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Ticketmaster Claims Hacking Over Ticket Resale Site
FlopEJoe writes "Ticketmaster claims that RMG Technologies is providing software to avoid security measures on their website - even to the point of utilizing bots to get large blocks of tickets. RMG says it just 'provides a specialized browser for ticket brokers.' From the New York Times article: 'The fact that tickets to popular events sell out so quickly -- and that brokers and online resellers obtain them with such velocity -- is clouding the business, many in the music industry say. It is enough, some longtime concertgoers say, to make them long for the days when all they had to do to obtain tickets was camp out overnight.'"
They are nothing more than scalpers.
Of course, all that is needed to fix this is for tickets to be tied to the credit card. You buy the ticket with the card,you confirm it's your card when you get there.
Speaking of Brittany Spears concerts, It throughly amazes me how desperate people are for "culture". Any public gathering that involves alcohol, some pretension of sophistication or spirituality, and good parking is absolutely overflowing with people these days. Maybe I'm just getting old :/
Sell some tickets online, sell some more at the venue.
Ticketmaster's been bending us over for years...now we're to feel bad for them? It's too bad TM has such a stronghold on the industry - ticket sales ain't rocket science, especially not at a convenience fee of $10+.... per ticket.
Coming from the company that has, for the longest time, been ripping off customers and making a killing off unnecessary ticket processing fees which are likely a hold-over from when they were outlets in shopping malls and telephone sales. There is absolutely no reason why I should have to pay such astronomical rates to a third party in order to get tickets for a show to support bands that I want to see because they don't support the RIAA.
If anything, these companies are just paying you back for screwing over legitimate consumers for years by screwing you over more. The TicketMaster model is dead and everyone should really do their own ticketing in order to avoid this non-sense. I am much more likely to pay a band's direct ticketing agent than TicketMaster. Hell, I'm more likely to go to a show when I have to pay anyone other than TicketMaster to get the tickets for any event I attend whether it be sports, theater, or music.
1) Lottery
2) Auction
3) Non-transferable tickets
An auction is the most capitalistic approach. Scalpers won't bid much lower than they think they can resell the tickets for later.
A lottery adds some fairness but only if you can limit the number of tickets per buyer and avoid the straw-buyer problem.
Non-transferable tickets that are refundable for 100% of the purchase price will solve the scalpers-buying-up-all-the-tickets problem but they aren't too useful if your target audience is children and others who don't have ID cards.
For popular shows, I'd go with selling non-transferable tickets, where any adult would need an ID that matched the name on the ticket and children would have to be accompanied by someone sitting nearby. If after a few days the promoters realize a given block of seats is not expected to sell out, I would lift the non-transferable restriction and let people sell their tickets on the open market. Anyone needing to return tickets could get their money back less the usual ticket-service charge.
If you show up with a non-transferable ticket in hand that doesn't have your name on it, you are turned away. You can contact the original purchaser to beg him to get you a refund.
I'm not sure how this would work for shows oriented to the 12-15 crowd, as these people usually come without their parents but without any ID other than a school ID.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You want to sell the tickets ONLY?
Or
You want to have controlled the tickets? You care only your business, what do you want to controll others?
You sell your music, not to control the music.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Waah. They can spend some of the money they get from ticket buyers to come up with solutions to protect their customers (the promoters that is). It's their problem to solve, and I ain't going to help them. If they can't solve it, promoters might stop using them, and I would consider it progress.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
Concert venues should bid out ticket-management contracts on "which service vendor can give the best quality of service to the attendee at the best price" not "which service vendor will pay me the most for the concession."
Venues should make their money on the tickets and the non-essential services like food, not by forcing the ticket-buyers to pay inflated costs of essential services like ticket-vending.
The ticket-vendor's cost on a typical concert should be well under $1/ticket. Double that for profit and the service charge should be well under $2/ticket maybe even under $1. It might be higher if they expect a high volume of returned tickets, if there's a high chance of a cancellation or rescheduling, or some other unusual cost.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
There is nothing wrong with what these people are doing. They provide me a service where I don't have to go through Ticketbastard's system of illegible word verification and long waiting periods to only end up disappointed. Yes, I may have to spend upward of $1,000 per ticket, but simple market economic principles of supply and demand, dictate their will always be a surplus of tickets for me to buy. These people let me chose where I want to sit, without the need to feel stressed out over not getting where I want. I commend these people for allowing me to bypass Ticketmaster and these cruddy system.
