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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If I recall my Ayn Rand, high ticket prices wouldn't be a problem in a Randian paradise because artists whose artistic integrity has been transgressed would frequently blow up venues. That would, I am quite certain, discourage desire for tickets and therefore bring ticket prices down.
An interesting and unique solution to a vexing problem.
Note that we could achieve much the same affect by simply marking every 500th ticket with a black border and shooting the guy who buys it. Since scalpers buy many more tickets than ordinary people, we would wipe them out in short order.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Tickmaster sucks the life out of venues and acts.
Unless, of course, the venue happens to be out in the burbs.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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".
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).
The proposed solution has nothing to do with identifying scalpers. Scalpers take advantage of market timing; they attempt to buy up as much of the ticket supply as quickly as possible and sell tickets at higher prices later. In a Dutch auction it's assumed everyone who wanted to buy a ticket has an opportunity to place a bid, and the price point is optimized based on all of the bids. Resellers wouldn't be able to win a majority of the tickets in the auction and resell them at higher prices (above what consumers were willing to bear), they could only sell to people who missed the auction or mis-judged their bids or have more disposable income later on.
The idea that resellers would sell at lower then face value price to obtain market dominance doesn't make any sense... there is an infinite supply of future events and the distribution costs for tickets is extremely low. Are you suggesting that Ticketmaster would be put out of business by resellers that originally bought the tickets from Ticketmaster? The "US capitalist ideals" you talk about are making the market efficient in the best way possible by optimizing profit, and if that means using a different market style like a Dutch auction then that more power to them. It is not intervening in any definition of the word.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying a Dutch auction is definitely the best answer, there are a lot of open questions there. I don't think your reply had any valid rebuttals though.
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.
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