Why scalpers can get tickets
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A lot of these tickets get resold on the platforms themselves. If a reseller buys the ticket, and then sells it again to the end user, Ticketmaster gets paid twice.
This point results in at least hundreds of millions in revenue. Now, if one of the platforms “cracks down” and makes it harder to buy and sell people will prefer another platform.
So platforms have a huge disincentive to do anything about resellers.
Also…more obviously, demand pressure drives the price, so scalpers are helping create a market and getting paid for it.
The artist and TM still get the revenue, but the scalper gets inventory they can't move.
What about the fans?
Similar to airlines, let people buy standby tickets, at the event, check attendance, if there is space let the stand bys in. TM still gets paid twice, scalper has garbage, and fans get in.
What about fans who can't go? Buy the insurance at checkout, if you can't go the insurance comps for the cost of the ticket.
Note that events where the promoters are actually interested in having people show up instead of in scraping for every dollar (e.g. PAX) do this, and it works fine.
Which can also happen with airplane tickets. What makes it ok for an airplane ticket to be strictly tied to an ID, but not for a show?
It seems to work OK as long as there is enough capacity to get everyone in quickly.
Refund with a small charge seems fine to me.
If it/they are picked up, you get your money back minus transaction fees and perhaps a small penalty, and if it doesn't, you don't - but at least you tried and someone else had a chance to get it.
Ticketmaster obviously doesn't GAF / care.
(The above was for a last few hours or days cancellation type scenario; there could be variations to this where if the event is months out, you could get an instant almost full refund etc - benefits could very well be linked to a premium subscription service perhaps. Lots of ways here to play.)
Or, more specifically you set your own price with the max being what you bought it for.
1) when buying for young kids. Minors don't always have ID and are rarely expected to have them in public.
2) when you buy for a group. You may not have everyone's ID on hand at once, and it makes it harder for honest friends to get tickets together. You don't need to sit together at PAX.
Have a day or two window to assign the names to the tickets. Sure it is a small window for scalpers too but not really enough to make it work properly (and you could still force at least one of the tickets to be locked to a name at the moment of sale)
- kids do not need ID because they usually don't have them
- every adult in the group needs to have their name registered at ticket purchase time
On the other hand, I had an extra ticket. I did manage to sell it for face value by organizing the deal just as I approached the pickup counter (someone else knew how to play the game), and we did a quick cash transaction for face value.
> If you tied tickets to names and required ID at the venue
What happens if I want to gift somebody a ticket? What happens if I don't want my name associated in a database for going to a gay artist's show? What happens if my wife is sick on show day so I invite my neighbor instead at the last minute?
Gifter only gets refunds in credits not tickets.
Then on acceptance, the receiver has the credit and only gets refund to them.
More effective would be having to show your ID at the venue with no reentry.
"Scalpy McScalper. Looks good to me. Enjoy the show!"
Scalpers locking out fans is a universal concern. How often do you hear the success story of "I can't make the concert so I sold the ticket online". Come on. An industry has propped up. This is small potatoes.
People just don’t want to deal with the reality that the Taylor swift tickets that start at $40 or whatever were never real to begin with
This.
Here's a much more optimal semi-auction style solution. Tickets go on sale for 20 days, each day, all the seats and spots are worth the same price, you can buy anything, the price is always the same.
Day 1, the price is $2000. Day 20, the price is $10. So you'd only pay $60 at most for a ticket? Sure, just check in on day 16.
Since we start the price at the higher-than-scalp price, there's no scalping opportunity if you are paying the 'real market price'.
The entire reason performers want their tickets sold below market value is so that non-rich "real fans" can actually afford them. All of the other shenanigans going on are there to get around this issue (and the performers definitely get a cut) while protecting the performer's shield of plausible deniability.
But inevitably, someone (such as the vocal people in this thread) is going to complain that it means only the richest fans can afford to attend the concert. No duh, being rich means you are able to afford things that some others can't.
You find similar effects at sporting events (which is part of why nearly every soccer club has a "supporters' section" with ticket prices deliberately kept very low).
Banning resale is not about selling per se but banning the changing of ownership. The person who paid is verified to be the one attending.
It of course still happens, but in a smaller scale. You can't base a business around it, exactly.
Absolutely no resale is just shifting the risk to the consumer, and affecting the 99% of people who want to see a good show. If the agency takes away the profit of resale, while still collecting a small fee on change of ownership, and allows customers to have flexibility in changing circumstances...its a win win win.
By what surveillance method is this?
Or you mean there is a locked down trading platform, and only there can tickets be traded? What prevents additional money from changing hands via an off-platform backchannel?
A law could discourage that, like the one in Norway your sibling comment pointed out.
In Norway they introduced a law[1] that forbids reselling for a higher price than that printed on the ticket.
I do recall there was a lot of talk about scalping in the years before this law, and I haven't heard much since. I also noticed a drastic decrease of scalpers trying to sell tickets outside the venue.
For sale, desirable ticket at face value and $500 peanut. Only willing to sell as a bundle.
So basically scalpers are being paid to be the scapegoat so Ticketmaster can make more money, at the expense of artists and fans.
As a general rule more complex contracts favor the side with more experience. For example many people get hosed when leasing a car, there’s simply more levers a dealership can adjust to favor themselves.
Ticketmaster's one job is to launder the artist's reputation. They find ways to milk the show for more money than fans think is fair and keep a chunk of that extra cash as their fee, which from the artists' perspective is well-earned. Ticketmaster gets the blame for the scalpers and fees, the artist stays clean, and everyone makes more money than they would have if there was no one willing to be the bad guy.
You blame Ticketmaster for the double-dipping because that's what the artists are paying them for: to take the blame.
Ticketmaster has a monopoly position and is exercising monopoly power here.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/arts/music/taylor-swift-e...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/18/taylor-swift-slams-outside-e...
What I meant is she’s avoiding the resale/scalping thing via Verified Fan to minimize the impact of scalpers. It’s still run through tickmaster.
https://help.ticketmaster.com/hc/en-us/articles/978700273934...
But Verified Fan isn’t universally applied. The individual artist make separate deals requiring it or not and they take the blame for the hassle of requiring it. I suspect but don’t know that Tickmaster also takes a larger cut for the “overhead” of Verified Fan, making this a classic monopolist lose lose situation.
PS: Rereading what I said I really wasn’t clear.
The artists would get more in the short term, but all this outrage that's currently directed at scalpers and Ticketmaster wouldn't just go away—a lot of it would still exist but be directed at the artists themselves.
[0] https://www.vulture.com/2011/05/katy_perry_reserves_the_righ...
People look at high prices as "the seller is just greedy" even if they're arguably justified by the demand. If you can just relist those Taylor Swift tickets you bought at face value on Ticketmaster, they are "sold" as far as Swift herself and her record label are concerned but Ticketmaster can make extra money and presumably pays a kickback to Swift and her label. If she ceases to be the "current thing" and demand massively drops for her concerts to the point that face value is overpriced, the scalpers are left with the losses.
Sometimes scalpers do lose money. Anybody who thought Playstation VR2 was going to be high demand like the PS5 lost a ton of money getting rid of that thing below face value. Likewise, if you try to scalp tickets to an Inter Miami game on the assumption that Messi is going to be playing and it comes out that he actually won't be because he got hurt playing the last place team on the Wednesday before a Sunday game[0], you're the one who ends up losing money from the unsold ticket not the soccer teams. Which is why nobody selling high demand goods or services really cares that much about stopping scalping.
[0]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-12546567/...
