I hope scalping in general become outlawed. The practice is just pure opportunism - it literally brings no value to anyone, it only extracts value from hotspots of popular demand.
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.
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.
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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?
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.