Rammstein Get Restraining Order Blocking Viagogo from Reselling Concert Tickets
consequence.net
consequence.net
Viagogo purchases tickets with fake names and addresses to then resells them for a much higher price. This is illegal in Switzerland and probably also in many European countries.
[1] https://www.srf.ch/news/panorama/eintrittskarten-zurueckbeza... (German)
Same here. We issued a restraint order against Viagogo years ago, but still receive >30% 'automated traffic' during high demand pre-sales, according to Cloudflare.
Even though we put lots and lots of resources into making it as difficult as possible for black markets, it still seems to be a quick and easy way to make some cash.
It's sad to see you have such a big amount of automated traffic, no wonder why it's so hard to get tickets for high demand events as a human when you're competing with this.
It's ironic that we only found out about the scale of automated traffic after moving to CF. Before, we were just fire fighting the load during peaks, while thinking our infra is the problem.
I went to a very well-known university (in the US), and they had business courses that literally invited speakers in that had startups that were ticket arbitrage.
I was taken aback that they would be bragging about buying out all the tickets for an event and then charging more for them. Their response is something along the lines of "well first we are getting the 'real WTP' price from the consumer and second we sometimes buyout events that turn out bad and lose money, so it's fair!"
But the whole time it was discussed by professors as if this was a great idea!
I see ticket scalping as a natural and good outcome. If you want a private club then start a private club but honestly you will still have to deal with members attempting to scalp since you aren't charging market price and our broader economy uses more or less free markets.
Well that is one way to look at it. Let me offer you another perspective.
Let's say that I send people to your town to buy up all the bread. All of it! Every brand, every size.
Then I raise the price.
Were the people before charging below market price, or did I just manipulate the market price and raise it?
Now consider that it wasn't bread, but something like insulin or gas. Is that still the "correct" market price or am I forcing it?
If by bread you meant specifically and only bread, then there is no issue. People will simply do without bread, perhaps buy pasta, you will be out a huge amount of money, things go about how you'd expect. In that case your analogy is flawed because you have not changed the market price. Instead you have lost yourself a lot of money.
If by bread you meant "the food supply in general" then it is an unreasonable analogy. The food supply likely requires legal protections that luxuries don't because lives are at stake. You are able to manipulate it only because people are physically unable to "do without".
What I meant was not necessarily related to the items I suggested, you can change them for whatever you like. I was addressing your argument about "selling below market price" and illustrating that the market can be manipulated and the natural "market price" be specifically manipulated by arbitrage of the entire available stock of something.
It seems you want to turn the discussion back to specific types of items instead of your original argument. Regarding that I will say that I do not think that manipulating the price of any item (luxury or critical) by acquiring the entire available stock and raising the price is good for the market or for society.
I will say that I do not think that arbitrage of a single item if there is an otherwise existing market and supply of the item is a problem (ie. you can sell your single ticket for whatever you can get), but to clean out the supply and artificially raise it is.
I want my fans to be able to come to my shows.
I sell my tickets at a reasonable price to allow my fans to come.
All the tickets get bought up and resold for prices a large majority of my fans can't afford.
The venue is still full of my fans, but only the wealthy ones, and I have no method to allow my less wealthy fans to be able to come to my shows.
I've also made notably less money that I would have if I sold my tickets at the scalper price.
I am no incentivized to sell at the scalper price permanently removing the ability for my less wealthy fans to attend my show.
If you want to raffle your tickets off then by all means do that. But you will need a very different system from what we have now. And in order to prevent scalping you will probably need to collect government issued ID or biometric data which would need to be verified on entry to the venue. And the secondary market would have to be totally disallowed, with cancellations involving a refund and the ticket being re-raffled off.
Personally I think that anything short of that is incredibly naive and that you get what you deserve.
The only 'fair' alternative to this (even in hypothetical scenario when there are no scalpers, e.g. like it currently is in Japan) are lotteries.
I do hate the lotteries for ticket sales a lot, but I'm obviously biased (while I'm not wealthy by any meaningful standard, I'd be able to pay ~5x of the usual ticket here w/o breaking too much sweat).
Maybe the ticket market is ripe for some structural changes where wholesalers become an integral part of the value chain but I don't seriously think that this is the way to go by competing directly with retail consumers by denying them access to these tickets.
You are correct. His point would be along the lines of "There is obviously value surplus left over in the current pricing or else the ticket-reseller would not be able to have a profitable business".
The ethics of competing directly with retail consumers by denying them access to the tickets was not a consideration. Clearly their WTP was higher than the venue's/event's pricing, so they see no problem with this.
At least that was my interpretation of the situation. From a business-person's perspective it all seems reasonable enough. From a consumer's perspective it stinks to high heaven and seems like something that should be illegal.
Like corporations buying up all the realestate. Its all just part of an anti-pattern fulled by greed and the lack of laws that weren't put in place due to lobbying. Our Western idea of democracy and capitalism is fucked.
They're about insulating the owner from debt. The LLC can go bankrupt without ruining the owner.
Even in the case of food shortage one must ask if speculation does not increase investment and production in the long run.