They could rise the face value, but sell the first say 80% tickets at considerable discount (so that the price matches what the ticket costs today). Although perhaps this could also tarnish their relation with fans, who want to see their idols as "pure" and not commercial entities they are.
The thing is, they don't need to get additional money from the resale directly. If resale makes their events more profitable, their contracts with the venues and Ticketmaster will be more favorable.
This is true, but most artists aren't insanely popular with millions of fans, most artists are little-known gig workers. In this thread we're talking about the big names, which can and do operate by different rules.
The Guardian interviewed several artists in these big tour situations and they say artists get most of each ticket sale, after taxes and royalties (though they obviously also have expenses to pay, so it's not pure profit). If you're claiming otherwise, where does your inside knowledge come from?
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jan/30/where-does-con...
Source: that's literally what the companies behind lolapaloosa, monsters of rock, et all do.
Company sells ticket officially at 50, black market clears at 150 off the books.
Were I'm from it's the most popular take. Doesn't have to be done by the company itself, could be just some insiders doing it for their sole profit.
1) what other platform? I'm not too intimate with this, but part of the revolt over the Taylor Swift contrversy came from how Ticketmaster as exclusive use to most of the big venues. That seems to be the other half of the issue not talked about in this article.
2) I thought this issue would be as simple as banning resales, but after reading the kind of tech (and money they pay) to invest in the scalping... idk. It'd kill off the casual scalping of someone who buys maybe a half dozen tickets. people paying hundreds for fake numbers and specialized browsers won't be deterred. And the demand for the tickets comes from the celebrities, so it's a pretty safe market as long as the concert industry stays up (so, no more COVID. Even then, it's not like it's hard to pull out).
Then again, scalping itself out to be illegal; it’s just a form of exploiting someone else’s work to extract money from average folk without creating any value or meaningful work.
I don’t know what the solution is.
I’m unconvinced that there is a harm when the scalping is for section 102 row 14 seat 11 at a OneDirection concert.
Lots of people want to vacation in Ibiza, so it’s expensive. Lots of people want to sit in section 102 row 14 seat 11, so it’s expensive too.
Just because someone with more money buys the seat doesn’t mean the person with less money was exploited. If that were the case, we must require all seats to be sold at the exact same price across the stadium and that price must be low enough for even the poorest person to attend.
Either way, you're buying something people need, in an effort to restrict demand, raise prices, and resell at a profit without having to add any real value.
No more scalpers.
Need a refund? Log on to the site, get a refund, and your ticket goes back into the pool for a round 2 public release.
Oh, and they were usually poorer folks that I’d much rather get a brokerage fee than ticket master.
Resellers in the sense of those scalping are not "helping you out". There wouldn't be a shortage if they didn't scab everything available.
Yeah, but Ticketmaster doesn't own the tickets.
Nor do they decide the fees. Or even keep most of the revenue from the fees. All of that is decided by the promoter, possibly with the artist (if a big enough name) and to some extent the venue.
Huh, they only have to ensure that the price of the resold ticket is reasonable ...
Definitively not if it happens like this article describes, with what the scalper selling being a ticketmaster account.
Festival appearance rates are agreed on in advance of ticket sales, so tickets prices are the responsibility of festival organisers.
That's really what money is - a transferable token to persuade other people to do stuff on your behalf.
At that point, would scalper's contribution be net positive? Net better than it was? I'm not sure how to answer that.
Namely, if you are aware of intergroup variability in ID-having rates, is choosing it anyways a conscious discriminatory choice?
What I brought up was, knowing this, is still using ID discriminatory?
Edit: Dang it, the best answers always come after I close my laptop. "It would be discriminatory if the government didn't provide people a way to get ID. As a business owner, that's beyond the scope of my responsibility. Same as if someone showed up without $5 and wanted to buy a sandwich." ...is another way to look at it.
Also seems nearly optimal for alienating all but your richest fans. The extra profit you might extract from the concert might not actually put you ahead in the long term when fans stop caring about you because of your profit maximizing business practices.
If demand is so high that people can't afford tickets and you want to do something for the fans, put the game in a bigger stadium.
> Barry Kahn, of Texas-based dynamic ticket pricing consultancy Qcue, doesn’t believe artists should be judged for using tactics including scalping their own tickets (or it’s newer twin, “Platinum” and dynamic pricing to demand). “The issue is the transparency,” he told Billboard. “If they get caught doing something they have said is wrong, then they are deceiving their fans.”
> In this specific instance, Billboard says that Metallica’s management moved up to 4,400 tickets per show over 20 concerts on the tour through intermediaries, masking the process by packaging the tickets as if they were held back for a sponsor.
- https://www.ticketnews.com/2019/07/live-nation-admits-artist...
Take it worth a grain of salt, I have no idea how true it is but it's at least a plausible explanation as to why artists may not want scalpers eliminated.
Some festivals avoid it by requiring ID to be linked to the ticket and banning resale (though they may allow refund).
It’s funny, but “extracting maximum profit” isn’t the only motivation some people have in life. Especially when it comes to cultural events.
[citation needed]
More seriously though, it's true that people - arguably most people - have other motivations than purely materialistic ones. But, like every market, cultural events are a dynamic system. It follows a trajectory over time.
Slightly more greedy people have better outcomes than slightly less greedy ones. The least successful get filtered out. Iterate that over time. What results do you expect?
And yes, this is a general argument of why the market first makes things better, then makes them all go to shit. And it is confirmed by real world. Exceptions involve some factors that counteract the dynamics described above. Do you see such factors at play in entertainment event industry? I don't.
Define "better outcomes" and "Least successful".
The most coveted and arguable most successful music festival in the UK, Glastonbury, operates in the way I described. A variety of other festivals in the UK do too, often due to the politics of the organisers (see, for example, Beautiful Days)
> Do you see such factors at play in entertainment event industry?
Yep, where people make it happen I see them at play and working well to create systems that both the organisers and the public want, and which lock out the third-party profiteers. It would be nice to see such things become more widespread. Though I agree we are less likely to see that where 'the industry' is in control, rather than artists or passionate individuals.
In effect the number of less wealthy fans who can get into a show is a lottery. Ideally you would do just that, lottery off some tickets at affordable rates and sell the rest at market rate.
But the market has adjusted to that too and re-sellers dominate such lotteries. If you offer the opportunity for arbitrage, the market will take advantage of that opportunity.
So just sell at market rate, cut out the re-sellers entirely.
A key part of that concert experience is other people’s excitement too. For one extreme, a Grateful Dead show was basically a mini festival with one act. The crowd before, after and during is an integral part of the experience. Empty seats don’t tell others about the event or participate with the other ticket holders, degrading the value for artists and many concert-goers.
So, a Dead show that sells just a few hundred many-many-thousand-dollar tickets might sit on a maximum supply / demand curve for the venue or scalpers just looking at ticket revenue, but could destroy much of the value of the event for the band and it’s everyday fans who want the event experience and want it for as many people as possible.
No, artists and producers aren't stupid, they get the most of the money from the Ticketmaster "fees". But when a fan sees a 70$ ticket, they'd may decide Bruce Springsteen (net worth 650$ million) isn't a man of the people. When they see a 40$ ticket and a 30$ ticket, fans just swear at Ticketmaster.
I'm confident in a few years we'll read about how scalping enterprises do profit sharing with artists and producers.
What matters is how much fees they charge and how much do they keep. Can't find it right now, but I remember an article claiming they rarely keep 50% of their fees.
Many “event platforms” allow you to add fees that cover the credit card percentage, but if they’re higher you just get to keep the extra.
The "face value" (base price) will usually be determined between the artist and promoter, the venue will apply a fairly generic fee on top, as will the ticketing provider.
