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Comment by dclaw | Hacker News Reader

End it.

Make reselling tickets illegal again overall.

Allow resale within 5 days of the show only (for those that genuinely can't make it), and for face value+original fees only.

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The fact that "the name on the ticket must match your photo ID, but you can resell at any time before the event" would instantly solve scalping problems and yet nobody does it is your clue that nobody actually wants scalping problems to be solved. Scalpers are the sin eaters for Ticketmaster and the events themselves, taking the hate so the performers don't have to.

Adding ID checks would make venue entry a slower and more tedious process.

In the vast majority of venues, ID checks are happening anyway to verify eligibility for drinking.

Yup, I'm in 30s and have been ID'd for every show I've gone to in the last few years.

Here’s a wild idea, tie tickets to a drivers license/photo id number, and scan the id.

Edit guess that doesn’t work for kids. Start the tickets at 10k and drop them by a percentage a day. Automatic price discovery. Rich people can just buy them whenever they want.

>Adding ID checks would make venue entry a slower and more tedious process.

Airports seem to handle them just fine?

Do they? Not necessarily making an argument for or against the original point, but to me airports epitomize "slow and tedious". My hunch is that they also don't handle nearly the volume of people/time that major stadiums do during event entry.

>but to me airports epitomize "slow and tedious".

That's the security check, of which id check is only one part. The bottleneck is everyone needing to take out their laptops and then repack their bags. Same with boarding. The bottleneck there is people putting their luggage into the overhead compartments.

In practice a lot of venues are already 21+ so they are already checking IDs.

Maybe a bit of a dystopian situation but ... I think this was 10 year ago now I went to an Utada Hikaru concert where I had to upload a picture of myself on a dedicated website and when the tickets were scanned I think they had access to that picture

How do performers benefit from scalping?

The price tickets sell for will be higher if scalping exists. Demand increases for 2 reasons:

1 - I’m more likely to buy a ticket or pay a higher price if there’s a chance of turning a profit if I can’t go.

2 - Speculators are more likely to buy unused inventory if they can turn a profit. This increases total tickets sold. (Scalpers get paid for taking risk)

I’m not defending this. I’ve given up on concerts for my favorite larger bands due to sticker shock.

All of your points apply to performers who may not sell out, so scalpers take risk, you may buy more, speculators may soak up what would go unused.

But consider Ms. Swift. All of her shows sell out, period. Face value tickets are maybe $400 max, and resell for $2000+. I don’t think she sees any benefit from scalpers. Ditto any performer that is in very high demand and certain to sell out and have unmet demand.

> I don’t think she sees any benefit from scalpers.

If a ticket sells for $2k then the platform gets some massive portion of that (like $400?) - are you sure some of that doesn't make its way back to the artist, at least on the primary sale platform? I would be rather surprised if it didn't.

They get a cut of the tickets live nation puts on the resellers site.

In addition to what others say, the potential for profiting later increases the initial price.

Think of it this way… let’s say two identical companies are going to IPO. Company one you can sell the shares for a profit later if you like. Company two you can only sell for the price you bought.

Which will have the higher IPO price?

Live Nation needs to get the guillotine. The monopoly will find other ways of extracting value if you try to fix one problem created by it at a time.

Except Live Nation owns most of the venues that aren’t stadiums. The mom and pop’s couldn’t compete with their monopoly and went under or sold to them.

The UK is passing a law which makes it illegal to resell event tickets for greater than the face value.

+fees, though ideally the fees would be capped too

Not a lawyer but here's how it works:

Illegal usually means there's a law forbidding it.

Tickets are usually governed by the Terms and Conditions (Contract) between original purchase.

It's already possible for the terms to forbid resale.

So as it stands it's possible to sell untransferable tickets. And those who sell such tickets are in breach of contract, but are not breaking a law.

What would 'making reselling tickets illegal' entail, a law that makes selling transferable tickets illegal? That would be a very weak position. A law that upgrades the resale of untransferable tickets to a crime? Again a very weak position.

I contend that people that suggest and write laws should learn about actual law.

IANAL, but if you enter a contract with the intent to violate it, is that legal? My understanding is that it's technically illegal (only civil perhaps, but still illegal), the impracticality of enforcement notwithstanding. Also, I have no idea if the contract for a ticket "sale" is really considered a contract for the purposes of such laws.

>but if you enter a contract with the intent to violate it, is that legal? My understanding is that it's technically illegal (only civil perhaps, but still illegal), the impracticality of enforcement notwithstanding.

On the first matter, I'm not sure, it might be fraud, which can be civil or criminal if there's a specific law that defines criminal penalties.

Again I guess the proposal could be that a law specifies that the resale of tickets is a so and so crime (misdemeanor?) and carries a penalty of X. We are steelmanning the argument here, and it still sounds quite untenable.

On the civil front, I can see how the intent to breach a term might be relevant, but I can also see how it might be irrelevant, in the sense that the breaching party would be forced to remedy the damages of the breach, no more no less. How would the intent to breach a term increase or reduce the damage caused by the breach if so?

>Also, I have no idea if the contract for a ticket "sale" is really considered a contract for the purposes of such laws.

On the second matter, it really is. The layman perception of a contract is usually a formal document that needs to be signed, whereas in no legal systems that I know of are these actual elements of a contract. In most legal systems a contract is a much broader concept: a private agreement between two parties, with the main defining elements being offer, acceptance and consideration. Most if not all trade transactions are contracts, they include the main elements.

> On the second matter, it really is. The layman perception of a contract is usually a formal document that needs to be signed, whereas in no legal systems that I know of are these actual elements of a contract. In most legal systems a contract is a much broader concept: a private agreement between two parties, with the main defining elements being offer, acceptance and consideration. Most if not all trade transactions are contracts, they include the main elements.

Note the layman perception wasn't why I was doubting this; I'm aware not all contracts are that formal. The reason was I don't know if this is considered a sale or not, and whether other principles apply in that case (like first sale doctrine) and if they might somehow override this.

Oh interesting.

I'm not sure if you question whether the first sale or the latter resale might not be contracts.

But in either case, I believe both them to be. It's similar to a sale of a stolen good with an unaware purchaser.

It's a contract on two counts. First, the contract is not void, the subject is not illegal in itself, the seller would just fail to fulfill their end.

Second even if a contract would potentially be voidable, I would argue it is a contract until a judgment voids it, this is a bit subjective, ontological and inconsequential for cases where the judgment would be certain like a contract for stealing, but the more borderline the case is, the more relevant it is, a contract about a complex legal issue that might be or might not be voided with p=0.5 is still a contract to me. Of similar value to a contract about a good of stochastic value, like an option, or an asset that may have been stolen with p 0.5

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