For those against this: I'm curious to hear your take on how you'd stop/mitigate scalping.
For example - allow ticket resale only through the official platform and cap it at the original sale price.
Another approach - check IDs at the door and only let the original ticket purchaser through.
The real problem is that scalping is insanely profitable for Ticketmaster & co. They take a cut of the original sale and every subsequent transfer, most of them at highly inflated prices, from both buyer and seller. Why would they give that up?
That obviously doesn’t work because money can still change hands outside the official platform, unless you mean resale to a random buyer selected by the platform, in which case the resale is not terribly different from a refund and restock for any event where scalping is a problem.
You simply can’t stop scalping if you allow resale. Heck, people even attempt to scalp things where there’s no official resale mechanism (e.g. I change my id at this second, you immediately change yours).
Nine Inch Nails/Trent Reznor did this in 2018 and it was infinitely better (I also met a lot of people just standing in line—we recognized each other at the show later and ended up throwing each other around in the mosh pit—a great time) [1].
It was a far more sane (and exciting) experience.
Not really. The place that sells the tickets doesn't have to be the performance venue itself.
This sort of distribution was quite common pre-Internet. In theory it's even easier now, because so many of the venues have (unfortunately) consolidated under vertically integrated ownership (e.g. directly owned by Live Nation). Which incidentally, after scalping, is the biggest reason that ticket prices are so high in the first place.
Overall, that was the last really "old world" experience I had that reminded me why technology isn't always the right solution to a problem. Since then it's felt like this [1].
Also economics of paying linesitters make it relatively much less attractive than all-digital scalping. So I think you have a solid plan. Should greatly reduce scalping.
Reminds me of technologically-inclined woman who pointed out the flawed thinking behind a grocery store handing out first-gen iPads to their shelf stockers. “I love my iPad at home but this will cost them so much time compared to pen and paper.” (Gotta go find out whatever happened to putting an RFID tag in every product, maybe they needed to hit 1/10 of a cent instead of a penny or something)
Above-face-value ticket resale is illegal here and it helps a lot. But you need to make sure this gets prosecuted hard.
It's actually a lot easier, the scalper would just hand a wad of cash to the teller and walk away with a stack of tickets to resell.
Sorry, I only thought about this for 5 seconds, but there are markets where scalping doesn't cause issues. We could look at those.
I suppose if we're requiring showing ID to attend anyway, it's not a lot worse to add an online ID verification step in order to be allowed to be a "sender" in the transfer system, and an identity is only allowed to have like 5 distinct "friends" in a rolling 12-month window.
Part of me thinks that Ticketmaster/Live Nation probably makes so much money from their own in-house scalping operation that they don't want to fix any kind of scalping problems for fear they would be somehow obligated to not participate themselves.
My dad used to joke about how many signs he'd say at baseball games saying scalping is against the rules but somehow hearing loads of StubHub ads whenever he would listen to a game on the radio.
Limiting the number of tickets someone can buy doesn't protect against scalping.
It works at a small scale: 5 people, 5 tickets each, and $100 profit on each seat after everyone else gets paid? That's not so hard to keep track of, and it brings in $2,500.
It also works at a larger scale: 50 people. 5 tickets each, and $100 profit on each seat? Keeping that all in-line is definitely sounding like Real Work, but it also sounds like a tax-free $25,000.
UEFA limits this for football games by allowing you to purchase only two tickets and changing only one name, and the two tickets must go together. Or you sell back the ticket to the organization and they sell it back to random fans.
Darn, guess I'm not a true fan or I would've booked a private jet.
They haven’t all universally built in overbooking as a critical part of their competitive price structure or whatever, and we can stop it before it starts.
EU version for flights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Passengers_Rights_Regulati...
One way is to run an auction and provide every attendee on site with a credit code they can apply to next year’s auction. That way you tip the scales slightly towards previous attendees in a way a scalper can’t reliably access.
Another way is to run separate auctions: one for previous attendees, one for fan club members, and one for GA.
The aversion to auctions transforms everything into a lottery but I can see why they do it. The event operator takes all the heat and the artist keeps much of the benefit.