How much of the face value goes to the artist will depend on their leverage in the contract with their promoter. This is usually best improved by the confidence that the venue will sell out, meaning artists with bigger audience and social media presence will usually get the best terms.
I don't have a paper or article I can link to as a source, but I have experience in the industry.
Unfortunately Ticketmaster is owned by LiveNation, and they are far and away the biggest promoter. They sign exclusive rights with large venues. My local 25,000 seat amphitheater has a deal with LiveNation. I can only get tickets to shows there through Ticketmaster.
Artists hate Ticketmaster too (some have sued them) but if you want to do an arena tour, good luck avoiding them. Artists use them because they don't have a choice. The number of large venues that don't use TM is growing, my local basketball arena uses SeatGeek.
The one concession TM makes is to their fan clubs. Artists get to sell tickets directly to a limited number of fans. If you love an artist, joining their fan club will probably save you the annual fee back in one show.
So mostly what GP said. This is not an accident, and everyone is in on it.
I think that's a critical difference, because if the current situation is actually a big reputation laundering scam by artists, there's not much we can do about it without regulation. If it's not, if in fact most artists are as unhappy about the situation as their fans, there's quite a lot they can do about it and should be encouraged to do so even if it makes getting a ticket significantly harder (e.g. showing ID for purchased tickets at the venue and only allowing 1:1 refunds, not resales of tickets).
Of course, if producers are receiving a significant portion of earnings on resales, some of that does "trickle down" to artists in the form of higher performing fees on the basis of anticipated resales. But that's a small fraction of added value for most artists, and it's coming at a level of indirection that means ticket sellers are incentivized to raise fees to their highest possible levels after artists get paid, because that's pure profit for them. I think it's entirely reasonable to believe that artists aren't happy about this payment structure, even if they do see slightly higher show income as a result, and want a range of fans to be able to attend their shows.
The only things I’m sure of are that A. consumers would benefit if there was an actual market and B. It is hard to imagine one happening without government intervention.
I think that's where the "reputation laundering" angle comes into play. With its unique position, Ticketmaster gives artists plausible deniability. "Nothing we can do about it", "evils of capitalism", "a monopolist captured the market, government doing nothing", etc. - say artists, for whom the image they project is a core part of their market value. With a properly functioning competitive market, those same artists would have to either get much less, or answer some inconvenient question about ticket pricing.
It’s a monopsony.
The only real winners are Ticketmaster live nation
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The standard tickets sold on Ticketmaster are owned by our clients (venues, sports teams or other event promoters) who determine the number of tickets to be sold and set the face value price.
...
Ticket fees (which can include a service fee, order processing fee and sometimes a delivery fee) are determined in collaboration with our clients. In exchange for the rights to sell their tickets, our clients typically share in a portion of the fees we collect.
...
Service Fee and Order Processing Fee
In almost all cases, Ticketmaster adds a service fee (also known as a convenience charge) to the face value price, or in the case of a resale ticket to the listing price, of each ticket. The service fee varies by event based on our agreement with each individual client.
In addition to the per ticket service fee, an order processing fee is typically charged. Unlike the service charge, which is added to each ticket, the processing fee is charged once for each order. The processing fee offsets the costs of ticket handling, shipping and support and as a result, the processing fee is generally not charged on in-person box office purchases. In some cases, Ticketmaster's order processing costs may be lower than the order processing fee. In those cases, Ticketmaster may earn a profit on the order processing fee.
In both cases, these fees are collected by Ticketmaster and typically shared with our clients.
That’s exactly what I said. They pay for exclusive ticket sales. They’re just defining “client” as who they pay and notice they do not say artist, which they surely would if they ever did.
It happens in football (soccer for my American friends) for clubs like Man Utd (and probably Man City now) where ticket prices are out of reach of working class fans. The visiting fans make a point of trying to out-sing the local support then insulting them for only being there because the club is winning trophies. All football fans know the song "where were you when you were shit!"
"Developers, developers, developers, developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers!!! Yes!!!"
But either way, both Dean's and Ballmer's examples are marketing stunts, a calculated performance - that's entirely different to rich people honestly letting loose at a concert.
Notice how he is at Clippers games.
Sure it is part stunt, part performance but it also personality.
If the ticket is cheap for me, I can go even if I don't like the band too much. And with very expensive tickets, many enthusiasts won't pay while rich non-enthusiasts are bigger part of audience.
Meanwhile, if tickets are cheaper but you have to jump hoops to get them, you get enthusiasts.
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/reason-why-billy-joel-refuses-s...
These people were so eloquently described by Manchester United captain Roy Keane, as 'the prawn sandwich brigade'.
Citation needed.
Rich people are the main audience at all organized events of all kinds. Do you think you can take you and your kids to an NFL game if you're poor? The main attendees of Taylor swift? Women in late 20s - mid 30s working corporate jobs.
Also who is to say because they don't act ridiculous or obsessed they aren't 'real' fans. What is a real fan anyway? I hadn't heard there was a universal accepted definition.
I suspect, though, he doesn't sit quietly in the front row of his own concerts, so that's not really relevant to the point he makes.
“For our last number I’d like to ask your help. Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewellery.”
I can’t speak to the USA sports, I’m specifically talking about English football which is generally quite affordable for most working class people. I’ve bought tickets to games myself.
Both venues and airlines normally segment the market by how good a seat you get.
The cost to the concert going public of ID verification would probably be a lot lower than the costs scalping imposes. And the concert venues could certainly capture more than $5 per concert goer by raising prices closer to what the typical person actually pays.
This damages the act's fan base, which in turn negatively affects future revenues via streaming, merchandise, co-branding, and future ticket sales.
(I may be wrong about the artist but recall reading about at least one act that toured like this).
I smell it everywhere now. It makes me furious when I'm in a public park with my kids and clouds of nasty smoke are wafting around.
This seems to be a general rule: if some problem is annoying to people with money and clout, and it persists for long, then perhaps it's not actually a problem for those people, but rather a money maker they perpetuate.
That is to say. I think the artist just like the idea of the tickets being affordable to allow their younger and less well off fans access.
I think any argument here has to acknowledge the artists rights in this. Charging more might alleviate the issue, but if private ownership of the performance is to have any meaning, it must include the right to set a price below the market rate. If the artist wants to be "economically inefficient" we as a society must protect that right.
Most venues ARE hypercapitalists.
That club down on the corner where the cool touring bands play? They take a 15-20% cut on the hands merch in exchange for the oh so vauablr service of providing maybe a beat up old folding table.
Fair is fair, right?
They do, they just price discriminate.
It also is up in the air of the market value is really what people are paying or if it’s being inflated by scalpers. Some people will pay it but I don’t think it’s an accurate view of what the price should be in that situation.
But we saw exactly this with the recent Lorcana release. Local game stores acted like scalpers charging scalper prices, it is hurting the perception of the game of what normal prices are.
Then use some form of a Dutch auction to sell them.
Those guys have something like 30 seconds max to hit their mark.
Now those are professional buyers. I think for your amateur crowd you would have to provide a bit more time. perhaps a week. just make it clear what is happening.
And that big clock, have you seen the big clock? if I ever made a dutch auction ticket site A big clock would feature predominantly in the ui. Unfortunately I don't think the flower auctions use the big clock anymore. which is a shame.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAdmzyKagvE (tom scott)
Scalpers would end up holding the bag if they did that. If no one is willing to pay $10k for a ticket, but then scalpers buy every ticket for $10k each they aren't going to me able to find anyone to resell the tickets to and will end up losing money.
Anyone can protect themselves from being scalped by just participating in the auction.