I'm assuming ticketmaster isn't implementing the captcha correctly. There is only 3 ways to exploit the system:
1) enter in the captcha before the tickets go on sale, and purchase when available
2) bypass the captcha because its not a requirement to make a purchase
3) the captcha not complex enough to fool a computer for a few minutes
No software should be getting around it without someone typing in the magic letters after the tickets go on sale.
Many Broadway shows have been smart enough to see scalping for what it really is: evidence that the products are mispriced. As such, they started charging significant premiums for many seats, and scalping is down. (Though $350 box office tickets are up.)
These people need to start auctioning tickets. First do it with premier seats at high-end shows, and then expand it as the program succeeds. In ten years they could have people trained that ticket auctions are the norm, and it should result in artists getting paid very close to the maximum possible per-seat value.
Or we could all keep on using TicketMaster, paying a fortune in fees (the venue, the artist and the consumer all get the joy of paying TicketMaster, hoorah!) and bitching about what an awful company they are.
Until they fix it, I'll keep buying tix on stubhub.
C'mon, WWRPD (what would Ron Paul do)? This is an ideological test for you all, and you're flunking! This is the free market at work, right? Scalpers are able and willing to buy in volume. What, you want the Nanny State to come in and regulate? Bunch of crybabies. Ayn Rand would be so disappointed.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Two years ago, authorities in Paris uncovered a ticketing scheme that had thrived for years and sluiced off more than a million euros involving the Eiffel Tower.
As long as there is commodity demand, there will be someone short-cutting the process for their own advantage.
Led Zepplin held a lottery for tickets to an upcoming concert.
They neglected to tell the winners the tickets were non-transferable.
The promoters are telling ticketholders that if their names don't match the names on the credit cards they won't get in.
BBC News has more.
"What we have here is a failure to communicate."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
They are both worthless companies that do no add any value what so ever. Both can DIAF and the industry would be much better.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
Am I right? Tell me I'm not right.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Run a dutch auction. Highest bidders win. No fuss, no bots, nice and clean.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
I see this as supply and demand at work. If these resellers were able to SELL the tickets at 10x face vaule, then the original people selling the tikets (ticketmaster etc) were clearly not pricing them at their market value. If you have 10,000 of an item and can sell it at $4/ea to make a proffit, and you realize that at $/ea you will sell 100% of your inventory, and then you look at say if we charge $20/ea we wil STILL sell 100% of our inventory, well, duh. higher price of course. Tickets like this are obscenely proffitable and ticketmaster wants to invest a good chunk of that proffit in customer good will by selling the tickets to them cheaper than they could. They are gettting upset because you can buy the tickets and resell them at a markup ("ticket scalping") and make money.
When scalpers can turn a buck, it means you are grossly undercharging for your product. So quit complaining and raise your prices. I guarantee that will put a cap on the scalping.
This problem exists because there are people out there willing to pay $200 for a ticket that could be sold for $20 and make a proffit. If you want to blame anyone, blame the fans. They are the ones causing the huge gap between real value and market value, which is just going to attract scalpers. The sellers can't change the real value of the ticket, and the scalpers are just playing a free market for all it's worth which is to be expected.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I am a Libertarian. And I was offered the job of cracking the Captcha on the TicketMaster site. I turned down the job because I felt it would be unethical.
I should emphasize the point that while Libertarians believe in a free market, that does not mean that they are unethical... quite the contrary. Underhandedly buying commodities in bulk while others are limited to a few each is not a "free market" principle... on the contrary, it is cheating and an anti-competitive (monopolistic) practice.
I should also mention that the scalpers in question were offering peanuts for the job, in comparison to the profit they stood to make. That did not affect my decision, though. It still would have paid well. I just wanted to point out that the scalpers are also cheap bastards.
These so called ticket brokers are actually worse than most people think. I actually had a long conversation with one of these scums. First of all, these guys don't operate small. He claimed that his operation spent over a million dollar a year just on Google AdWords advertisement campaign. That tells you the scale of his operation. He uses a network of machines with bot software to buy up as much tickets as he possibly can for sports events and concerts. The markup on those tickets are astronomical. He deals mostly with movie and sports star agents mostly to unload these tickets at shockingly high prices but those agents don't care because they are out to make their clients happy at all cost. What's sad is how he sometimes end up with bunch of unsold tickets. This creates artificial demand thus increases ticket price for everyone as well as depriving fans who want to go see these events. Whenever you see bunch of empty seats in a sold out baseball game, it's not because the fan had a change of plans or got sick. It's because these scummy ticket brokers couldn't unload them for huge profit. One of the reason why ticketmaster won't do anything about the situation is because these brokers ensure that events are sold out which works out in their favor. They don't care about actual fans getting hold of the tickets. They simply want the tickets sold.
