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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.
Isn't this just the logical conclusion of capatilism and the free market economy? Supply is limited, Demand is large, thus the price should go up? The only reason scalpers exist is because there is a gap between the price of supply and the price at which there is still demand.
Ticketmaster has every right to dictate their business model. And I have every right not to buy from them. I applaud his efforts to take back money lost to middle-men nipping at his heels. As long as the market will bear those prices - then go for it. This means that concerts will increasingly become the past time of the rich, yes, and they will leave some of their best fans, the teenagers, out in the cold. If there's enough blowback they might go back to the 'wait in line at 8am on Sunday for cheap tickets' model - but not if they are making good money. Perhaps some alternatives will spring up to fill the gap. Who knows.
As for myself however, I find some of their business practices riotously lame, and I haven't bought tickets to a big concert in years, and I scrupulously avoid ticketmaster. Mostly because:
Maybe one day live music will return to a more sane level of operation. In the mean time I'll continue to partake of smaller venues and lesser known bands. With the money I save I can buy some albums and listen to them in the comfort of my car or on my stereo / computer at home. Obviously there are plenty of people who don't agree with me, because they fill the stadiums up with people at any price currently.
Like the situation with the RIAA, the only ones who can change it are the acts themselves. They have to conciously choose to publish independently (which is actually possible with the internet) and not use companies like ticketmaster when promoting and selling live events. It takes a serious amount of balls to be the first major act, but I believe if enough acts choose to go this route, it will reach a critical mass that will again change the industry. All it takes is for one well connected entrepreuer to convince some of his rock star friends to go in on a website where the site gets 10% of the cut and the artist gets 90%. Then you can sell songs for 25 cents or 50 cents a piece, and most of it goes to the artist. And the artist is still making directly more than he or she would than through Itunes, and the sales are good because of the low price
Ticket scalping is a sure sign of a supply/demand imbalance, just as long lines at gas stations in the U.S. were during the 1973 oil crisis, and Xbox 360's on EBay for $1000. If the market demand is high enough to sell some tickets at $500, it's almost a sure bet that someone will sell them for that price, and it might as well be the people putting on the show who earn the money, rather than some random guy who happened to be at the right place at the right time, who is contributing no economic benefit.
At first I read this article, and felt bad about the near monopoly that ticketmaster holds on the industry, but then I saw this article is from September 2003, and we haven't seen this yet. Maybe they thought better of the idea?
This isn't people being ripped off, this is everybody getting a fair price. The tickets go at the price people are willing to pay. OK, so we no longer get the chance to get lucky with a good seat for no extra money, but then again we never get unlucky with a crappy seat for the same price that people in good seats pay.
As for the comment that the scalping fee goes to the organizer, is that not better than it going to a scalper? We all talk enthusiastically about the day that the extortion of money from fans with high prices for DRM'd albums will stop and be replaced by artists earning money honestly with performances. This is a step towards making performance a more attractive source of income.
foo mane padme hum
This article was posted on September 1, 2003... but it could still happen.
RTFA. Most of the "extra" money goes to the performers, promoter, venue, etc. TicketMaster gets a percentage or a flat fee. As someone who has purchased tickets from scalpers, I'd be happier paying the (inflated) price on a ticket that was guaranteed to be legitimate, rather than have to carry lots of cash to pay for a questionable one. On the other hand, TFA doesn't explain how the auction process will work. Will they auction a few seats each hour, or a few dozen once a day, or some other scheme? Or do you just bid on some number of seats within a specific area, and they dole them out to the high bidders? If I am willing to spend, say, $200 on the "best available at the price" seat, will I be guaranteed to get some seat somewhere (assuming that not all the seats in the house went for more)? What if I'm flexible on the exact date? What about groups of 5 that want to sit together? And how long do I have to wait to find out if I got a seat or not? It seems like it would be tricky to come up with a scheme that even just keeps all the rich people happy. There's also an existing "TicketExchange" feature, where customers can re-sell their tickets for more or less than they paid for them. TicketMaster is getting close to establishing a REAL market here, where you could even sell a ticket short! Now that's exciting -- "I think this upcoming mega-show with the big stars is going to be a flop, so I'll sell a ticket I don't own yet, wait for the bad reviews to come out, and then cover my short sale by buying a ticket that's now really cheap". How about a Broadway Futures market? Or Mutual Funds (an unmanaged portfolio of dramas; or a basket of musicals with no more than 20% revivals; etc.)?