This can't make sense. Then where is the profit for the scalper coming from?
Its also a bit untrue. Its true that yes, people _will_ pay it, but did they need to get that high? Scalpers are like auction bots - not always going to win, but will raise the prices for those who would have bought at an otherwise lower value.
Sure thing it makes buying air tickets a lot more stressful, but we do get low cost trips if we plan ahead, or a much-needed last time seat if we can afford it.
Kind of like how when the 4090 released and was being instantly scalped at every website it popped up on then resold for double to triple retail, and yet thousands of redditors were magically “just stumbling on to one totally randomly, oh and my 2050 also sold for $1200!!”
How do you figure? Are you using a nonstandard definition of "market clearing price"?
> the scalpers would exercise perfect price discrimination if they could.
So what?
This is similar to stuff like auctions to have dinners with certain successful people. Those people have many dinners where they don't ask for a bunch of money from the participant, because then they would only have boring dinners!
Great example: I bought a bunch of tickets to take my little league to a Mets game, which turned out to be the game where David Wright retired. I sold the leftover tickets, which I purchased for between $12 and $30, for a minimum of $350. We built a batting cage with the proceeds.
On the other side, whenever I’m in the city for a few days, I’ll try to score a cheap premium ticket from a season ticket holder who can’t make the game - and frequently do.
IMO the biggest issue with tickets is that it’s 2023 and we live in a pseudo libertarian business climate. It’s a market that should be regulated, as the ticket platform has an incentive to optimize their own self-dealing. The platform gets a vig for each transfer, so maximizing transactions is the optimal path. I worked for a company whose successful entry into event ticketing prompted a buyout by Ticketmaster.
1. The enjoyment of attendees can be partly dependent on the enthusiasm of other attendees. Consider the extremes: an audience entirely comprised of people who hardly know the artist, but can afford it Vs an audience comprised of only die-hard fans, irrespective of their ability to afford a ticket. The first has a flat atmosphere, the second, a special one.
2. A simple desire by the artist to make their show available to a cross-section of society (this could be viewed as altruistic, since most other products/services don't usually offer the same thing at a lower price just to help those who can't afford it).
A possible solution to problem 1: If the goal is to ensure that only die-hard fans get the tickets, why not use their spotify/apple music/other histories to work out who's really a fan of that artist? It should be trivial to get a very high degree of accuracy, and would be costly for scalpers to imitate (they'd need a subscription and to listen to random music years in advance).
Also the fact that it's assumed that everyone attending wants to sit in the audience and go crazy and MAKE SOME NOISE. It can and is annoying to many people.
One other thing is artist may want an active crowd for their own benefit ie they are making a video live recording for further sale or to post to youtube whatever. (Point is good for artist but not for many all of those attending).
As if everything in our society is 100% ok.
Higher ticket prices would lead to more diehard fans
> A simple desire by the artist to make their show available to a cross-section of society
But if scalping is a problem then making tickets cheap doesn’t accomplish this.
In total, this seems to point towards raising initial prices with negative consequence.
no? personal utility doesn't work that way in the real world... We have such drastic inequality that $200 is literally impossible for a huge fraction of the population wheras to some people its an afterthought to spend for a laugh. You can literally notice it in a venue when ticket prices are higher, the atmosphere is different, the clothing is different, the energy of the dancing, the singing
profile of somebody with money to spend: 40+, knowledge worker, drained of energy, has a lot of things going on in life
profile of the kind of fan that makes your show trendy: <30, sporadic employment, excess energy, impulsive, carefree
On a previous tour, Wilco made tickets only valid for the original holder with matching photo ID at the door. So I couldn’t sell my ticket. I was able to bring any guest I wanted with my second ticket though.
For a while now Phish has done tickets via lottery and all tickets come in the physical mail not long before the show. So there’s a limited window for scalping and it can only happen at the speed of paper.
In my experience both bands get concerts full of true fans and also get to charge pretty high prices in a way that doesn’t feel unfair.
More bands could try these or other techniques but almost nobody actually cares. Ticketmaster is a front, they take PR flak to preserve the status quo.
Although apparently it doesn't always fully work. But at least they are trying something:
https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/music/the-cure-ticket...
On the one hand, I didn’t have to deal with TicketMaster. On the other hand, it took a significant amount of time out of a Saturday morning. I’m sure there’s some happy medium, like if you’re part of a mailing list or bought some merch before tickets were announced you can get a pre-release code to buy online.
Also not all sports finals are so expensive! For instance the FA Cup Final, one of the major trophies for one of the biggest sports leagues in the world, had tickets last year starting at 45GBP: https://www.mancity.com/tickets/mens/fa-cup-final-ticketing-...
And in the UK at the time there was a lot of coverage that the tickets had gotten too expensive.
I'm unsure why the bands or the ticket vendors should be involved at all, it's a simple and sensible area for regulation.
- Random selection over an hour at ticket sale time that is unique per device, with some 'are you human' checks along the way to make it more difficult to bot.
- Requiring physical delivery of the badge with a maximum number per address, or government issued ID to pick it up in person.
- Random ID checks during the con.
- The first round of sales goes exclusively to people who had a badge before. I.e. you need a code from the back of the badge. So even if you bought it from a scalper, you would now have the code for next year's presale.
None of these are perfect, but it's still the best ticketing process I've seen in recent years.
i would imagine a scalper would record the code from the badge as well, before giving it to you. So this means they're going to be able to buy just as well, and may be invalidate the code before you get to use it!
Put your name on the badge. If you want to sell it, they buy it back at face value minus a restocking fee, and then resell it at original price.
This would be much less of a pain in the ass for everyone involved.
With software there's no real need to take an admin fee...
Scalpers will have to work for it the old fashioned way then.
This, of course, obviates the need for Ticketmaster (which needs to die in a fire).
Realistically, Ticketmaster has a monopoly because they merged with the biggest artist management company, so if you want big artists you have to contract with them.
The situation will not improve until antitrust enforcement comes into vogue again.
Yes, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Dedicated fans get in first.
You can resell for the total price including fees, but no more.
https://www.consumereurope.dk/purchase-of-goods-and-services...
In addition to being generally legal in the US, in key markets, resale cannot legally be constrained. A venue or artist cannot legally institute policies or practices to prohibit resale.
Even if resale were prohibited or technically impossible, it will not necessarily be any easier to get tickets to a high demand event as resale is only a factor when an event has enough demand to sell out far in advance of playing.
So, it would be hard for them to make the argument you are making. They directly profit from resale (that they “can’t legally ban”) because their ban on resale is legal.
I’m surprised SMS verification is this ineffective at testing for “human-ness”.
It's because most honest users only have one phone number, which makes it a useful unique ID for tracking the honest users. Anyone using it should immediately be under suspicion of selling you out.
Of course, this is another reason why the practice is harmful -- legitimate users with a legitimate desire to be anonymous will do this, and then if you use the number provided for account recovery, someone can steal their account after the number gets recycled. (This also happens to normies when people change their phone number and don't update it with your service; don't use phone numbers for password recovery. The near-100% probability of being reissued is a disaster.)
But what happens at scale, for actual wholesale-level spammers? They get a contact with a phone carrier who lets them use all their unissued numbers. They operate one of these public SMS websites, which not only doesn't cost them money but turns a small profit because of the ad revenue. They do the same thing, but privately, and sell the availability of thousands of phone numbers to other spammers. Then they resell the SIMs to recover the money because they never actually used any of the prepaid data. Which makes offering the service to other spammers cheap, which keeps the price low if you want to be a buyer instead of a seller. The more people who try to do this on their service, the better this scales, because the customer base increases.