Defeating bot buyers, scalpers and resellers would actually be a noble goal but its' really the tip of the iceberg. If anyone was actually interested in tackling this (hint: they aren't) then you need to tackle a much bigger problem: the venue monopoly with Ticketmaster and Live Nation.
Many venus, particularly larger venues, have exclusive contracts with Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster also has an official platform for reselling tickets, of which they get a cut. In a more equitable world, you would only be able to resell tickets for their face value. It's alleged (and I believe this) that Ticketmaster only releases a tiny portion of tickets to the general public. The rest they have arrangements to sell through scalpers and resellers and their own platform because, hey, they make more profit that way.
There was a time when businesses were a tool to generate income. Small businesses still work this way. But any sufficiently sized company now is just a tool to speculate on and make a capital gain on. Ticketmaster doesn't need to grow into a trillion dollar company but they want to and, at a cewrtain point, the only way companies can continue to grow is by cutting costs and raising prices.
Back in the nascent days of Internet music piracy it was pointed out that almost no bands make enough money from selling music to live on. It's why the biggest anti-piracy advocates were huge bands like Metallica. Most bands make their living for performance fees ie playing concerts. And even then they might make barely enough to cover gas. What really gets them over the line is selling merch at the venues.
I'd say that music would be in a better state if bands could see more of the value of their labor from playing concerts. But even concerts aren't about bands or their fans anymore. They're about upselling premium services to high-net-worth clients. You ever notice that at sports venue, for example, general seating always gets mysteriously ripped out and replaced by suites? Same principle: venues make more per square foot from a corporate suite than they do from sports fans. There was a time when ordinary people would be fans of their home teams and just go to every home game. That's increasingly out of reach.
In short, the entire system is broken. Spotify participating in it won't change anything.
1. When an event sells out you can join the 'waitlist' and people can offer their tickets back to the ticket company who give the person at the top of the waitlist the opportunity to purchase. All at face value. Good for the artist too as there is less chance of empty seats when people can't make it.
2. QR code tickets that rotate meaning they can't be screenshotted and sold.
Harry Styles is playing in my city, he's apparently very popular, but there's still plenty of tickets available for as low as 47€ for tomorrow.
I think some artists want to appeal to the poorer people so pricing their tickets higher or letting the free market work out the price would damage their reputation. So it doesn't seem to be a real problem we need to solve. It's a problem some artists feel they have. Let them figure it out.
If I was an artist and I expected a full venue with tickets that cost 10, I'd start selling them at 1000, then at 500, 200, 100, 50, 20 and finally 10. If someone buys all of them at 1000 and only that person shows up - awesome! Maybe there will be less drug sales because 1 person bought all tickets but that 100x per ticket could be used to pay the vendors.
I don't know why this is being made to look like an insurmountable problem. We're talking about multi-billion dollar companies, organising billion dollar tours.
> If she sells all tickets at $10k each then maybe she'd clear the market, but she'd piss off a lot of fans
If I was conspiracy-minded, I'd say blaming "the scalpers" would be a very convenient way of dodging responsibilities while taking a cut.
This allows scalping.
And then, since scalping is not prevented, all that these measures really accomplish is to theatrically increase the burden for everyone else.
It's not exactly a project Manhattan level of breakthrough we're talking about here. The incentives to scalp are vastly reduced. Sure, I could buy four tickets and resell three of them, but I would still need to physically go to the venue to walk people in. It just doesn't scale.
The platform doesn't need to support it, not do the rules and laws.
It's very straightforward: The buyer either meets my terms or there is no sale.
Awesome. Let's just add the frictions of flying to the concert-going experience.
That's a pretty good way to eliminate scalping: Just make it such a pain in the ass to attend that the seats never sell out to begin with.
Other than being terrible, this sounds like a great idea!
As a side note, this notion that a phenomenon being the result of market forces means it is fair and has no issues seems to be a blinkered view of the world. Surely enjoying high quality art should be possible for a broad section of society?
If anything, as an artist, I'm incentivised to seek out the whales that can absorb ridiculous prices, because they are the ones that will buy the 25 limited editions of my album.
