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Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

An artist might want to opt out of this, though. They might think, and reasonably so, that the optics of having affordable tickets - even if they make less overall - is better for their brand identity and long—term benefit.

That LiveNation has created a de facto system where they cannot opt out of their price setting is at the heart of the entire matter.

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Affordable tickets requires a way to combat scalping, which in turn butts up against freedom to resell/transfer tickets after purchase. It's a hard game to win whenever scarcity and economics are involved.

Radiohead does this, banning scalping and limiting prices/supply. It seems to work out pretty well with the fan base. May be due to the band having obsessive and largely left-wing fans

How did they stop scalping?

They have tried a bunch of methods like demand based pricing, ID verification, electronic tickets, and lotteries. I suspect these things only work a little and each has its own problem side-effects.

Bands with the clout and fans lined up down the block the day before ticket sales open (e.g. Radiohead, The Cure, Pearl Jam) can do these things, and I'm glad they do. For the vast majority of acts– even well-known ones– it's absolutely not an option.

I think pretty much any act popular enough to headline at a large LiveNation venue can do this. Not even all that is necessary: just ID verification. Require each ticket to be associated with a real person's name at the time of purchase (and the ticketing platform should make it easier for people to find tickets next to or at least near their friends when they have to buy in separate orders).

Tickets aren't transferable. Ticket purchasing platform has a marketplace where people can resell tickets to others if they can't attend, and sale price is capped at whatever they paid in the first place. (Or the ticket issuers can partner with something that already exists, like StubHub, and contractually require the price caps.)

Each attendee must present their ID to enter the event. Names must match, no exceptions. I don't love the idea that you can't anonymously attend a concert (by walking up to the ticket counter and paying in cash, assuming any large venues even have box offices anymore), but I think the benefits of this scheme for the majority of purchasers far outweigh that negative.

This isn't hard. It's almost as if someone in the chain likes scalpers...

Indeed, the problem would not be difficult for LiveNation to solve.

Those acts are still the minority of things they book. Within maybe 30 miles of where I live, there are probably 15 big venues that house huge acts like that, but hundreds of smaller clubs, event spaces, halls, theaters, etc that use LiveNation. I used to work at a bouncer at a little rock club with like a 250 person capacity and they used them for ticketing.

Most venues in NYC seem to use an app called dice for ticket distribution. You can only resell on the app and only at or below the original price. Not foolproof, but seems to work pretty well in nyc, but in a less populated area might be hard if people cant sell the tickets and start complaining.

Lol most NYC venues do not use dice.

most of the ones I go to :shrug:

Dice is for smaller venues, generally.

Robert Smith also came down hard on this, and as a glorious result, we saw The Cure for like $30/head last summer.

Combatting scalping is the easiest thing ever. Just put the name of the attendee on each ticket and if you want to be nice you can have a buyback period until a certain date before the show, where the venue purchases back your ticket if you can't go.

And then what, check the ID of 50k people at the door?

Why not? They check hand bags anyway. Even if you don't check everybody it is a huge deterrent to scalpers if the buyer can not be sure that they will be allowed in. Imagine paying for expensive tickets, travelling a long distance, paying for a hotel room etc. And then you're not getting in to see the show.

Would it have to be more or less speedy than an airport's TSA line?

The work of checking IDs is mostly done in US venues already, for 21+ drinking wristbands. It would have to be done differently, for sure, but a good portion of that labor is already being incurred.

More likely, the venues don't have much economic incentive, if any, to reduce ticket reselling and scalping.

This is what Comic Con does but it's more like 130,000 people

nope, they would check like 20% to 30% of them. i’ve done work for a few non-profit performance organizations and this seems to be fairly effective in putting a large dent in reseller markets for non-transferable tickets.

resellers really don’t enjoy cc charge backs to pile up on their accounts.

Yes? They already do this at music venues to card people for putting wristbands or Xs on their hands.

They already check IDs of every entrant.

Also, in the US, your driver's license has a 2D barcode on the back which encodes your name.

The venue ticket has a QR code or similar which could also encode your name.

They already scan the venue ticket QR code. They could also scan your ID barcode, and beep differently if the names do not match.

Yes, absolutely. Adding an ID check to a ticket check and often a bag check and sometimes metal-detector wand check seems pretty minimal to me. Or have people scan their IDs themselves when they scan their tickets; pretty much every driver's license and state ID in the US has a barcode thing on the back. Of course have enough staff at the gates to deal with the exceptions or when things don't work right.

Regardless, this already happens: I went to a concert at Chase Center last year, and they were checking everyone's IDs, not even just a random sampling of them. When I went to EDC in Vegas last year, they were checking IDs at the shuttle stops on the strip. I believe they were only doing that for age verification, but if the ID is already out, that can easily turn into identity verification.

Current ticketmaster tickets are electronic and often can be resold only on their system (depending on what the artist/venue has chosen as a restriction). Of course their system could limit the resale prices of the ticket, to the original price or a set percentage above it. They already take a bite of each resale I believe.

They have already built the electronic ticketing and transfer system that would allow them to prevent resale of tickets at a profit, the system is done. They just choose not to use it that way (and I'd guess artists/labels/venus are in on this too -- what the ticketmaster system does make possible is for them all to take a bite of the scalped ticket resale price!)

Not only does their system make it possible, they teach their "partners" (scalpers) how to buy and sell more tickets, and the fees are usually even higher on those secondary sales, so this is very lucrative for tickermaster (and the scalpers).

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ticketmaster-resellers-las-...

afaik, scalpers will often be selling tickets that have been bought speculatively in large blocks during pre-sale or when sale starts. this is a whole very complex side industry in itself, and being able to get those large chunks of cash up-front/early is beneficial for the artists/promoters/venues for lots of reasons. obv. this doesn't really apply to a super popular artist who is going to sell out on the first day, but there are very few artists/performers who do that.

so. as mentioned above. it's a hard problem to solve. if you think about it purely as a market/exchange then it's not dissimilar to how market-makers, arbitrageurs and HFT systems keep the market "efficient".

there's a good writeup here. https://www.404media.co/why-scalpers-can-get-olivia-rodrigo-...

Interesting! To translate to the language of stock and bond offerings:

TicketMaster ~ bookrunner/sponsor; scalper ~ underwriter;

The general population cannot participate in IPOs, just like we cannot buy primary-market tickets to popular shows.

yeah, as i understand it - i did a lot of research on this for a service i was building way back - these third parties (like scalpers) are useful because they actually find the "true" price of the tickets and, through the resale services, a good chunk of that extra money makes it back to the ticketing companies/promoters/artists. i wouldn't be at all surprised if a lot of these scalping operations are actually being run (secretly) by the ticketing companies and promoters themselves, or at least with their tacit approval and some revenue sharing.

so, it's a hard one to solve because it actually ends up generating more revenue for the promoters/venues and (sometimes) the artists. but the audience, who have the least power in the relationship, get screwed. well, my feeling is we/they get screwed, but many others would say this is "just capitalism".

And this is another area they're part of the problem. Not only do they have a resale platform, they've also been caught placing tickets directly on the resale market.

https://pitchfork.com/news/live-nation-admits-placing-concer...

You are correct, the ticket prices will be agreed between the promoter/venue (LN) and artist/manager via the booking agents.

The venue, often LN, will charge a base rate then everything else goes on top.

There are several other factors at play that lead to higher ticket prices which often comes down to the artist and its tour production being very expensive rather than pure greed

More often than not the deals are worked out on a 70/30 or 80/20 in favour of the artist and split after breaking even on most mutually agreed costs (ads etc), or a bigger artist flat fee which is risky for them.

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