Tickmaster sucks the life out of venues and acts.
I wanted to get a ticket to a local event recently. The only online option was TicketBastard. The ticket cost $28.50. The combination of "convenience charges" and "handling charges" came to $15, plus it was recommended to me that -- for my maximum convenience -- I print out my own ticket on my own printer, which would merely cost me another $2.50.
In the end, I drove down to the venue box office and bought my ticket for list price. Just one of the perks of living in the city that hosts the events. People out in the burbs presumably don't have that option.
Breakfast served all day!
I guess they don't want any competition in the 'charging extortionate prices for tickets' field.
Their bullshit fees keep me from seeing more than maybe three concerts per year. I just bought two tickets for a show where the face value was $23 each, and all their fucking fees added up to just under the cost of a third ticket!
The parent company of Ticketmaster is IACI, which also owns Ask.com, LendingTree, Match.com, the Home Shopping Network, the remnants of Excite, and some real estate companies. It's Barry Diller's company.
The corporate history of Ticketmaster is fascinating. Paul Allen owned it for a while (and, unusually, managed not to screw it up.) They've sued Microsoft over deep linking, and been sued by Pearl Jam over their monopoly.
Ticketmaster should set a limit of 5 tickets per credit card. Not per transaction but per credit card. That would stop the brokers. But what does Ticketmaster care? As one of the brokers (scalpers) in the article said Ticketmaster is getting full value for the tickets. It is the fans that are getting the shaft.
First, no, the problem here is not ALLOWING them to buy too many tickets, it is that the security was not strong enough. The "captcha" was cracked. And while I was not the one who did it, it was hardly a trivial task. Using standard security measures is not "allowing" someone to hack your site, any more than having standard locks "allows" someone to break into your home. The parties doing the breaking are responsible for their actions in both cases.
Second, Libertarians are not Anarchists. Only "radicals" think that no regulation is appropriate, just as radical democrats and radical republicans believe in some pretty silly things. Moderate Libertarians (which does include Ron Paul) believe in using minimal necessary regulation, not absence of regulation. For example, if you even want to HAVE a free market, some antitrust regulations are absolutely necessary. Only a delusional person would argue otherwise.
Concerts, sporting events, whatever. If ticketmaster is involved, I don't go.
I just don't like being surcharged and fee'd to death. If its going to turn out to be a $300 ticket, just price the ticket at $300. Not $150 with a $50 convenience fee, a $30 internet-order fee, a $20 online-ticket-printing fee, a $10 "you paid with a visa card" fee, a $20 "processing fee", and a $20 "fee collection surcharge".
Sounds like they are just selling tickets around the equilibrium price, while ticketmaster refuses to. Hell they even use google adwords instead of using much more annoying ads. What's not to love? And how is that 'artificial demand'? There's nothing artificial about their profit, if they can afford operations on the scale you're talking about.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I always thought that Ticket Master is just the largest scalper. So now they are complaining about the smaller scalpers?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
This has been driving me crazy for years. Ticket master is as much a ruthless business as the MPAA et al. I just bought tickets to see a show here in San Diego. The tickets are sold via Ticket Master and would have cost TWICE the face value had I bought them through them. Fortunately I knew where to buy them in person directly from the venue (not always an option or encouraged). I have no pity for a company that screws customers. Period.
Quack, quack.
Hazy recollection, but pink floyd at three bucks I think was my best deal for great band great concert at a real decent price (that was about one point five hours pay for me at the time for perspective), but I have seen any number of decent olden days bands for much less. I remember paying 50 cents to see ted nugent and the amboy dukes (DAMN fine show) and a lot of other bands for a dollar or free actually. Heck, I saw steppenwolf play in a bar with no cover charge before. Saw BB king play for free at the quad in ann arbor. Geez, just a bunch, could recollect now for awhile but won't (more like can't/1960s/brain cells, etc) ;).
I stopped going some years ago and also stopped buying overpriced music on disk, it just got too nuts and I don't think it is worth it, no matter the band. I was buying their stuff from the 50's with 45 singles and a few albums then, worked right on up to the modern age, and finally just said "enough". I am satiated and they are just format gouging and all the DRM nonsense and so forth. The entire music industry went hard core expensive just when they should have been dropping prices because of tech advances-for the prerecorded stuff anyway. Just got older and don't give a rat's ass about any of them anymore. To each their own, but hundreds of dollars to see a band?? Naw...not interested anymore.