It's not necessarily a choice between the 1000 genuine fans vs the 10 posers. If the artist is popular enough, it's between the 1000 rich genuine fans, and the 1000 broke genuine fans, so might as well please the rich. It's a selection that already happens when picking the venues. It's always London, NYC, Paris, Tokyo, and never Skopje or Pine Bluff, AK.
I'd also like the news to talk about the show "so popular people are willing to pay a fortune to see" rather than the one with plenty of cheap seats still available.
I was reading an article earlier this week about "blue dot fever". Promoters like ticketmaster show the available seats as blue dots on a plan of the venue. The more blue dots, the more seats available, which seems to lower the demand even more, by signalling that the show is not popular, which drives the status-seekers away.
To me it seems it IS an economics problem - the artist needs to make money and they need to decide whether they want to optimize for the profit from ticket sales or for the profit from merch or from a broader fan base. But it's an economic problem for the artist, it's not really a societal problem or anything more major.
As a disclaimer, I'm not rich and I don't care for concerts anyway. It just doesn't make sense to single out tickets for concerts as some special thing. As an example, I'm OK with not being able to buy some fancy ethically sourced gourmet food yet I still support the company that makes it. Or maybe I won't buy it often, but I'll save up and buy it once in a while. Many parallels to be made, but of course not perfect. Still, it's not a necessity, so it's strictly an economic problem (not a moral one), mainly for the artist. Whether they want to solve it and how they want to solve it is their issue. Whether it's non-transferable tickets or ID-bound tickets with a strict policy on how they're transferred or an auction or a lottery or whatever.
Harry Styles is giving more than 20 concerts in Europe, but only in Wembley or Amsterdam.
I can't attend most of the concerts I would go to if they were in my city and cost nothing because they're far away from where I live org because they cost a lot. I still enjoy the recordings I can download. I treat concerts as a luxury, not a necessity or a right.
Geez. It is really not that hard to imagine a better outcome here.
A reasonable distribution distribution could be whatever is the result of the following: (a) each seat is priced by the artist/venue/whatever however they wish, and (b) everyone who genuinely intends to attend the concert themselves and/or is purchasing on behalf of another known person whom they believe would genuinely attend the concert themselves gets an equal opportunity to purchase the tickets at the time of release.
How you achieve such an outcome is an interesting question with lots of possible approaches, but what outcome would be adequate to achieve than the status quo really isn't some sort of unanswerable question.
It should be obvious we want a system that is optimally beneficial to artists and fans rather than middlemen.
Because there is demand for it. A lot of people like going to live music and theatre events and scalpers make it more difficult and more expensive for them.
Why shouldn't anything be done? Because capitalism is God?
Scalpers make it possible to get a ticket at market price, instead of maybe being able to get it for less and maybe not being able to get it at any price. It's not at all clear that the latter is better.
In that world, there wouldn't be scalpers.
If the scalper has enough customers that he can sell out the show above the face price of the tickets, the existence of those customers is sufficient to make it "practically impossible to get a ticket at face price" whether the scalper exists or not.
The only thing scalpers make possible, is pricing out people that the vendor wanted to sell tickets to.
I'm absolutely not convinced that the problem is as widespread as people make it out to be, outside of a few big names or events.
> Why shouldn't anything be done? Because capitalism is God?
Because it's just the system manifesting itself. There are winners and losers, and the winners are usually those with the most money.
I really find it odd to see people being this vocal for Taylor Swift tickets or Pokemon cards. If I use my capital to buy ten houses to rent, then I'm an investor. If I use it to outbid a city for electricity to feed my data center, then I'm a captain of industry. But the shiny charmander card is where people draw the line?
this isn't just about trendy commercial items. Michael Sandel in 'The Moral Limits of Markets' called this 'Skyboxification'. These mechanisms like scalping affect sport events where people of different classes used to sit next to each other and where now low income earners are either priced out or delegated to the backrow. Cultural spaces that do not separate people into 'winners' or 'losers' but treat people equally are the basis of any civil society. It's where people from different walks of life come into contact.