Can you unintentionally and unknowingly engage in a criminal act?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability_(criminal)
I guess most organiser are angry only because they sold their tickets at too low of a price.
However, the ticket market is changing and these resellers are getting sidelined a little more, but that doesn't mean the market is getting better.
Ticketmaster, who are part of live nation who in turn own a lot of the big venues and festivals are horrible and owned a lot of resellers or were responsible for the reseller market, as it started to become more outlawed they simply side stepped it.
Now you have tickets that have dynamic pricing, with prices that go well over double the face value, strange extra fees or just out right miss-selling.
A concert I tried to book about 2 years ago, was 'sold out' of general admission tickets the minute it went on sale, including several 'presales' but these 'special access' tickets were available for double the general admission price, it was listed with the VIP tickets, but when you read the small print, with confusing language, it said things such as the ticket would ensure you got access to the concert (Shouldn't a standard ticket do that?) it was basically just a general admission ticket at a 'demand driven price'
This used to happen even back in the bad old days when the way to buy concert tickets was to use special phone banks in certain department stores. It was especially awful for suburban kids who would get their parents to drive them two hours to a city that had the right department store, then as soon as the clock struck 10am, they'd pick up the phone only to find out the concert was sold out.
Most large concerts have felt like a scam for as long as I've been alive. Maybe that's why I've been to so few of them.
What if tickets were sold using a reverse auction system[1] instead? For instance, tickets could start at $1000 and then go down by $1 every hour until the minimum price set by the promoter is reached – or all the tickets are sold out.
This way, even if resellers bought a huge number of tickets, it's possible that they wouldn't be able to resell them for a large enough profit to cover the risk.
Circumstances such as the fact events are generally a part of tours, that the artists likely want a diverse audience, that event sales have side effects on future sales and marketing, etc etc.
Not specifically targeted at you, krn, but is it really so far-fetched to think that artists did think about the fact they'd still have sold out venues at a higher price point?
No, I am not interested in maximizing profits. I am only interested in eliminating resellers.
> Circumstances such as the fact events are generally a part of tours, that the artists likely want a diverse audience, that event sales have side effects on future sales and marketing, etc etc.
That's exactly my point: if currently tickets are grabbed by automated systems and resold for much higher prices, none of these goals are reached by the artists.
Now you have increased profits short term and increased risks. And only rich fans can attend. This works for some stars and against other star'a brand.
A popular answer is requiring the purchaser to show id to get in with obvious drawbacks.
Rising prices would lose the cool fans and make the followers who can afford less likely to want to go.
No, that's what the promoter should do.
> Now you have increased profits short term and increased risks. And only rich fans can attend. This works for some stars and against other star'a brand.
No, it's doesn't have to be this way. Price could start at $1000, but the minimum could be as low as $50.
Yes, the rich fans would get their tickets first, but after the first 50% tickets are sold, all the remaining tickets could cost $50.
This way, at least theoretically, all the rich fans would get their tickets directly, and the resellers would go out of business.
What makes you think there would be any remaining tickets? I mean I don’t see how this system could increase the availability, it would only allow the event organizers to get all the surplus that goes to the resellers now. Also having a fair and transparent system would likely only increase the number of bidders driving up the price even more.
Again, there could be a rule, that after the first 30-50% tickets are sold, all the remaining tickets are sold at the base price (let's say, $50).
It's just a trick to force resellers out of business: because there is a limited number of people who can afford to buy tickets at heavily inflated prices.
> What’s more, fans won’t be able to resell their tickets [...]
This works great for air travel so why not concerts as well? The reason it's not common must be because of collusion or side business with scalping services (which we know that e.g. ticket master has done). Checking an ID card is easy.
> [...] unless they go through the Eventim-distributed website fanSALE
This is potentially dangerous. Scalpers can still transfer ownership for an out-of-bounds payment. So this isn't exactly waterproof.
Here's how I would do it:
- 2 days before release, anyone can sign up to buy tickets. Name and payment details are required and put in escrow or on CC hold (weak rate limit). They are put in an unordered set (no bot advantage)
- at release time, assign tickets those in the set until you run out of tickets.
- create a queue for the remaining tickets. The unlucky ones who didn't get tickets in the former step are moved to the queue (again in random order). Others can also join the queue, but this time order is maintained, for fairness[1].
- You can leave the queue anytime and get your escrow money back. In this case, you cannot choose who will get your ticket, it goes to the person who is first in line.
This doesn't solve all intricacies like group bookings, different kinds of tickets etc, but that should be solvable without breaking this scheme.
[1]: Technically you can just keep the unordered set, but you cannot just make returned tickets available suddenly, because of bot advantage)
Of course, it can go too far and become a monopoly, just like anything in capitalism without restraint; but they do have a purpose
It is more pleasant than the alternative for the person buying a ticket from the scalper; not going at all. If there weren’t scalpers, you just don’t get a ticket at all because they are already sold out. Scalpers are what let you get a ticket so at all.
You can’t just play more shows at a single location. What if every show at every venue is sold out? A band can only play so many total shows.