The US government (or the state governments if this is a state responsibility) should basically make it illegal to sell an event ticket (concert, sporting match etc) for more than what was originally paid to the event organizer/promoter/the company legally allowed to sell the tickets (so in this case it would be illegal to resell the tickets for a higher price than was paid to ticketmaster to purchase the tickets)
Problem solved.
this issue may arise because a widely used of internet..the tickets may be bought in bulk for friend, family or staff...also..if the movie is now on showing and it is a hot movie in town..people may take this advantages to buy tickets and sold it with the higher prices..no encryption and decryptin occur during buying the tickets..that why the hackers can easily hacked the system and "buy" the tickets..
The bottom line is that ticket prices should be dictated by a free market. If the tickets aren't worth whatever additional value the secondary market (including scalpers) places on them, no one will buy them. If a ticket is worth that much to you, it shouldn't matter if you're buying it from a broker (e.g. TicketsNow) or a fan (e.g. StubHub). But I think if the secondary sellers are using technology, buyers should be using technology to keep the sellers in check (e.g. oyaka.com, ninjatickets.com).
That explains why a $40 show was $200 the day I found out...
Plenty of them have posted here before you.
This is one of the cases where I agree with them. If you sell below market price, the market will correct your mistake. If a ticket is worth US$50 for a poor person, and US$500 for a rich person, and you sell it for US$50 to the poor person, the only thing that makes economic sense for him to resell it for US$500 to the the rich person. He has then US$450, nine times as much as the ticket was worth to him. And the rich person got his ticket, so he is happy too. This is a win for everybody.
If you do this sufficiently often, the poor man will likely make it his livelihood to correct you mistakes, spreading joy and making a buck at the same time.
In Belgium, large events like Rock Werchter have your name on the ticket and you only get in with your own ticket. A specific service (free of cost afaik) was set up for trading/selling in the genuine cases of people being unable to go or change date.
Back in The Days, getting tickets for a gig or a festival meant -- unless the venue was nearby and had their own box office -- going down to your local independent record store, and handing over pound notes to a human being. If they were sold out, you had to find a phone box (no mobiles then .....) and call up a few other record stores in the local area. If the event was a major one, you could usually get tickets from the Tourist Information Office (if your town had one). Sometimes you could find tickets for sale in the classified section of the local newspaper. And if you were shagging one of the record store staff, you were practically guaranteed first refusal on every gig ticket going :)
It was harder for ticket touts to buy up all the tickets to a particular event, because there was no centralised point of availability. And there was no eBay (although there were newspapers and post office windows). A tout would have had to visit every outlet in an area and placed adverts in the paper for a few nights. Also, most people wouldn't have paid over the odds: if it really came down to "see a tout or miss out", they'd have left it as late as possible, gambling on the ticket tout preferring selling the tickets at or even slightly below cost just so as not to be left with a bunch of worthless pieces of paper.
I really don't know what was so wrong with that system that they had to change it.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I bought tickets a couple of times and never had a problem. ACtually quite the opposite: It has the huge advantage that tickets can be bought on very short notice.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Your proposed solution might work because it makes sure the high profits go the venue/artist, not the scalpers, but it only works if you can design such a system that can keep out/identify the scalpers. These technical hurdles is what caused the problem in the first place: if Ticketwhatever made a system with all security features working as intended, then there would be much less of a problem. The same technical hurdles would need to be taken for your proposed auction system.
But the reason scalpers can make a living is because they can manipulate the market. By buying up all tickets, they create an artificial scarecity which enables them to ask what the mark will bear. Selling at a lower than facevalue price is just the cost of obtaining market dominance.
Undercover agents with a licence to kill scalpers would be a good solution, but just realising that intervening in a free market is contrary to the US' capitalist ideals, would be an even better solution. Then the only problem is for the venues that don't get all the profits.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
They should adopt a capitalistic system and auction the tickets. If they sell tickets for $150 when fans want to pay $300 then it's natural that there will be a black-market in them.
Whenever you see a documentary about life in the Soviet Union it always shows long queues to buy goods and black market people selling them at the market price. It's exactly the same situation with concert tickets in first-world (supposedly capitalist) countries now.
Charge what the fans want to pay, sell the tickets at auction (I'm sure that Ebay would be happy to create a special online store for them) and everyone will be happy. The performers get more revenue from higher ticket prices, the fans avoid queues and simply pay what they think tickets are worth (or miss out if other people value the concert more highly), and the middle-man only gets a few percent (as opposed to Ticketmaster getting 30% or more when fees are taken into account and scalpers adding another 100% mark-up).
