying this about Tesla cars or other luxury goods?

It would make the artists (and venues) more money, meaning that they could make more concerts and seats.

What if there was a "cash back" rebate available inside the venue? So TM sells each ticket for $1000, and you get $500 back once you get inside? This would make it very expensive for scalpers to be left with extra tickets. There would still be the problem of preventing people from claiming multiple rebates but I think that's solvable.

That would mean the only people who could buy tickets are that who can afford to tie up hundreds of dollars for months.

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