It's just not meant for this and the inconvenience and privacy invasion to legitimate users is unreasonable.
I suspect verifying government IDs would be a viable uniqueness criterion, except the only thing those IDs can buy you is voting rights in a particular country, which are usually worthless, so these systems aren't attacked. Now imagine if we decided that Taylor Swift ticket purchases had to be verified with ID. You could see, say, a particular country in the global south deciding they're going to just invent people on paper to go buy Taylor Swift tickets specifically so they can scalp them on the open market.
The underlying problem is that so long as a particular economic opportunity exists, whoever is trusted to stop that opportunity from being exploited has an incentive to stab you in the back. Mobile network operators were never intended to be a 2FA code delivery system or Sybil resistance system, so they will totally just let people SIM-swap you or sell numbers in bulk to spammers, because not doing so was never in their job description and their business is not built to defend against such things.
a) is not required to vote in many places (and pushing for that requirement is, in fact, one of the major methods of classist/racist voter suppression), and
b) is required to do various other things, like purchase alcohol, drive, or buy plane tickets.
Due to (b), there is already a thriving black market in fake IDs for various reasons, and of various qualities.
Government-issued ID systems are absolutely attacked, fairly aggressively.
Proof of work is useful for protecting things worth like a thousandth of a cent per transaction. Captchas for something worth 1/10th of a cent. Phone number verification for something worth $0.1-$1. Real-world presence and real-world id checks for things worth $100.
The amount of money you can make scalping tickets is way higher than that, so it's not a useful defense. Doubly so when the cost of the phone verification isn't even per-transaction, but once per account.
For the ticketmaster case, I think what you'd want is some kind of proof of stable liveness at every transaction. It's easy enough to game proof of liveness, or proof of unique identity, at account creation time. Just the classic method of paying people at a parking lot $5 to pass a "wave to the webcam" captcha. But they can't get those same people back for another captcha every time they want to use that account for another ticket. (Though it's possible that deepfakes have rendered webcam captchas effectively worthless in the last year or two, I don't know where the state of the art on deepfake detection for this kind of usecase is.)
I avoid them whenever possible, but I recently bought a ticket for an event weeks after they went on sale (there was essentially no activity on the map of available tickets that day).
They "unknown error"'ed me at the end of the purchase flow (inside their reservation timeout window). 60 seconds later, the tickets I had tried to purchase were being resold by a scalper.
So, whatever their API is, it allows scalpers to get a feed of tickets that are in the middle of being purchased, then to buy them in the reservation window and offer them for resale with super human speed.
That company is clearly run by crooks. They've repeatedly been brought under investigation for exactly this behavior (for over a decade), so presumably, they are also good at paying out bribes.
That is insane. How is that possible?
Thats 1.43 shows per day. Its hard to imagine 2 shows per day, let alone traveling. That sounds exhausting.
Apologies for the inadvertence.
Generally the scalpers over buy and will start to panic and unload tickets at very good prices the closer the show gets.
It all comes down to whether or not there's enough demand to fill the venue.
If there's plenty of demand, StubHub prices will remain much higher than face value. They absolutely do not ever become available at good prices.
On the other hand, if the venue is larger than demand, then yes -- you can easily score half-price tickets a few days leading up to the show.
But good luck trying to figure out which one will be the outcome. If you delay purchasing, prices are just as likely to keep going up as they are to go down.
You can pay people to wait in line for you
> 1/3 random assignment (you have to get lucky)
Scalpers have the means to can create hundreds of accounts
If people can’t make it, they can return the ticket for the same amount of money they bought it, up to one week before the event. Or they can get cancellation insurance just like some would on holiday plane tickets. Returned tickets go back on sale into the main pool.
As far as I can tell, the scalping problem would be gone instantly.
But there’s a reason nobody is doing it: they’re making money hand over fist.
And you now have a new scalping model where you create a website for people to submit their IDs ahead of time and pay a fee to have someone try to get them a ticket in the two seconds before they sell out, but they buy 2-4 tickets per ID and resell the others.
They can also just disallow multiple tickets per ID.
To clarify the proposed process: you buy one or more tickets online, and you're required to put full names to those tickets when you purchase them. You are not permitted to change those names later. You can return the tickets (minus some "restocking" fee), but that's all you're allowed to do; no transfers.
When the time comes to attend the concert, everyone brings their ID, and the ticket checker matches the names on the IDs with the names on the tickets. No match, no entry.
There is certainly one hole: tickets are still scarce, so someone could set up a website where they claim they'll guarantee you a ticket (because they have fast internet connections and legions of low-paid grunts clicking furiously at the website), and then charge a large premium on top of the ticket price in order to do so. You either give them your Ticketmaster (or whatever) account credentials, or they even "give" you an account after buying the ticket for you, all with your name on it. I do think this would inflate some ticket prices, but I feel like the situation would still be much better than it is now.
On top of that, the ticket seller can just ban these sorts of websites. Again, not perfect, as they'll do everything they can to circumvent the ban, but you can probably make things difficult enough for them that their value prop doesn't really work out all that well, and they fail to get tickets often enough that they end up with a bad reputation.
Really, ticket scalping should just be illegal, and law enforcement should crack down hard on these kinds of outfits.
That doesn't fix it. The person whose ID it is actually wants to go to the concert. They show up with their ID and activate the other tickets sold by the scalper.
> you buy one or more tickets online, and you're required to put full names to those tickets when you purchase them.
Then you're back to pissed off customers because they have multiple tickets they actually want to use and can't change who gets to go when one person can't.
> I do think this would inflate some ticket prices, but I feel like the situation would still be much better than it is now.
A lot of things like this work okay the first time you try it, then entrepreneurs find a way to improve the efficiency of the market.
Fundamentally the problem is that you're trying to violate the law of supply and demand. If you want scalpers to stop existing, raise the price of tickets to match what people will pay for them. If you want prices to go down, move to a venue with more seats.
It doesn’t matter that one person can’t come. All the others can go. If you can’t go, you still can get refunded for your ticket cost.
If one person buys multiple tickets, they need to provide all the names of the people who are going. Just like when you book a plane ticket.
At which point you can no longer exchange one for a different name and have pissed off legitimate customers. That was the point of the suggestion that you could get 2-4 tickets in the same name -- so that you could change 1-3 of them in case of a conflict. But then scalpers can too.
Plane tickets are all virtually as this person described. Someone in your party can’t go to Jamaica with you because they got sick/broke up with you/whatever? Nobody cares, AND no refunds. This Names-and-IDs policy is actually much nicer than plane tickets, because refunds at face value would be allowed. If you’re lucky you might even be able to rebuy the same ticket for your new gf if you’re quick.
They had no chance to afford tickets to popular shows thanks to artists not providing enough seats or dates. If there is more demand than supply then your options are high prices or shortages.
> Plane tickets are all virtually as this person described. Someone in your party can’t go to Jamaica with you because they got sick/broke up with you/whatever? Nobody cares, AND no refunds.
People do in fact care, it's a common gripe about airlines screwing you, and the people who care a lot pay extra for a transferable ticket -- which are available. Which in turn allows the airlines to point to that and say you should've bought the more expensive ticket. But you can only say that if it's available, and if it is then the scalpers just buy those.
Sure, if you're in a relatively new relationship, planning anything at all 6 months out is a gamble. That's just life.
At any rate, you'd still have the option of returning your ex's ticket, and buying a new one in your new partner's name.
Or you can return both tickets, and buy a new pair that are guaranteed to be seated next to each other. Sure, presumably you didn't get full price on the ticket return, but, again, that's life.
