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Ticketmaster to Start Online Ticket Auction
Jason1729 writes "According to the NY Times, ticketmaster is going to begin auctioning off the best tickets to events online. They claim it's to eliminate scalping, but in truth it guarantees every seat will be scalped for the highest price with all the money going to ticketmaster. It also eliminates the possibility of getting a decent seat by waiting in line or being lucky."
This is such a great thing!! ...Because Ticketmaster's monopoly and average $10 per ticket fee (half paid by promoter, half paid by customer) is not enough profit. Plus, they even make you pay $2.50 extra when you want to print out tickets on your own printer since they just scan in the barcodes anyway. Sometimes Ticketmaster charges up to 35% of the face value of the ticket.
When was the last time you have been to a major ticketed event where Ticketmaster didn't control everything? Ticketmaster is the primary ticket seller for 27 of the 30 NHL teams and 28 of 30 NBA teams. An anti-trust case has been brought against them in the past, but it was unsuccessful. Ticketmaster has even been accused of signing you up for services you never ordered.
The end-user has really very little choice in matters like this, aside from not going to ticketed events.
They already do auctions for the best seats. Where has the author been? I just bought some tickets this way a few weeks ago, and it's a total scam. They also end the auction one day *after* general ticket sales, so if you don't win that auction, you get nothing. Totally evil, and designed to make you bid to the max so you don't get left in the cold. I really wanted to see that concert, though (I rarely find one I want to see), so I bid high just like they wanted.
Ok, first of all, as many people have already pointed out (but few seem to notice), this article is from September, 2003.
In any case, their auctions are not replacing their current ticket selling system, it is just a way for them to make some extra money, and people to be able to score a few last minute tickets at prices that they would be paying scalpers anyways (so basically it is just a way for ticketmaster to make more money). For certain big-name concerts they apparently hold a few sets of tickets and auction them off after the rest of the tickets have sold out. I regularly get concert updates from ticketmaster and it seems like once every month or so there is one of these auctions (the last few I remember are Roger Waters, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Madonna...), and they have rarely been of any interest to me... for one thing, these are the kinds of concerts which often have face value prices of $100+ to begin with.
I think most everyone here agrees that ticketmaster has way too much of a monopoly over ticket sales, and their fees are ridiculous. But this whole auction thing is nothing new, and it just moves some money from money-grubbing scalpers to money-grubbing ticketmaster executives, and hardly changes anything. The fact that nobody here seemed to notice that this auction thing has already been going on for some time pretty much proves my point.
On one hand, we have Ticketmaster selling tickets tickets for 1k that otherwise would have been scalped for 1k. The difference here is that the band now gets some of that 1k instead of a person with connections in the office.
BUT Ticketmaster is doing this in an auction format. Something that scalpers already do on eBay. Couldn't it be possible that the bands just avoid Ticketmaster's probably 40% (I'd think it would be even more) comission and just put them on eBay themselves for a substantially reduced cost?
I'd imagine that it wouldn't be that difficult for eBay to implement a system just for concerts. I mean, I imagine that most of Ticketmaster's business is online anyways, eBay is a lot more popular and could easily promote and develop something for tickets.
I mean, the only benefit I can see Ticketmaster has over a tickets.ebay.com type setup would be the physical presence at a few locations... but I believe they hire a different company for that (at the venue). How hard would it be for companies that already sell Ticketmaster tickets to create a business account on ebay to purchase set-priced tickets for customers and print them right there?
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
> There is no right to purchase tickets for a concert or event. I seriously don't see why there should be any controversy over this - if Ticketmaster (or anybody) can get $1,500 for a ticket then they should be allowed to get $1,500 for a ticket.
Interestingly, many venues for which Ticketmaster sells tickets are public property, bought for some rich bigwigs by the taxpayers. Case in point in is "US Cellular Field" in Chicago. Paid for by the taxpayers, but no taxpayer could afford World Series tickets last year.
Your government at work for you, as always.
My other car is first.