Making $32k/month as a ticket reseller | Hacker News Reader

Making $32k/month as a ticket reseller

businessinsider.com

7 pointsjbrins117 comments

"how I grift the ticket system..." would be a better title, this behavior is bad for people who actually want to go to shows.

If you removed all of the middle men then the live event industry would practically be hallow.

You don't think they can learn and adjust?

Most live music happens outside of mega venues, where this doesn't happen. They get along fine without the middleman tax

Sorry, wasn't implying that people holding live events in large venues wouldn't adjust, in fact I believe all of these middlemen are bad for the people doing the actual work. Just lamenting the fact that so much money from the live event industry is going to people that add no actual value.

yes, so true. I have an old pet project that was trying to address this...

SpotJams, humans together for music

It was really trying to be more the grassroots social network purpose built for musicians, to encourage more small scale live music

"how i sell tickets for their actual market price and what people are willing to pay for them..." would be a better title.

I love liking music that at most costs like $50 per concert, at the extreme. I look at these ticket scalping issues and drink my beer and not give a shit.

Increase prices and/or make lines a thing. There is no bypassing simple supply and demand.

I know I should respect the hustle, but hard to respect a middleman adding 0 value to the process.

I also love how they softened his side hustle by fitting "helping make tickets more affordable" in the same sentence where he says he resells them at a higher markup.

He actually is adding value. The pricing is way out of line with the real demand, causing a shortage. But bands/venues don’t want to set ticket price at market price because it will make them look bad.

Scalpers take the reputation hit in exchange for setting tickets prices such that anyone who wants to pay market price can get one.

Scalping could be done away with, but only by setting pricing at market value, which many are reluctant to do. Hence, it will remain.

> But bands/venues don’t want to set ticket price at market price because it will make them look bad.

How exactly does the band or venue benefit from the scaled price increase? Are the scalpers given them some of their profits back? Otherwise, it seems they only get the price they set, and the scalpers get everything on top, besides Ticketmaster, who probably takes a fee twice...

> Scalpers take the reputation hit in exchange for setting tickets prices such that anyone who wants to pay market price can get one.

I've been priced out of concerts because scalpers took all the tickets and jacked the price out. What about people like me

You were never priced out, you just can’t afford the concert. The price they jacked it up to is the market price.

The band or venue don’t benefit, the people who can now buy when they’re used to be a shortage do. It’s just arbitrage, being compensated for adding liquidity to the market.

problem is, the scalpers run bots and take all the tickets before someone like me can make a purchase, then they jack up the price

there may be a "market", but it's not a healthy one, nor should there be one

I want to do business with the band and venue, unfortunately, some grifters like the post want to abuse the system

They're not adding value, they're capturing value that was left on the table. Most of your points in these comments are correct, but for that core thesis.

The scalpers aren't "solving a shortage", they're redistributing tickets. The same number of people get to go to the concert regardless of the existence of the scalper middleman. That's not adding value to the system -- it's not like rich people get any additional enjoyment from the concert than less-rich people get. There's no global increase in utility generated by the scalping.

Adding value in a situation like this would be if Nvidia had actually priced their MSRP of GPU's to what scalpers were charging, and then reinvested that money into additional production, to actually solve the shortage by increasing supply.

There is significant money to be made as a ticket broker, unfortunately there is nothing of substance in this particular article, such as, how does he obtain a lot of tickets at below-market-value in the first place.

I wonder what the Canadian tax rate is on this type of business, and how they enforce accurate reporting? In the U.S. it would be the regular income tax rate plus 15.3% self employment tax.

Gross or net?

> In May, I sold 850 tickets for just under $121,000 in sales, which equaled about $32,000 in profit

So net

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