The funny thing is that, while on occasion this situation might come up, and someone will end up paying a little more to see the show, overall they (and everyone else) will pay less to see shows in general, since scalping has been (in theory) eliminated. So for most people who see a show every now and then, they'd still come out ahead under this system.
For this specific example? Sure. But then people have other kinds of conflicts with other people.
And pissing off even 10% of your customers is bad.
> At any rate, you'd still have the option of returning your ex's ticket, and buying a new one in your new partner's name.
By then they're sold out. You can't get any other tickets. If you could exchange the ticket you have for one in another name then so can a scalper.
> The funny thing is that, while on occasion this situation might come up, and someone will end up paying a little more to see the show, overall they (and everyone else) will pay less to see shows in general, since scalping has been (in theory) eliminated.
The problem in this situation is not that you have to pay more, it's that you can't go to the concert with your current SO even though you have two tickets. You can get a refund for one or both of the tickets, but you don't want a refund, you want to go to the concert with your new SO.
Some of these scalper sites sell tickets that they don't even have yet, which helps give them the capital to actually buy the tickets later.
I wonder how much of this could be alleviated by selling a certain percentage of tickets at the box office only? I worked in operations for a pretty large concert venue several years ago, and the Jonas Brothers were going to play there (this was at their peak). I remember a good chunk of tickets were only sold at the box office and there was a limit per person (maybe 5 or 6)? I know it's annoying to drive somewhere and wait in line for hours, but I'm sure there are folks out there that would prefer to do that instead of paying a 500% markup on the original ticket price.
The artists have simply decided to sell $1000 tickets instead of $200 tickets that get scalped for $1000
The scalpers then create a secondary market where there is a supply and demand situation like you talk about.
Of course profit maximization is not the only (or even primary) goal, that's what makes this such a hard problem. If it were, ticket sales would be trivially solved - just auction each seat to the highest bider, close biding near the concert date and prevent any transfers. Of course that's a terrible idea.
Society's tolerance for parasites who do that kind of thing has a breaking point and when the people being negatively impacted get fed up enough to take action I'll have no sympathy for anyone who seeks to make others miserable just so that they can profit off of their suffering.
During the pandemic the price of toilet paper should have been increased by an order of magnitude at the store level. This would prevent hoarding and it would make sure people who desperately wanted it could get it. Additionally, it would have incentivized producers and sellers to fill demand.
Price controls are the equivalent of rations. They don’t solve anything because they remove all of the incentives.
I fail to see how making toilet paper cost hundreds or thousands of dollars per roll would ensure that everyone who needed it would be able to get it, since many of those who desperately wanted to wipe their ass were unable to work and going into record amounts of debt just to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads.
Producers and sellers were already fully incentivized to sell their goods, as they always have been. They know people want their product and will pay them enough that they can turn a profit. There's no reason to turn toilet paper into an luxury item which only the wealthiest people can afford leaving the majority priced out.
Price controls and rations have their place. Like all tools, the key to is make sure that they are used correctly.
Also, you’re incorrect about producers having the right incentives. They are incentivized by money, not a higher calling to wipe ass.
Price controls have no place at all other than appealing to people’s emotions. They cannot fix or hide supply problems. They can just shift the price signal to lucky intermediaries (scalpers) rather than to suppliers.
You said: "the price of toilet paper should have been increased by an order of magnitude at the store level. This would prevent hoarding". How high do you think the price per roll would have to be to ensure that no one (not even rich people or a small group of rich people working together) could afford to buy up a pallet of toilet paper to try to resell at a higher price? It'd have to be pretty damn expensive. Expensive enough to price out most people since a millionaire can afford to pay so much more than someone making below minimum wage
> Also, you’re incorrect about producers having the right incentives. They are incentivized by money, not a higher calling to wipe ass.
Read my comment again, I never said anything about a "higher calling". I explicitly said that their incentive was profit.
Instead, IRL, anyone who could find them were buying up several massive packages because it was only the normal ≈$20 for 20 rolls situation, so “heck, buy 60, 80, maybe 100 rolls! Who knows when I’ll get this lucky as to find it again?” Meaning suddenly everyone was buying and warehousing way more TP than they needed in 6 months. Not adjusting prices literally caused the shortage.
It’s amazing what tech bros making 6 figures will say from their ivory towers.
Were you alive and shopping for toilet paper during covid? The wealthy could already purchase it whenever from scalpers (a.k.a Amazon resellers). Normal people had to drive from store to store hoping their ration came in and they timed it right.
The hyperbolic interpretation of price controls is, “the poors don’t deserve toilet paper at all unless they win a lottery”.
Scalping is only illegal in certain jurisdictions (usually state level, iirc). Presumably stubhub intentionally does not operate in those jurisdictions.
They could sell to people in those jurisdictions, but you could make people sign a thing saying that they actually bought the tickets from another area. Someone could probably come after them, but there's enough plausible deniability to keep it tied up in court for a while, and nobody is going to do that for low level scalping offenses.
Almost seems like Ticketmaster allowing resale of tickets creates a secondary marketplace where Ticketmaster earns twice for fees, and the resellers make a big buck on market inefficiencies.
Perhaps artist should either decide whether they want to sell tickets at a fixed price or at an auction.
If fixed price, then it’s first come first serve, no reselling. If bid, then it’s whoever pays the highest. No reselling.
Airline tickets aren’t allowed to be resold. Name must match ID. Prices are dynamic. No reason why concert prices couldn’t be the same.
Or 50/50 fixed vs bid.
In general auctions seem the fairest in any marketplace where the price is an indicator of supply vs demand.
However not fair because artist gives an impression they’re only there for the rich turning some of their fans away.
—-
But I legit dislike Ticketmaster. Their ridiculous fees and dark patterns UI infuriate me. The best I can do is vote with my wallet.
You can take the seller to small-claims court and sue the seller for the difference.
Of course, this approach has its own problems, including possibility of riot, long queues, and surprise venue fees scaled to handle crowd control.
I see plenty of technical solutions being proposed. They might even work. Except each one seems to be exclusionary in some way or another at scale. Or they stomp on the tender feelings of libertarians, but I repeat myself.
Basically try to make it so money changing hands is inpractical and bears considerable risks.
Why not just require a name for each ticket and check ID at entry?
(Well, they have an issue where everyone tries to buy a ticket at the same time and it crashes their servers. Tech could help a bit with that. But in the end, everyone trying to buy a ticket actually wants to go to the festival)
At the venue, someone checks your photo, and you scan your ID, which must match the one on the ticket.
But Ticketmaster would never do that, because they make too much money from scalping.
So we can easily solve ticket allocation on a "fair" way - London 2012 olympics was a good example. Everyone who wants tickets for an event signs up and there is a (verified) random selection and the lucky winners paid (I think) a tenner.
This is because there was no profit maximising incentive for the Games - it was a PR exercise for UK government.
Now for a Taylor Swift concert there is profit maximising. I am going to say here it's Taylor's manager who is the cackling moustache twirling villain of the piece to avoid upsetting Awiftians but hear me out.
Profit seeking manager arranged a contract like Katy Perry below [0]. This basically is a leak showing Perry arranged to be able to sell her own tickets to "resellers" - ie people she knew would sell on StubHub for higher than face value.
But to protect his clients reputation he wants to keep this selling of tickets at high prices a secret.