No, it’s also pleasant for the person who wants to go to the event and can afford to buy a ticket on the secondary market.
This isn't a secondary market, this is scalping at an industrial level and provide strictly no added value whatsoever.
This is only pleasant for Viagogo making a quick buck with scalp bots.
The root cause of the graphics card shortage was rampant central bank printing of currency.
This is a long ride, so buckle up... TL;DR at bottom.
How do we get there? Everyone got scared of a virus that was so lethal half the people who had it didn't even know they had contracted it. Yes, early on, COVID-19 looked like a contender, but six months in, we knew... we knew it killed fat people, old people, immunocompromised people. In other words, people that Nature herself is already stalking. Even with the delta variant, arguably the "worst" of the bunch, as long as you took moderately good care of yourself, weren't old, and didn't have compromised immunity, you very likely were going to be okay.
In response to this, politicians, always fucking terrified of being held accountable for any decision they make, decided to lock everything down in the Western world and send out a metric ass-ton of money to everyone. Well the only way to do that is for Jerome Powell to make the money printer go "brrr". Obviously, Europeans will do whatever America does, so all their central banks made money printer go "brrr". What exactly does happen when you pour trillions of dollars into the global worldwide market?
People start doing idiotic speculative investment, that's what... hence some of the most hilarious /r/WallStreetBets posts we've seen since the subreddit's creation. Meanwhile, a few people who still have their heads on straight realize that their life savings are being rapidly devalued and they start looking seriously at cryptocurrency for the first time. Even Grandma and Grandpa are buying a few of these "Byte-pieces". Meanwhile my neighbor, a bald, greying man of 53 who was literally a maintenance supervisor for manufacturing plants, ends up with a 18 GPU Ethereum farm running out of a shed on his 4 acre property in rural North Texas. That's how easy it became for the average person to set up a crypto-mining farm. A guy who graduated high school and spend 35 years turning wrenches on conveyor belts, fucking around with PLCs (which I do admit, you can't be a fool and do that...), manages to not only hoover up a shitload of GPUs during the pandemic, but also figures out how to buy mining motherboards, hook the shit all up together, and set it up so it's 24/7 mining Ethereum. He also has three 15,000 BTU air conditioners in the shed windows keeping the temps on the GPUs tolerable.
So if a beer-swilling, "God, guns, and country" blue collar laborer-turned-manager can figure out how to set up an Ethereum mining farm, and if Grandpa and Grandma can figure out how to put some money into Coinbase to buy Bitcoins, then you can imagine just how easy it was for more technologically adept people to get their hands on GPUs and start mining.
In Dallas, Texas at our MicroCenter, for pretty much the entire pandemic, it turned into a miniature version of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. Tents everywhere, everyone waiting for the daily lottery to see if they would get the chance to buy a GPU, so they could then go repost it on eBay, or sell it directly to a miner buddy, or just go home and install it into their own crypto-mining rig.
Moving on to NVIDIA, AMD, and their board partners... they were directly selling to miners. All of them. Thus bypassing the chance for gamers to even get their hands on the cards in some instances. TSMC and Samsung were at maximum capacity every single month of the pandemic. It never slowed down, except for "acts of God". This made sense as a lot of the white collar workers found themselves in need of laptops, webcams, monitors, blah blah blah, all shit that TSMC/Samsung makes chips for. That's another reason GPU demand was so dramatic. TSMC/Samsung couldn't focus every single wafer on GPUs. They had to make all kinds of shit for all kinds of devices. So you have a two-fold hit on demand. Everyone wants a GPU, but we're having to reduce capacity for other stuff we also need. Turns out you don't actually need an RTX 3090.
Talk about a "perfect storm".
But wait... people are now flush with cash for getting $600 unemployment payments every week for a year or two. So they do what any rational person does... THEY INVEST IT... HAHA, JUST KIDDING! They buy... new fucking cars. Yes, people buy new cars instead of paying off mortgages early or investing their hard-earned dollars into the market.
So anyway... that's how you get a GPU shortage.
TL;DR: Bad virus scare people. Politicians coward. JPow make money printer go brrr. People use pandemic money to buy Magic Internet Money printers called GPUs. Everyone has to make spreadsheets at home. Everyone has to buy electronics. No more capacity to make extra GPUs. Gamers have no GPUs, go play NES on an emulator.
With scalping, I know that I can get a ticket at at least some price. If I want to go to an event bad enough, I can pay more and get a ticket.
Without scalping, it doesn’t matter how badly I want to go to an event, if I am not lucky enough or fast enough, or able to wait in line, I can’t get a ticket.
Scalping does provide a value… it creates liquidity in the market.
Scalpers increase market demand just as much as people that actually want to go and the only person profiting here is the scalper, who is not really deserving to do so here.
If you are going to increase price with demand, at least let it go to the people behind the event/artist in a fair way.
But the only reason that scalping is profitable is that more people want to go to these events at the original ticket price than there are seats available.
> If you are going to increase price with demand, at least let it go to the people behind the event/artist in a fair way.
I agree with this. When a show sells out in 5 minutes, the organizers should take note and charge more the next show.