One guy driving a nicer car or having a nicer watch than another person is fine but when you start tearing apart culture, sports, art, music you end up with well, the US of today https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-money-cant-buy_b_1442128
For the same reason anything is ever done about anything -- because it upsets a large enough portion of your community.
Reality is there is no good solution IMO, no matter what you do, someone is missing out. Just the reality of supply vs demand.
Presumably individuals involved in these cases are already tapped out for how many performances they can do, so why not have other people put on the same show to expand the supply?
Er, I don't feel like you're thinking of what "supply" means here. We can't clone humans (yet). How many times do you expect a singer to sing in each city in a tour?
That is essentially what they have done. Ticketmaster is basically "We take PR heat to make you more money".
Spotify's solution can't remain completely anonymous because Spotify will need to limit botters and verify attendee identity at the door. So we're all just pretending that ID isn't involved, and there's no reason Spotify needs to be in the middle.
Spotify's solution obviously sucks for non-platform users, and if the implementation is "sort fans by listen hours in the last month to find true fans", it would also suck for fans who can't listen at work, fans who were on vacation, fans who don't like the latest album as much, etc. This is basically the modern equivalent of JPop/KPop acts putting concert lottery tickets in CDs and forcing a gross incentive on the fan.
Maybe there’s still another way for scalpels to game this system, I don’t know, but I’ve been to a few concerts in Paris and I’ve never seen scalpels hanging outside the venue selling tickets, which would be the norm in Germany, so maybe the system does work.
So if not seeing them there means the problem is solved, this problem is in fact easy to solve.
Non-transferable I think? But you could resell them via ticketmaster maybe for facevalue?
It was amazing, we sat on the ticketmaster page, refreshed over the course of a day and we got 8th row for I believe $75 - it was an amazing concert, and being able to pay a reasonable price for tickets like that was amazing.
Why should that lock me out of a reasonable reservation system?
We have a massive centralization problem in these industries and this doesn’t fix it.
1. I like live concerts but I don’t spend my days listening to a lot of music. I would be considered “not a fan” by these metrics.
2 The monopolistic aspect. I subscribe to a much smaller Spotify competitor, now I’m at a disadvantage.
3. I don’t consider scalping a problem. The market price is determined by demand. It’s also been a problem that has been solved by artist presales and fan club gates.
I also think that as a recognized monopoly Ticketmaster should have more limitations on its business model. For example, their compassion on resale tickets should be limited. At present, they are encouraged to double dip on fees by finding ways to send more tickets to the secondary market.
It's the same logic for de-googlers. You can't De-Google yourself and then bitch about some Google products work better on Google products.
If you are a proud edge-lord/hipster with your obscure choices, you should also learn to deal with consequences.
Scale brings advantages. You can't have it both ways
I use a competitor to Spotify because I like the other product better overall. It’s a better value and better suited to my needs. I never said I’m using something else just to stick it to Spotify or become an edgelord.
I’m perfectly happy to be “punished” by missing some concerts. I think you misunderstand my comment as complaining about the situation. I really don’t care that much, I just am giving my opinion that this is a system that doesn’t seem ideal to me.
Many artists are struggling to fill seats right now. The industry can have fun trying silly schemes like this while they cancel tours in oversized venues.
No, the real solution is to make tickets strictly id-bound and non-transferable in any way.
I don’t understand this. If you can’t resell for higher than ticket price, how do they make any profit? Are you saying they’d sell the cheaper ticket for the more expensive ticket’s price? Wouldn’t price stick to the ticket, since presumably different price tiers afford different location/etc?
Taylor Swift can’t realistically play more shows than she did during the Eras Tour, and it’s unlikely that she’d have sold a million seats in London if she were charging much more than she did.
That's only if the event sells out. The ticket should have sold for a higher price such that the demand was exactly the number of seats available.
They ended up being acquired by a company that was much more into charging top dollar to big-spenders. The company was ultimately acquired by Live Nation and the ticket prices kept increasing until suddenly ticket sales stopped, and that whole category of festivals is now largely dead in Australia.