So imagine there are 1 million tickets for a tour, over 50 days at 20,000 tickets per event (no idea of this is right seems ok-ish). Then hold back 10 days (added by extra demand!) and then only sell say 50% of tickets at the low price, there are say 400,000 tickets available to fans. But release them slowly - extra demand / seating allocation, verifies fans first etc etc. The point is to guage demand - if 1000 people try to buy tickets on day 1 for a stadium, and only 500 manage to get through the process you know there are 500 disappointed people out there so sell the other 50% for that day on that stadium to reseller (your mate) who will go on stub hub or ticket master selling to people who just missed out and will pay higher prices.
finally a market that makes sense. Why is the process slow, awkward, convoluted? Because it's a signalling mechanism for reselling you higher priced tickets without affecting the reputation of the client
[0] https://www.vulture.com/2011/05/katy_perry_reserves_the_righ...
The Cure tried really hard to make ticket sales for their latest tour as fair as possible. “Verified fan” sales only, resales disallowed (except where required by law), not allowing dynamic “Platinum” (aka airline ticket) pricing, transfers not allowed, face value resale only, no added fees. They also had their tickets go for extremely reasonable prices (like, $200 for front row tickets down to $25 for the nose bleeds). Even merch was reasonably priced; $20 t-shirts, $35 sweat shirts, and everything was high-quality. It seemed like they tried everything they could to balance playing in large venues (which unfortunately means dealing with TM since they have the monopoly here) while allowing a fair experience for fans and it still went sideways.
Scalpers still found ways to game this. Tickets couldn’t be transferred, so the novel approach they used was to sell the entire account with the tickets attached to it.
Sometimes I want to resell a ticket and I’m not looking to profit but TM makes it so painful to do this under normal circumstances. The fact they can double dip on fees should be illegal. Whenever I’ve tried to sell tickets at face value (because something came up, I got better tickets later, or another tour stop opened up at a better venue), the actual listing ends up being some 20% higher because of the extra fees TM adds. TM doesn’t let you list a ticket at below face value.
In that case I imagine the scalper would have to get a card issued that scanned properly with your name and the original number.
I also remember Green Day did a show which was cash at the door only; in that case you only have line cheats who pay people to stand in line for them.
I've also been to concerts where the ticket in an app locked to the phone, which could makes it harder if scalpers have to send a phone to you (though rooted phones could help.)
In each of these cases you're out of luck for the show if you lose the card or phone, though it might be possible to get a refund.
Ticketmaster could do the same thing if they wanted to, but I have a feeling they don't.
Only memberships over a certain age before the concert get access to presale, and name on ticket has to match at the door.
It sucks if you are a fan of the music and don't want to be part of the whole idol worshipping part of the business, but my impression is that there is very little scalping going on.
Either it should be lottery system or ticket price should be set high enough, which might not be fair to people who can't afford. But, this is the way.
(Besides the potential for personnel to be bribed individually. I'm wondering about whether there's hypothetically an angle for the company to permit scalpers. Maybe to be involved in scalping, as a kind of double dipping.)
Additionally, resale fees tend to be higher, on a percentage basis, and prices tend to be higher on resale tickets for high demand events.
But this does not mean ticket marketplaces are incentivized to sell to resellers initially instead of actual event-goers.
Primary prices and fees are lower because artists and venues demand it. Ticketmaster's continued ability to source tickets to high demand events is more important than marginal revenue from resale on even a large number of those tickets.
Scalper pays with their card
Someone purchases the ticket from the scalper
Venue distributes special code (short like 2 letters) that gets tied to your ticket.
If you go back to the website, and enter the code, it's not benefiting your credit card, but the scalpers. So if you purchase from an unauthorized person, you have no reason to enter the code.
Wrong code entered twice - lose your 480.
Numbers could be adjusted to make more sense for more people, as long as it makes the scalper ticket seem ridiculous.
A lot of the "solutions" presented end up making shows too expensive for a large portion of the artist's fans. That's not an outcome the artists want.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=37624742&goto=item%3Fi...
Just in case, you know..
For example on this page: https://www.404media.co/ios-17-could-break-diabetic-glucose-...
They link to CNN using the same reference: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/07/health/abbott-recall-freestyl...
We all think that when Major Band goes on tour, they just rent a bunch of big arenas and sell tickets. If you think that, a lot of the comments about the bands getting paid by TicketMaster make sense, but that's not at all how it works.
Venue operators are a lot like commercial landlords. They manage a building, and someone else runs all of the businesses in it. Major Sports Team might play in an arena they own, or an arena owned by the city they are in, or one owned by a third party. Major Amphtitheater could be owned by an investor group, LiveNation, or (as in my area) a symphony or other not-for-profit or governmental entity. Whoever owns it, they usually contract out basically everything that goes on inside it, just as an owner of an office building or strip mall doesn't own most (or any) of the businesses that have offices or stores in it. That beer you bought probably was sold to you by Legends or Aramark or Delaware North who payed Arena Owner for the food and beverage (f&b) rights. The F&B might then be subcontracted out, done in house, or some combo. The F&B company might sign an exclusive deal with Bacardi to use their liquor brands. The shirt you bought probably was sold to you by the exclusive merchandise vendor (or, with music, likely the space was given to Major Band as part of their contract). Etc.
The events work much the same way. The venue doesn't run the conerts, they don't even book them, hell their owners likely couldn't even tell you who was performing yesterday. They probably have an exclusive deal with a large promoter like LiveNation, AEG, etc. Or they may not be exclusive, and various promoters may rent venues on an individual basis. For each concert, a promoter pays the venue and hires Major Band. My favorite band does about 75 shows a year, and gets paid $1 million per. If nobody shows up, they still get $1 million, though they probably won't get it again next year. They don't really know or care what the ticket sales are, except maybe to use it to ask for more than $1 million next year. Then the promoter sells the tickets and they profit from the difference.
But, the venue or an exclusive promoter may have a deal with a ticket seller like Ticketmaster. And because Ticketmaster is owned by LiveNation, the biggest promoter (by far, about 2.5x the size of their nearest competitor) and also an owner or exclusive operator of most of the nation's biggest venues, the ticket seller may BE the promoter AND even the venue. Even worse, LiveNation does band management too. They've been caught steering their bands away from arenas and amphitheaters with a third party promoter after the venues signed ticket deals with other ticketing agencies.
LiveNation's business model is very simple (and brilliant and evil): they buy out venues. 50% of the world's concert revenues come from like 300 venues, so it's an obvious chokepoint. They pay Venue Operator millions per year to run the facilities, then they hire Major Bands to come play there. They make money off the concert and the TicketMaster fees. Or, in cases where for whatever reason they can't buy out promotion, or own the venue entirely, they pay whoever does to be the exclusive ticket agent, so they still get that sweet ticket money.
So why does Ticketmaster like scalpers? Simple, more fees. In the good old days, Ticketmaster sold a piece of paper once, then whatever happened happened. Then came StubHub who made a trusted digital route for reselling tickets (that themselves became digital). At first Ticketmaster fought them but then eventually realized it was a whole lot more profitable to just do it too.
If you buy a ticket and go see the show, they only made one ticket fee off of you. If you buy a ticket and then turn around and sell it verified resale, they got paid twice.
The obvious question is: why don't promoters just charge more for tickets to shows that sell out? (Caveat: the following is more supposition by me than the above.)
1.) Bands don't like this. Bands want their fans to remain fans, so they will buy albums, stream music, buy merch, see future shows, etc. for years to come. If the Stones have shown us anything it's that a music career can span generations if you manage it right.
2.) Just as night clubs purposefully keep a long line in front of the door even though they're empty, a quick sellout induces demand, so it might seem like Taylor Swift's promoters could probably 6x her price and still sell out, but that's likely not true. Bands even often have price restrictions in their deals with promoters.