In general yes, however I have seen plenty of events that didn't sell out and scalpers where left still selling tickets and perhaps some people only knew about sites like ViaGoGo so bought of there.
I'm sure times when demand closely matches supply, it's still going to the scalpers because they get in there first.
---
See how pointless this type of comment is? What exact information are you trying to convey here? "I disagree"? Do you consider that your disagreement alone is supposed to be a valid argument?
I do agree with you that the solution should be to have the artist make the money… they should raise ticket prices or us an auction system to match the price to the demand.
All that is needed to stop scalping is to price the tickets appropriately when they are first issued.
And OFC, they will charge you way ABOVE what would be the free market price of the ticket, i.e. the amount you would have to offer to find an individual willing to sell you their ticket, if the direct sales ended up to fans instead of the scalpers.
They charge exactly the free market price of the ticket, which does not necessarily have any relationship to the face price.
i.e. the amount you would have to offer to find an individual willing to sell you their ticket, if the direct sales ended up to fans instead of the scalpers.
This doesn't make sense. If you had a magical way of allocating tickets to the people who genuinely most wanted to attend, the price you'd pay to get one of those people to sell you their ticket would be even higher.
It is possible (and would depend on demand elasticity and proportion of tickets scalped) that scalpers might have an incentive to intentionally remove tickets in the same way a monopolist has incentive to artificially restrict supply. If prices on the remaining tickets increase more than the price of the unsold ticket, they’re money ahead.
This probably isn’t happening, but could in theory.
But often tickets are sold below the market price, and scalpers insert themselves and suck up the difference while providing next to no value in exchange.
The market is supposed to serve the people, not the other way around.
Why should tickets to a Rammstein concert sell for any price but what people are willing to pay for? This isn't exactly food or healthcare we're talking about.
Substitute X for whatever you want, and any affirmative response would be equivalent to saying "nobody should have X except the rich". If you agree with that sentence, then that's no other argument I can bring to the table.
I disagree with your opinion. Money is just a middleman - and a mathematical device used by the cunning to take everything away from everyone else and essencially enslave the world.
Food, water and shelter is obvious. Is there anything else you consider important except those three? If not, would you be willing to live a life where the only things available to you are food, water and shelter - i.e. a life of a prison inmate, or a labour slave?
You have incorporated the word "important" into your opinion, but you haven't explained what you mean by that word. Walking away from a discussion like that without explaining what you mean by the (subjective) word you used is nothing short of rude. Especially combined with the snarky remark about your own entertainment.
If you want to spill out your opinions, without engaging in further discussion when asked, feel free to open a personal blog.
Sounds like a plot to a dystopian movie to me.
If you are one of the wealthiest people perhaps you should consider the fact that you have been pretty lucky in life already, even if you sometimes can't attend a concert you really wanted to.
> There were hundreds of tickets available for around $25 the day of the concert.
This was not the case in Los Angeles even for general admission or the nosebleeds, and especially not if you want to be at the very front. Why you saw $25 tickets in Philly, I have no idea. I don't think I've ever been to one of their shows in the United States where tickets were as cheap as $25 for presale.
I've never paid more than $40 for a show in the east.
Something everyone can afford isn't a luxury. Food is a luxury in certain nations. Food is just another everyday regular bullshit item here in America, or in Sweden, or Denmark. Not everyone can afford a Rolls-Royce Cullinan. That's why it's a luxury SUV.
Ticket prices aren't really any different. First off, these tickets do have "fair" pricing, but what they don't have are protections. If I want to buy 153 tickets for $40 each so I can bring my entire extended family to an event, should I have the right to do that? I don't know. Obviously in America, I tend to lean more towards "yes" than "no".
I do agree with one of the posters above who said, "If someone really wants to go see a show, they'll pay whatever they have to pay." I do tend to agree with that. I don't even remember the last concert I've been to because, based on my experience, it's going to be hot, entirely too loud, entirely too distorted, and I could have a way better time in my home theater cranking a recording of a previous concert up to 50% volume and rocking out.
Frankly I don't even understand how someone could pay $50 to see a show, much less $250, but each to their own I guess.
Out of curiosity, do you wear concert earplugs? I get that some people prefer a controlled sound experience, but maybe your experience was subpar because of the loudness? I wore some concert earplugs from Amazon last weekend, everything sounded clear, and no ringing afterwards.
I think a fair price for flawless 2 carat diamonds is $100. Why won't anyone sell them to me at that price?
And more generally you can calculate a "fair" price by looking at costs and adding a comfortable profit margin on top.
Of course the concept of fair price is made up. The money itself is made up, it's just pieces of paper with serial numbers. Does that mean we all just have to bend down to every trickery ever invented by the rent seekers to extract value while bringing none? No, fuck rent seekers, their parasitic behavior ought to be punished by arbitrary rules.
Money is not sacred. The market is not sacred. It is supposed to serve people. Once it stops serving people, it ought to be changed.
That already happens today. It's just that competition provides a counterbalance to foodmakers raising their price to infinity.