It's no good optimizing for simple supply and demand in one year if it destroys the product and therefore demand in subsequent years, which is what we're seeing the market. I'm familiar with libertarian principles, but every libertarian economist I've paid attention to has emphasized the importance of second-order effects.
Only if you think spending power is the only criterion that matters when considering who you want coming to the event, and my whole point is that this is not (always) true, given that audience demographics influence the experience and the quality of the performance.
> everything Ive read already suggests that audience makeups are changing at music festivals as more tickets are bought second hand at these considerable markups
For some events, sure, like Coachella and concerts promoted by Live Nation, whose approach is to maximize ticket revenues and who are able to take a cut of the resale price via Ticketmaster's official resale marketplace (though, as I explained in the first comment, this can damage the experience and destroy the brand value of the festival over the long term, as happened in Australia).
Other festivals, like Glastonbury, actively eschew this approach, and have remained relevant and youth-oriented for five decades now.
And the very reason we're having this conversation is that some artists want to reserve at least some of their tickets for buyers who can be qualified more by authentic enthusiasm than spending power, with listening time on Spotify being an interesting proxy for authentic enthusiasm.
Taylor Swift can probably still sell out if she raises the price ten fold, but what kind message does this send to her average listeners? What does it mean if the most popular popular musician of our times prices the populace out? You can of course dismiss the likely negative responses as emotional and irrational, but that's the whole deal with art and culture. You can't build a fan base without catering to their emotions.
And then on the other extreme of music you have people like Fugazi, whose low ticket pricing is very obviously a part of the band's entire artistic and ideological project.
If you want to see what happens when you apply supply and demand to ticket pricing, you can just look at your nearest big league sports team. The recent trend seems to be jacking up the prices as much as they can get away with and catering more and more to VIP guests who spend a fortune in one of those "hospitality" suites. Perhaps not a coincidence that less and less people, especially younger people, around me are casually into sports these days. They got told that they are not welcome in the corporate owned sports venue and they take their attention elsewhere, and all it's left are a dwindling set of diehard fans and C-suite people who are there not for sports but for overpriced steak dinners and are too nicely dressed to cheer for their home team.
If there is room for arbitrage (which is what scalping really is) then the tickets are too cheap in the first place.
Markets are more efficient than you give them credit for. If there was no value-add it wouldn't happen. The value-add is that the scalpers take the risk and hassle off of the artist/venue. They can instantly sell out and then get back to worrying about the actual performance. Selling the tickets at their fair market value initially sounds good in theory, but then you have to spend weeks and months trying to get them sold, which is not a core competency a musical artist really wants to have. It is advantageous to underprice and know that you are sold out upfront and let someone else deal with the slog.
It's much the same as why wholesalers sell to Walmart for pennies on the dollar instead of trying to capture the retail market themselves. Selling direct to retail seems like a good idea... until you have to do it and realize you'd rather get back to what it is you're actually good at producing.
They're just profiting from the difference between the cost of the item and what people are willing to pay for an item. Simple market economics, right?
As should be obvious: Since it can be explained by capitalism and we even have a nice neat concise word with which to describe it, then there's nothing to hate there. /s
> It's much the same as why wholesalers sell to Walmart for pennies on the dollar instead of trying to capture the retail market themselves. Selling direct to retail sounds good... until you have to do it and realize you'd rather get back to what it is you're actually good at.
It is not the same. Unlike Wal-Mart, scalpers do not buy truckloads of tickets at wholesale prices. They instead buy truckloads of tickets at retail prices -- and then increase the price even more.
And unlike a manufacturer like Proctor & Gamble (with zero or very limited direct-to-consumer sales), the combination of venue, artist, and ticket broker (eg Ticketmaster) is already equipped to handle direct consumer sales. They're quite good at doing so and their entire business model revolves around maintaining this ability.
The scalper is just an added, unnecessary layer. If scalpers somehow disappeared completely today, then yesterday's sell-out shows will still be sell-out shows tomorrow.
Scalpers provide zero value to the transaction.
Clearly that's not true. Retail charges what the consumer is willing to pay. If the tickets were sold retail there would be no consistent arbitrage opportunity.