See http://etbe.coker.com.au/ for my blog.
They're the folks screaming about how 'artists' need to get paid, no? Well, when no one wants to pay for live tickets anymore because of the price I'm sure the RIAA will get right on that lawsuit thing. Oh yes I'm sure.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
i also hate these scalpers. Any major sporting event in NY/NJ is impossible to go to because scalpers buy up all the tickets. Ticketmaster should institute a system where a certain amount of tickets are set for resale...let's say 10% of total tickets available. When these ticketing systems call up to order tickets, they should have to say they are a reseller and tickets bought are deducted from that total leaving the other 90% to the general public. This makes the resellers fight against each other and not the fans. If resellers are selling tickets designated for fans then ticketmaster should be able to sue. If fans end up not being able to go, they can resell the ticket to their friends or whoever because that's under the table but if it goes up on ebay or other auction sites then they can be held liable too. Ticketmaster should also allow refunds to purchased tickets if a person can go. The fan, if they can't sell it, can return it back to the box office for the retail price. The ticket then becomes available at the box office at the time of the event. That's how I would fix it. Of course ticketmaster would have to start enforcing the rule and make sure tickets on ebay/stubhub etc are really tickets marked for resale
I have my doubts about this lawsuit. It seems to me it's rather convenient to have this lawsuit here now when the climate is changing.
Local concert here in Houston.
Tickets went on sale at Midnight for $23, $45, and $75 per ticket
13,500 tickets total available.
3,500 set aside for the fan club
10,000 for general resale
at 12:10 am the concert was sold out.
Only 8 people that camped out where able to get tickets
The scalpers had all of the tickets.
The cheapest ticket for a single seat was $236.00
If you wanted two next to each other they where $285 each
If you wanted 4 (which is what I wanted) they where $554.00 each
I was online and attempting to get them by 12:30 am the day they went on sale.
needless to say I could not justify $2200 for tickets to a concert.
Now, IMHO they should at least regulate the price.
Say no more than twice the street price for the scalpers.
Then working folks can afford them
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
I think this is very interesting. It tells us a few things:
1) It tells me that ticket prices are, basically, under-priced. If scalpers are buying up the tickets and selling them for 10 times the face value, then Tickemaster should be selling those tickets at ten times what they are currently selling them for.
2) It tells me there is a lot of money in live performances. If I were a performer, I would capitalize on this by putting on 15 shows in a city instead of 5 (or however many I could continue to sell out) before moving on to the next city. While digital music is becoming worthless, clearly some live performances are skyrocketing in value.
3) It tells me that Ticketmaster needs to work on developing technology that can limit the number of tickets that can be purchased by any given entity or individual.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
TM should die a horrible death. I've yet to see or feel the positive effects of any supposed -service- they're providing. It's an unwanted yet legally sanctioned ass-fucking, and that's the nicest thing I can say about them...
For several years it seemed as though no end was in sight, though recently I've been seeing shows and events put on by lesser known artists in generally smaller venues, and the end result is much better. In the next 30 days I'm seeing 5 shows, four of which are underground Hip-Hop (Del, Atmosphere, Lyrics Born and Aesop Rock) and each had tickets for less than $20 with no additional fees beyond the face value - and one of which will be Tool where I paid $55 plus $8 in fees.
Much like my disgust for the RIAA, I do everything I can to avoid doing business with TM - neither of those motherfuckers deserve one cent of my money.
Anonymous Coward out...
>$100 a ticket to see a band? you've got to be kidding me.
Clearly, from TFA, there are a lot of people who are not kidding and quite willing and able to shell out that kind of money and more for tickets.
The demand is there.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Yes, I'll say it again. The venue industry is killing show business!
:P
Tickets cost an arm and a leg, with an extra 20-25% tacked on for "venue fees". Concessions misplace the decimal period in their prices. And the ticket scarcity bullshit... seriously, if so many people want to see these shows, then book more shows! Build mega concert halls if that can alleviate the issue, there's no reason why we should all stuff into a tiny hockey arena with terrible seats to see live music.
The longer this goes on, the further the show-going experience will get distanced from the actual show, and much like CD sales, the fans will stop consuming. Who will the RIAA blame when people don't go to concerts anymore ? The Internet ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I'd modify the non-transferability thing this way to make it a tad more flexible.