People follow rules of the market. Market is those rules. "The market isn't real" isn't really an argument here, when you're using the mechanisms of the market itself as an argument.
> Are you proposing to force them to serve cheaper or perhaps for free?
No, I'm proposing we stop people from opportunistically extracting value without bringing any.
If you're an artist, and want to price your tickets at 1000$, and people still buy it - more power to you. If I want a cheaper show, I'll wait for another band I like to make a cheaper show.
But if you're a scalper who buys all the 10$ tickets to a show, then resells them at 100$ - effectively removing the choice of even attending a 10$ show - then you should be stopped, and, if possible, punished by law, as you're only extracting value without providing any.
The businessman philosophy of "let's price things as much as we can get away with" inevitably leads to standards of living getting shittier and shittier. Isn't the whole argument of capitalism that "competition will create abundance"? Add scalpers to the equation, and the whole argument goes down the drain. Scalping is philosophically inconsistent with capitalism.
Umm, that is literally how the food market works. The people selling food, including all the middle men, are selling it for as much as they can.
A sold out concert is like high end truffle... yes, they are crazy expensive, because they are rare and and in high demand. Most people can't afford to eat truffle often.
Most people have to eat cheaper food and don't get to eat truffles all the time. Because market sellers can sell their food at as high a price as they can get, more people are incentivized to produce food, and there ends up being enough food for most people to eat.
Of course the market isn't perfect, and we have to do things to make sure poor people don't starve, but that doesn't mean we stop using a market economy to allocate scarce resources.
Not to nitpick or take away from your point but this strategy is extremely myopic and counter-productive even from a maximum financial utility for the food producers as it eliminates the consumers gradually for their products destroying the demand side and the market altogether in the process.
How exactly is scalping "free market"? It is a textbook definition of artificial scarcity.
Also, "market liquidity" is just fine, without the help of the scalpers. If you want that bad to go to a concert, just post how much you're willing to pay for a ticket on a couple of FB groups. If you're willing to give 2x - 4x the face value, I'm pretty sure someone will be willing to part with their ticket.
No, artificial scarcity is for things that there could be an unlimited amount of, but that the seller artificially restricts the supply of. The limit on the number of seats at a concert is real, and scalpers don't change it.
> If you want that bad to go to a concert, just post how much you're willing to pay for a ticket on a couple of FB groups. If you're willing to give 2x - 4x the face value, I'm pretty sure someone will be willing to part with their ticket.
What's the difference between the person who would sell me a ticket in your example and the scalpers we have today?
Since the "unlimited amount of" anything doesn't exist in the real world, replace the "unlimited" with "sufficient", and the concept of artificial scarcity can be applied to scalping again. If scalpers sell tickets at 4x the face value, they don't need to sell them all to make a profit - they only need to sell more than 25%. All the others can go to waste, and scalpers are still profiting.
That's, again, textbook artificial scarcity.
There's no such thing as "unlimited amount" of anything that involves the physical world.
> What's the difference between the person who would sell me a ticket in your example and the scalpers we have today?
Everyone involved would be better-off. Except for the scalpers. Simple as that.
I can believe that. Offhand, I can't think of any examples of artificial scarcity that don't involve digital goods.
> Everyone involved would be better-off. Except for the scalpers. Simple as that.
I'm saying that the seller in your example is a scalper.
They're not. Intent and quantity are the defining traits of scalpers. If you're buying a single ticket with original intent to use it, you are not a scalper.
Buying up a bunch of diamonds from DeBeers and reselling them isn't artificial scarcity. It's just scarcity that people don't like.
If you could afford to buy ALL of the DeBeers stock, it would have a similar effect on the diamonds market: You could charge the poor sods that are desperate to get engaged ASAP 4x the price DeBeers charged.
It isn't, at all. There are a limited number of seats in a physical venue, and this is what gives tickets their value. There is nothing artificial about their scarcity.
This isn't the free market at first place, it's artificially limiting supply and price gouging as Viagogo provides strictly no added value upon the official ticket retailer. None.
It allows people who are willing to pay more to attend, when they otherwise wouldn't have been able to. That's an added value. You can argue that that's outweighed by the loss to people who really wanted to go and who can't afford the market-clearing price, but it's false that zero people benefit.
You might be able to, but lots of people can't afford to do that. You seem to be assuming that the people who want to go the most will pay the most, thus leading to meritocratic distribution of tickets. In reality, it will just skew concert attendance towards the wealthy who can afford to pay even if they're not that fussed about going.
Also it’s been established the artists are often hiding behind scalpers to sell tickets at true market prices, whilst appearing to sell them at “fair” prices.
Not everyone can live in the best location, not everyone can drive the best car, not everyone can attend the best concert. There is no other way when many people want something that is in limited supply - someone will be left out.
Wealth is a proxy for the amount of services provided to others earlier, so why giving tickets in exchange for that is less fair than giving tickets to the one who clicked first?
Yeah right. How many services has Elon Musk's toddler given to others, and how much have you?
Note that one of the strong drivers making people take risks, work shitty jobs, and otherwise do things that others don't want to do is exactly this -- providing for their families.