There may have been some point in history where artists tried to sell retail, which may be the source of your confusion, but nowadays these tickets are purposely sold below retail value so that they can sell out fast to the retailers, removing the risk at the origin.
Smaller/lesser known acts still have to focus on the retail market as there is no middleman willing to step in and take on the retail role, which may also be the source of your confusion, but that isn't the segment of the market we're talking about.
> Scalpers provide zero value to the transaction.
Aside from the value of knowing that all the tickets are sold, which is of enormous value. It is estimated that it costs around five million dollars to put on a single Taylor Swift performance. At that scale, things get scary fast if you find out that tickets still aren't sold at the last minute.
Markets are pretty efficient. It wouldn't happen if there was no value in it. Why would an artist give up the profits captured by the retailers if there was no value in having a retailer? They wouldn't, of course. Even if they have no personal need for even more money, that is money that can be used to better serve the fans. It is not given up lightly. It is given up because it is worth it.
Read that again.
Scalpers buy tickets at the same (retail) price that you or I do, from the same retail outlets that you or I also buy from.
They then raise the price.
The additional price of scalping adds no positive value to me.
(And to be very clear: I don't give a fuck if scalping adds value to the artist, the venue, the scalper themselves, or any entity other than myself. You can keep trying to persuade me to believe that I am motivated by something other than my own self-interest, but you'll just be wasting your time.)
The game of semantics isn't going to get you far. You could equally say that scalpers buy same wholesale tickets that you and I do. The words "retail" and "wholesale" are useful to illustrate the market dynamic, but they aren't rules.
> The additional price of scalping adds no positive value to me.
The value to you is that artists like Taylor Swift can justify putting on a show that cost five million dollars, which is presumably the appeal. If the risk was all on her shoulders, why would she take the risk? There'd be no incentive to. That would be insane, frankly.
I mean, I'd personally much rather watch some unknown artist in a dingy bar that can't find a market that is willing to buy tickets, but if you're attending performances where these retailers are prevalent and tickets are worth thousands of dollars I expect you are going to be disappointed if it is no different than a dingy bar experience. The five million dollar spend is necessary to appeal to the audience. Ain't nobody dropping five million big ones for no reason...
And, well, if you are like me and don't care about those big shows then scalpers aren't even involved. They aren't touching tickets from small time, unknown artists even with a ten foot pole. In that case, sure, there is no positive value to you if you have no interest in seeing Taylor Swift in the first place, but in that case Taylor Swift herself doesn't provide positive value to you either, so who gives a shit?
> You can keep trying to persuade me
Of what benefit would there be in persuading you? You're not going to find any. This might be the most hilariously out of touch thing I've read on HN yet.
So that distinction about Wal-Mart was just... resolutely bullshit. You're just here to waste time. Copy.
> The value to you is that artists like Taylor Swift can justify putting on a show that cost five million dollars, which is presumably the appeal. If the risk was all on her shoulders, why would she take the risk? There'd be no incentive to. That would be insane, frankly.
I do not give a fuck about what artists like Taylor Swift consider to be a risk.
> I mean, I'd personally much rather watch some unknown artist in a dingy bar that can't find a market that is willing to buy tickets, but if you're attending performances where these retailers are prevalent and tickets are worth thousands of dollars I expect you are going to be disappointed if it is no different than a dingy bar experience. The five million dollar spend is necessary to appeal to the audience. Ain't nobody dropping five million big ones for no reason...
Ah. So without scalpers, there would be no reason to perform.
This might be the most hilariously out of touch thing I've read on HN yet. (<-- I like this line. I shall use it here, myself. Thanks!)
No. It's the same market dynamic. Artists with a large market sell their tickets below fair consumer market value for the same reason manufacturers with a large market do. There is tremendous value in letting a middleman buy your product in bulk. Hence why the producer is willing to see the point of value go for a reduced price.
> I do not give a fuck about what artists like Taylor Swift consider to be a risk.
Her fans do, though. It affects their experience engaging with her. If you aren't a fan then it doesn't really matter, does it?
> So without scalpers, there would be no reason to perform.
Not at all. Why respond before giving even a modicum of thought?