3.) Most of the time the promoter and the ticketing agent are the same company, so you might as well shove all of the blame onto TicketMaster. LiveNation knows you hate TicketMaster but you'll keep buying tickets from them as long as you have no other choice, so they just keep the rest of their brand behind the scenes. You probably don't even know who promoted the concert you went to, and they like it that way, but you know who charged you $30 in fees.
4.) They get other per-head revenues from their contracts with companies like whoever does F&B, sponsorships, etc. This is why low-selling shows often give away tickets for free, or why you'll see tickets on Groupon when a band plays an amphitheater that's a little too big for them. An almost sold out crowd at $110 a ticket might make less money than a sold out crowd at $100 a ticket.
In any case the one thing you can be sure of is that they have analyzed the data and priced everything at whatever makes them the most money. They're evil but they're far from stupid.
But as to why Major Band uses TicketMaster: TicketMaster has exclusive deals with over 2/3 of the big venues in the US, is usually the promoter that hired them and may even own the whole damn venue.
I guess that’s technically a near -monopsony. Bands would probably argue they’d make more if promotion was itself a functioning market.
This is good evidence that Ticketmasters' defenses actually work, and scalpers have gone over to selling scalping as a get-rich-quick scheme. (It's also of course extremely dumb to pay for). An inevitable step in the lifecycle of any grift.
We did buy Taylor Swift tickets for next year however it was $1k for three tickets.
If I understand correctly, the definition of scalping is to buy and sell quickly in the hope of a profit. Ticketmaster is the originator of the tickets (it is not reselling from anyone else), so it cannot be a scalper.
You can't just make up meanings and assume that scalping means selling at an uncomfortably high price.
Not all events have this though.
There are 2 overall approaches: law enforcement by making resale illegal or doubling-down on capitalism by auction sales rather than enabling arbitrage.
Either way, ticket marketplace(s) must do more to assure limits of tickets and verifying the uniqueness of individuals through technological and physical delivery controls. Since this is a widespread consumer rights issue, it could be grounds for hauling TM before a Senate subcommittee inquiry.
That is, even if you sell the account, the ticket is tied to the person.
Airlines arguably have the same type of selling situation and no one is scalping coach seats to Cleveland.
In France, a famous youtuber has partnered with the major platform to forbid any ticket resell for their show, and it worked pretty well. But still it was only one time.
The sale is set up so that ticket resale is forbidden, except that scalpers can resell them via ticketmaster. Ticketmaster gets to charge a second transaction fee when the scalper resells it.
Artists don’t have enough market leverage to bypass this. (Pearl Jam famously tried and failed at the top of their career.)
So, it’s a combination of auction fraud (building a platform for scalpers while pretending to enforce anti-scalper policies) and monopoly power (colluding with venues and probably agents to depress first-sale ticket prices).
I tried to figure out if ticketmaster also owns and operates the scalping companies (allowing two-sided auction fraud). I came up with a firm “maybe”.
You could in some circumstances return tickets to the theatre for a full refund, but couldn't resell them.
The buying credit card had to be shown at entry to make sure they hadn't been resold.
Afaik, they're still doing this.
Ticketmaster simply won't take the measures, as they have absolutely no financial problem with the way it is now or throughout the history of them existing. Their only problem is trying to figure out how to get scalper prices themselves, which they've already tried and gotten backlash for.
A decade ago or so I went on a first date with a woman who was a professional scalper. Unfortunately I didn't have the balls to ask her about the ethics of what she does. (I expect it would have been something like, "if I don't do it, someone else will".) But it really grossed me out; I just can't respect someone who does something like that.
The Internet has a remarkable way of introducing you to the absolute dregs. It's like computer security: everything not 100% locked down perfectly will belong to someone else minutes later. And even a gigantic corporation with intense experience handling money cannot lock things down 100%.
Most of humanity is ok. But the parts that suck, suck so hard that on the whole I think it averages out to really bad.
Know how I dealt with ticket scalping? I stopped going to shows like that in the 90's, then stopped buying cd's, and eventually stopped supporting the music industry (and media cartels in general).
If there are a limited number of tickets but many thousands of fans who are willing and able to pay, then naturally the price goes up. And whether you like it or not, people are either paying with money, or paying with time (e.g. waiting in line), or paying with frustration (e.g. going through opaque scalping networks).
The root cause of the problem isn't scalpers; it's the original concert seller either setting too low a price or too low a quantity.
Imagine viewing a pricing scheme that allows more socioeconomic groups access to the arts as the core problem.
We're experiencing a great decline and fall as social services are failing, wages stagnating, and common cultural experiences are being squeezed for profit, only enabling the richest among us to experience any kind of common social event.
And of course, the response is "keep increasing prices until its unbearable", just like we're doing with rent and housing prices, and calling this efficient.
Inflating prices until few can afford it isn't efficient, its just short sighted greed.
Finding a way to suppress prices and remove scalpers is a net benefit for the artists, venues, and patrons.
If Rodrigo decided to abandon her career and only do private shows for Bill Gate's who's business would that be but hers? I think there's room for either disdain or pity for the person who cares about nothing other then money but who's going to make that judgement about another person's motivations? And who would jump in take action on that judgement?
You can try to ignore the equilibrium price point, just as you might ignore gravity, but reality will assert itself. Scalpers will always exist to rebalance the supply and demand equality.
If you want to make something available to more socioeconomic groups, increase the supply. Simple as.
If the tickets were actually easily obtainable but more expensive then paradoxically people wouldn't be willing to pay as much for the ticket because of a perceived loss of value.
And as mentioned in the other reply, many people disagree with the "greed is good" philosophy, hence the /s.
I was a dedicated concert goer back in the day, having spent a lot of time in ticket lines. By time I started, "sleeping overnight" was pretty much over with as an hour or so before the sale, the staff would come out, hand out wrist bands, and then say "#123 is the front of the line" with the 123 being some (I guess random) number from the range of wrist bands they gave out, and everyone else would line up, with #122 wrapping around and being behind whatever the highest band that went out. The premise being there was no reason to show up much more than just before the onsale time, since your arrival time was no guarantee of line position.
Similarly, at one venue, they simply handed out numbers, low number wins. After we picked ours up, there was a guy on the edge willing to buy low numbers.
I was once first in line, but the tickets I got were underwhelming, which made me more cynical about the buying process.
Then, there was that one time, my poor wife, bought us some tickets. There was no way she could have known. There was no way anyone, really, could have known. It was a typical amphitheater layout, and she got the last row of the middle section. When you buy tickets during the mad rush of the opening sale, you just get what they give you, there's really no time to pick or choose.
Amphitheaters tend to be reasonably steep, with the seat in front of you lower, by, perhaps, a foot, so as to offer mostly unhindered sight lines to the stage. But the venue, at some point added a row of seats that were directly behind the row in front of it, with no offset, essentially offering NO view of the stage. It was just awful, and there's nothing she could have done about it.
In the end, I just learned to use a broker for most of the shows I saw. It was a much saner experience, I could pick seats, I could judge value, I could apply intangibles.
Thankfully, the bands I see today are cheap and unpopular, and the sports tickets I just buy from the stadium.
This is the way. There are a ton of bands you've never heard of that are really good, they just aren't popular because only very few acts are ever popular. You can absolutely see good live music cheap.
If the price is set from the Artist, venue, Ticketmaster at prices from $50-200 then they have made that decision.
The local mini libraries on the sides of streets have free books. You could take a book and sell it, but you are not the intended person. The intention of the transaction is for the genuine reader to read the book, put it back, or give new books. This intention is set by the originator of the transaction.
If the Artist wanted the most money, they would set the price accordingly.