If I can be wealthy without providing others services, then my wealth is certainly a poor proxy for how many services I have provided.
It's a bad thing because wealth is a poor measure of the amount of services provided to others. And because while someone will always be left out, it's much better if it's not the same people always getting left out. Being able to click first is more accessible to more people, although I'd argue it isn't great either, and some kind of random lottery system might be better.
It's the best we have though.
Otherwise, should we also randomly distribute best homes, or whatever else is in limited supply?
Isn't it better than pure luck, even if luck plays a part in wealth?
Source? I don't think the research agree with that statement.
That alone would wipe out everyone who doesn't want to go but wants to resell for a profit.
The rest works itself out within the margin of error... if you want the tickets be there at opening.
And before someone else replies in bad faith like the comment I'm replying to did... maybe along the lines of "well what if your internet cuts out!!! or you get hit by a bus at that moment!!!": that's the margin of error.
You can't have a perfect meritocracy but you can have a better one.
So now instead of discriminating against people who don’t have enough money, now you are discriminating against people with busy lives who can’t be there right when the tickets go on sale.
Also, you would still end up with people who were there right when the tickets go on sale and still didn’t get any.
I don’t think your method is any more of a meritocracy.
If you can't figure out how biasing sales towards people who want to go to a concert is more meritorious than allowing people who want to resell for more than face in a context where "merit" is literally "wanting to see the show", you need to take a long hard sit and really think this one out.
You cannot have perfect system in real life, but you can move away from enabling people with no interest at all in the event to just those who at least had a cursory enough interest when they're not profiting.
Come on, let's get real here!
That's invalid economic reasoning. Tickets are a monopoly market with a fixed supply. The monopolist (band/label) can issue tickets at whatever price they want, but once that price and quantity is set, additional resellers are only rent extracting, they are gouging consumer surplus and providing zero service in return - the exact same number of tickets are sold to the exact same show.
There are many legitimare reasons for a band to issue tickets bellow market clearing prices, i.e. leave some fans with money in their pockets even if they would be willing to pay more. For example, building a long term relation with their fan base, providing a good service for a "fair" price etc. Essentially it's a gift economy where people exchange more values than just money (trust, appreciation, artistic expression etc.); the scalper is throwing sand in that transaction by maximizing its own financial revenue.
Yes, economic substitutes exist for almost all human needs except perhaps air and water, not really pertinent to this debate.
It's literally the scalper who's acquired a near monopoly on the supply and is setting the price, not the "free market". Not every dog-eat-dog situation pertains to free market.
Without scalping, the band sells tickets for $X and nearly everyone who wants to go is able to buy a ticket for $X.
With scalping, the band sells tickets for $X, the scalpers buy a large fraction of them or even all of them for $X each, and then sells them for much more than $X each.
This doesn't let people go who otherwise would not have been able to. It just makes them all pay more to do so.
Except it does matter how badly you want to go... if you really want to go but you don't want to wait in line, and someone else also badly wants to go, and they do want to wait... they want it more. They deserve it.
So really you're against a meritocracy based on how badly someone wants to go to the concert, and instead want to define merit based on discretionary income.
It takes some self-awareness but people really need to take themselves out of their bubbles before they speak. I can't imagine people who don't live in the HN bubble saying things like "if I really want to go I can just pay more, duh" it's a bad look that's the root if why people look down on "techies" as being aloof and socially backwards.
Because the limited supply usually isn't there and artificially created for the sole purpose of rising prices. For tickets you can see this happening when there are suddenly lots of tickets available all over the radio and tv shows a week or so before the event (since they have to fill up all the unsold places).
And in this imaginary 'free market', the ones with most money buy the political power and the fastest bots.
How else do you recommend dispersing items of extreme scarcity where everybody can't have it?
My point, I guess, is that there's a legitimate, healthy reason for a resale market. Throwing the ticketing resale market out with the scalper bathwater is a myopic solution.
Reselling your ticket your purchased for yourself at face value because you can't go isn't scalping.
A secondary ticketing market enables scalping. There are legitimate reasons for the resale market to exist. If you think that the existence and dynamics of a resale market are unrelated to scalping... I would encourage you to look into critical reasoning courses which are perhaps available at your local community college at a low cost.
How do you propose we eliminate scalping, while preserving the secondary market? Go ahead, I'm waiting. Literally all ticketing companies are waiting for your profound insight.
Mark the ticket (physical or digital) with the price paid for it, and make it illegal to resell over this price. You may still have smaller scalping rings, but you would be enabled to go after the bigger scalpers.
Buying a bunch of different tickets to different shows you intend to go to, and selling some of them because things come up or you change your mind, is one thing.
Buying 20 tickets to the same event that you couldn't care less about and selling them for cash outside the venue is something else entirely.
Back in 2015 I bought 2 tickets for AC/DC through them and I paid ~£270. When I got the tickets in my hands I saw that the price was ~£75-£80 each and Viagogo added more than £100, just because they could.
Kudos to Rammstein and I hope more bands will follow and help us get rid of these scammers.