1) As many as 4 tickets can be bought under one ID and that person/ID MUST attend the event. The other 1-3 tickets must be presented at the SAME TIME for admittance with the ticket linked the ID. This solves the problem every ticket needing an ID, kids, etc.
2) Tickets can be transferred between IDs/owners up to two times, but both parties must do this in person at the venue ticket office while presenting IDs. This allows for the "Oh shit, I can't go" phenomenon but makes it cumbersome and impractical for scalpers.
This is the most basic form of supply and demand.
This is done because we live in a society that will overpay for these tickets, and support it all the way to the bank.
Can we call it Quebecistan?
Obtain RMG's software, put it up in a torrent, and then everybody will use it and be on the same level playing field. A side effect might be bringing down TicketBastard's servers with the flood, requiring them to work out a method of blocking access from the software. I'm sure an arms race between TM and the "cheater" software companies would ensue, but it would be trivial to start the process again with another torrent.
I actually have worked for a Ticket broker. Vast swaths of tickets going unsold to keep prices artificially high???? REALLY??? I bet the twin towers fell down because of some massive conspiracy that no one has yet leaked as well! Ticket Brokers are capitalists. While some of your higher echelon brokers may not unload tickets at a lower price. They will ALWAYS sell them to a mid tiered or lower tiered brokers. There are guys all up and down the market from the Super Bowl and Masters Guys to Truck Pull Brokers. They will simply broker tickets in between each other. Heck sometimes tickets will go through many brokers until it is finally sold to the Public. I can GUARANTEE you that there would almost NEVER be a wide swath of tickets go unsold because they did not want to sell it at a certain price. They will simply bundle them and sell them to the next man down on the totem pole. I love it how in some posts, Brokers are SCUM only trying to make a buck, but in other posts the same scum will actually not sell a product that can be exchanged for money. They may not sell it themselves but it will be sold in a B2B type transaction. Ticket brokers will NEVER leave money on the table. I have seen the big guy make 200K on an event and I have seen him lose 70K. It is capitalism at its finest. Want to see the criminals try Ticket master ( Monopoly ) or even worse Colleges that make you DONATE just to buy a ticket or Personal Seat Licenses from professional clubs. While playing the Telephone game with your friend of a friend some of the Fact Packets were dropped!!!
I'm all for non transferable tickets and buying directly from the venue's owner. Why can't this be a reality? Why do we need ticketmaster when venues could setup their own sales system? That way, if you want to go to Philips Arena to see the 'Stones you'd buy from PhilipsArena.com (or something along those lines). Go online to buy, or in person at the venue. Hence no more going down to box office locations to buy. This way, venues can decide on their own to perfect their selling scheme to minimize scalping (ie. non transferable, or early buy tiered pricing). Scalping and ticket unattainability is a direct product of ticketmasters dated middle man system. Bottom line: the system now is broken and needs to be fixed.
Since I finished school and make enough money, I have been using 'resellers' even if it is illegal to resell tickets in my area.
Believe me selling at half price means they already made more than expected. In my experience, the closest I am to the event, the lowest I pay and the happiest is my seller. My most common reseller, for all sporting events, does it full time and change luxury car every year.
Scalpers grab 80-90% of the tickets and sell them more than double the price on average.
They should simply double or tipple the price and give more to the artist, or better yet, give US more, like a free T-Shirt for all (25$), or a live CD from the previous show.
I got The Police tickets at 250$ each, without a scalper for the first time in 10 years. I was unable to get anything before (at 40-80$ a ticket).
Scalpers are a LOT better to fix prices too. Often shows have 2 prices, you can have a 100$ difference between 2 rows near the separation line. Yet scalpers will change prices based on distance, stage angle and other factors you did not know existed specific to the stadium or a specific artists way of doing a show.
I do it because it is convenient, I gain a lot of time. I cannot afford a 3 days waiting anymore (and sometime 2 weeks like some did for Pink Floyd in the 80's) like the old days of only missing school.
"Hey boss, the product will be released 1 week late, The Police will be in town in 3 months!"
Then translated into revenue, these hours are thousands of dollars, so what's 2-300$ for a ticket?
OH! Lets not forget that TicketMaster is a near Monopoly too.
Because I think Mass is 3 for 3. Well, granted, it only involves alcohol briefly and by the time it gets to anybody it is already Jesus, but the sophistication and parking stick around for the whole service.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Well, Mr. Jordan...
I could be mistaken, but it looks like you've been slashdotted!
I was trying to find out what events were available in Georgia.