Sure it fights scalping at the gates; now it's just Ticketmaster doing the scalping.
Obviously, Ticketmaster was jealous of some of the profit margins of the professional scalpers. This is like the government fighting the War on Drugs by taking over the dealers' businesses...
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Will I be able to get an unsold seat at a never-sold-out event like a Minnesota Twins baseball game for $1?
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.
Guess they were wanting a piece of the pie that scalpers normally would get.
At least with scalpers, while illigit, are working hard to make that buck. They stand in line, they shell out money for tickets, and resell them. They peform a useful service for those of us who can't stand in line... and that service is worth a few bucks to say the least. Better yet often times for overpriced over hyped shows they sell them at a huge discount. For example the Who's tour for their album Next seemed to have more scalpers than attendees... as also was the case for the U2 ZooTV tour.
Ticketmaster on the other hand is working with venues to artificaly infact the cost of tickets that normally would be flat rate. Call me silly, but I prefer the scalpers. It's income for the otherwise unemployed, and it sure beats selling things that are outright illegal and very much harmful like *crack*.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
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"
I wouldn't call Ticketmaster a reputable source! They are the prime reason scalpers are able to effectively function today. Now, the illegal scalpers will be gone, but there will instead be a legal one... who's making even more profit than they already do.
Personally, I completely disagree with the auction idea. I'd consider partial auctions, for limited quantities of seats (season boxes, charity auctions) where only small numbers would be affected, but auctions for every seat in the house not previously taken by the promoter or group buyers directly? Puhleeze. That's just asking for scalping to get worse, by pricing event tickets for popular events even farther out of the average person's reach. Most people who keep up with a team or a star do so because they feel that they can get tickets when they want to, even if it's somewhat expensive. This will sorely disillusion them to this.
Scalpers win huge numbers of tickets by having mass numbers of workers getting tickets for them, then collecting the tickets and reselling at high markup or at auction. This is essentially the same strategy Ticketmaster uses, except that they lock in contracts requiring the use of Ticketmaster as the sole official sales force, so they get to legally kick around every other scalper with C&D orders, but don't, because the scalpers make them so much money. Instead, they C&D the people promoting the events Ticketmaster sells tickets to, even if it's private sales to individuals/groups, so Ticketmaster gets all the sales profit that they can.
I'd rather pay more for a ticket
I just RTFA and boy have I got some good news for you!
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
If too many people get ticked off at Menudo or New Kids on the Block for the incredibly high ticket prices perhaps these groups will find ways to play without having to use Ticketmaster.
Menudo? New Kids On The Block? Incredibly high ticket prices? Let me be the first to welcome you to the future, young time-traveler! Reagan is dead, we're back at war, and there's 3 new Star Wars movies! Don't be scared by any of this; sit back, relax, and surf your way through our new "cyberspace".
> 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.
You are right. Ticketmaster SHOULD be able to get whatever they can for the tickets they sell. At the same time, I SHOULD be able to resell my ticket for whatever price I can as well. Scalping laws violate my rights. But once again, its the entertainment industry that gets these ridiculous laws passed.
But I think Ticketmaster is already gouging the public. I don't go to big name concerts anymore because a $25 ticket winds up costing almost $40 once all the "fees" are added on. And thats just for a ticket to some kids show like Dora or The Wiggles. I can't believe the people that actually will spend that kind of money to take their 3 year olds. Maybe its just me. Maybe I'm stuck in some kind of time warp. Or maybe a $50K job just doesn't cut it anymore.