It is not ‘just because’, it’s because there are more people who want to go than there are tickets. The reason you paid an extra 100 pounds is because someone else wanted that ticket, too, but would only pay 90 extra. That is the market allocating a scarce resource.
If there are only 10000 tickets and 100000 people would be willing to pay face value for the ticket, how do you suggest the tickets be allocated? A lottery?
If the reseller wasn’t selling them for more, you would have instead only a 1 in 10 chance to get a ticket at all. Would you rather have a ticket and pay 100 pounds more, or pay nothing but get zero tickets? That is your choice anyway.
Why not? If the artist prices their concerts at $100 because they want all of their fans to be able to attend, and if their fans are willing to spend $100 to go see them, why do scalpers get to "ackshually free market dynamics" there? I am quite happy with a ticket lottery as long as there are no sybill attacks possible on the system.
But that means all the fans won't be able to attend, because there aren't enough tickets.
If I have a 1 in 10 chance of going to a concert I want, I would rather save my money and spend more to go to a particular concert I really want to go to rather than just have a 1/10 chance and end up winning the lottery on one I don't really want to go to that much.
1. That’s viagogo making $100 without directly providing value, and while creating artificial (e.g. non-free) market conditions.
2. The concert sells out anyways because the scalper buys everything. So it’s not like the scalper is improving availability in general.
3. The artist should be getting most of the profit from ticket sales and even resales.
4. The artist should be allowed to forbid resale of tickets if they want them to be affordable.
And finally, the market is not “solving” a problem here. The same number of people attend either way, so the same amount of non-monetary value is being received no matter what. The only difference is “can a rich person get themselves to the front of a line?” Why would that be valuable in general for the market?
Well, no. Different people have different preferences, therefore assigning tickets to ones that prefer them most would create most non-monetary value.
Even if we assume that's the only way to make it work, Viagogo shouldn't be the one getting that money. They're a minor facilitator, and in a more open market they would only get a little sliver of profit or have no role at all. Especially when they're buying tickets under false pretenses.
No, it's Viagogo artificially limiting the ticket supply. Then price gouging.
Yes, that’s the fair solution. A lottery with some mechanic for friends to enter as a group.
How about instead you give every music fan 1000 music points a year, and they can use those points to bid on tickets? That way, every fan has an equal opportunity, and can allocate their points to the concerts they most want to go to? Maybe someone allocates all their points for Rammstein because they want to go so bad, and someone else instead would rather go to 10 less in demand concerts.
But wait, that still isn’t fair… some people like music way more than other people. Huge music fans shouldn’t have the same amount of points as people who only kind of like music, but are actually more into sports. The huge music fans should get more music points and the sports fans more sports points.
To solve this, we could just give out generic points to everyone and you could spend it on music OR sports, or whatever… so now the huge music fans spend all their points on music and sports fans spend it on sports…
But then what about people who would be willing to do extra work to be able to do more things, where other people would rather relax more and not go to as many things. Maybe people could trade their points to other people in exchange for goods and services…
Oh wait, we just invented money and the system we already have.
The emphasis is on the last part, i.e. "just because they could". My point is that they should not have been allowed in the first place.
> how do you suggest the tickets be allocated
First come first served. There are usually different price ranges anyway, so the market forces are already at play. I don't understand why we need to have black-market-as-a-service.
In both cases you trade your time for a ticket, either directly or indirectly.
In both cases, having blackmarket as a service is not helping.
My mum got stung by this and accidentally bought $800 of tickets from them for a show in December (that should have cost $400. Tickets were still available on Ticketmaster)
Tickets were bought 3 months ago, and Viagogo won't give her the tickets or seating Information until 1 week before the show. After some reading this is apparently how they work.
Every single aspect of their service is a dark pattern.
I’m fascinated by the price discovery problem in concert tickets, but I’m incredibly frustrated by the lack of artist involvement in that system. I usually hate bringing up NFTs and blockchains, but if any industry would benefit from a verified seller market, it could be this one.
It’s not like Bad Bunny (the company, not Benito) is hurting from missing out on the 9X multiple on floor seats, but acts are increasingly dependent on performance revenues to make a living, and they’re largely cut out from that resale market.
The artists are not interested in "price discovery" above all else. They do not, in general, want their concerts to be attended only by those who were willing to pay the most money, but rather by their fans. The goal of a band is not to provide a return on investment, or to most efficiently extract money from the value of the band's brand or music rights or whatever, it is to entertain and be artists.
This is the reason that tickets are generally priced well below what each ticket could earn in a blind auction or whatever, not because the bands are bad at "price discovery."
It seems to especially occur with older bands, where they go on tour mostly to get money, or they do private shows for wealthy corporates, or they sell rights to get money.
There are obvious tells that many younger artists are also very interested in profits. Some artists are wealthy enough to provide free concerts, but they don’t.
Then a second hand ticket is worthless.
"GLASTONBURY TICKET INFO
ONLY SEE TICKETS ARE AUTHORISED TO SELL TICKETS FOR GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL No other site or agency will be allocated tickets. All tickets for the Festival are individually personalised to the named ticket holder and are strictly non-transferable. Security checks are carried out on arrival, and only the specified ticket holder will be admitted to the Festival."
[1] https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/2018/09/19/we-we...
But they are doing exactly that:
> Further, fans’ full names must be displayed on their tickets, and they must display proof of identification to be admitted into the shows.
Further, fans’ full names must be displayed on their tickets, and they must display proof of identification to be admitted into the shows. What’s more, fans won’t be able to resell their tickets unless they go through the Eventim-distributed website fanSALE
They used to charge a pretty high delivery fee for e-tickets. When they were first introduced they where the same price as having an actual ticket delivered. They have since stopped that, but will find a bunch of ways to charge you extra fees.
Some venues add restoration fees, why should i be paying a fee to help you with the up keep of your building? Surely that is the cost of doing business, I don't pay a fee at the supermarket because they want to refurbish.
Other annoying things I have had, is ticketmaster charging £10 each for delivery, on two tickets I ordered. Both where delivered in the same envelope using standard postage, which is less than £1
You probably do; it's just not itemized as such. (I mean, I don't know how, since supermarket prices at least at the big stores seem to be the same across very different chains—but they do refurbish, and the money for that has to come from somewhere, so they're getting it out of you somehow.)
Source: I put on a large event once and we had to use Ticketmaster. I hate them like nothing else.
What we have now is lotteries, lotteries everywhere.
You need be sure to track the upcoming concerts, through all the bullshit ways the band may promote them — via twitter, facebook, their fanclub subscription (each email from it may get to spam) or whatever.
If you've missed the lottery submission period, you're screwed. If you've lost the lottery, you're screwed.
I do understand that scalpers don't create value, but I'd rather have the bands set market-based prices that avoided the necessity for lotteries.
I really hope this doesn't affect StubHub in the future because the experience was great and it came through when Ticketmaster was entirely sold out for FZ. I get why there's a restraining order for Viagogo; I just hope they don't take StubHub down with them in terms of whether I can use them again.
Also, it was an awesome, awesome, awesome... AWESOME show! One of the best things I've ever done. Even if you aren't that into the music normally, it's a performance like no other that's worth seeing in person.
edit: fix wording
what do you think they’re going to do to anyone?
2. Only sell tickets to people with these accounts. Only allow 2 tickets to be sold to a single account holder per concert.
3. If someone wishes to sell their ticket (eg. changed plans, etc.), they can do so for 95% of the original purchase price with 5% going back to the band and marketplace.
4. As an added bonus, loyal fans can get first dibs at tickets.
5. Furthermore bad actors at concerts can be tracked and permabanned.
Im not really sure why It has not expended to other regions of the world
UEFA/FIFA has managed to deal really good with scalping for soccer matches.
Is just matter of time.
Everyone pays the same, and it is the fairest price to sell all of the tickets.
I think you have no idea how deep the hole goes here.
I can only speak of my local experience, but it was so hard getting off the ground. Convincing artists and promoters to use an unknown site, convincing users that they should place fair bids (no, you don't want to pay $9999 for a ticket...)
The number of venues that had exclusive deals with Ticketmaster or Ticketek to be the sole seller of tickets for the venue also made selling tickets in larger venues impossible.
I ended up winding down the platform after running it only for a few months. Maybe if I had more capital, and some better connections inside the entertainment community, things could have been different.
Why? It’s my ticket. Should t I be able to do whatever I want with it?
Funny how the same crowd that complains about ‘not owning’ your phone/car/tractor etc is totally fine with not owning a concert ticket…
Yeah, "ownership" is not exactly a black-and-white issue such that impinging upon it is always bad. People in general want good outcomes, not bad ones.
They think that the way John Deere impinges upon the customer's ownership of their tractor (to lock it down and force you to pay recurring fees, use only licensed mechanics who kick back to Deere) is bad, and the way that Rammstein impinges upon the customer's ownership of their ticket (to keep you from scalping it and making money as a middleman who offers nothing of value) is good.
Ownership is one of those concepts where it is difficult to draw universally applicable rules. Instead, we investigate the specifics of each case to decide whether the infringements are ok or not.
But a ticket isn't a physical object that produces repeatable, expected value to the person operating it. A concert ticket is a license to a one time in person experience.
It's the same thing that happens with PlayStation console launches, except there's no chance of getting the experience later. The artist won't be in your city again playing the same set list.
Secondly, I don't think "concert tickets" should be classed quite the same as property per se, and this is for a few reasons:
- Concert tickets are limited edition, single use time slots you're booking with a person or group you admire. They're like stock options in that they expire.
- Buying concert tickets is a means to become a benefactor of the artist. (It's better financial support than buying their albums.) In exchange, you get a good experience.
- The act of profiting off of a ticket for a group you like should feel sleazy. Rather, in selling a ticket, I think a fan would simultaneously feel remorse for missing the concert and happiness that someone else that wants to go can see it.
These stipulations are of course if you really appreciate the art and the artist. There are all sorts of people that go to concerts -- such as those that talk loudly during the set, those that don't really care about the artist, etc. -- , and I understand they may feel differently.