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Paperless Tickets Flourish Despite 'Grandma Problem'
Hugh Pickens writes "Is a concert ticket a piece of property that its holder has the right to buy and sell as he sees fit, or is it merely a seat-rental contract subject to restrictions determined by its issuer? The Washington Post reports that in an effort to thwart scalpers and dampen ticket reselling on the so-called secondary market, musicians as diverse as Bruce Springsteen, Miley Cyrus, and Metallica have adopted 'paperless ticketing' for some or all of the seats at their live shows. Ticket issuers Ticketmaster and Veritix tout paperless tickets as a way to eliminate worries about lost, stolen, or counterfeit tickets, and to banish long will-call lines. But paperless tickets aren't really tickets at all, but essentially personal seat reservations, secured electronically like airline tickets. Fans buy tickets with a credit card and must then go to the venue with the same credit card and a photo ID to gain admittance. The problem is that Ticketmaster's paperless tickets can't be transferred from a buyer to a second party. The inability to pass along a seat creates what has become known in the industry as the 'grandma problem': it's almost impossible for a grandma living at one end of the country to buy a paperless ticket to giver to a grandchild living at the other end. Without the ability to transfer virtual tickets, brokers and dealers fear being run out of business, and consumers have a harder time selling unwanted tickets. 'People should be free to give away or sell their tickets to whomever they want, whenever they want,' says Gary Adler, a Washington attorney who represents the National Association of Ticket Brokers. 'An open market is really best for consumers.'"
Of course they flourish. When these are used, people really aren't given another option in most cases. This is much like saying "Despite outrageous fees, TicketMaster flourishes".
With virtual tickets, concerts will end up with a certain amount of empty seats as people's plans change or they become sick and can not give the tickets to a friend. Empty seats are a sign of a bad concert, as anyone knows. Of course they'll soon realize that an old airline trick will fix that with a bonus: oversell concerts, and tell the overflow they're on "standby" until the next concert. Full seats and extra money!
Grandma should be allowed put a different name on the ticket than the one on her credit card. All the grandchild needs is some ID with a matching name on it. Problem solved.
Can I patent this process please?
No sig today...
As much as I hate scalpers, I hate Ticketmaster 10x more.
From a purely technical standpoint, allowing the buyer to log in and change the owner of the ticket would be trivial. Upon the change, the system sends a new password to the new email address, and that person must log in and add a credit card number that will be used for verification at the venue. Paperless tickets exist for only one reason. Ticketmaster wants to capture the value in increased demand by raising prices instead of seeing it go to the middlemen.
I'll tell you who cares. The fans who can't get a ticket unless they pay 10 times the original price because all the tickets were bought up by scalpers 45 seconds after they went on sale. In this case, Ticketmaster is actually trying to do something that's good for the people who want to see the show, and isn't good for the people who just want to resell their tickets. Now, there are some downsides, especially for those who wanted to see the show, but something happened, and now they can't see it, and they can't resell the tickets. Which group of people do you think is larger? Maybe Ticketmaster thinks it is better to help the larger number of people who want to see the show see it for the real price, than to worry about the much smaller percentage of people who can't resell their tickets. Maybe they will get that part figured out as well, and nobody will have any reason to complain.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
No, they're called "wankers."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I can think of worse people than undertakers to describe as “scummy bottom-feeders”&hellip personal-injury lawyers who encourage people to sue their own elderly parents, just for one example. Undertakers provide a fairly valuable service—they work with death on a daily basis, so they can help the bereaved through what has to get done. Anyone who encourages someone to sue family for their own carelessness they need to be introduced to the business end of a hot poker.
Matthew G P Coe
http://mgpcoe.blogspot.com/
You're really just pointing out one of the problems with so-called free market capitalism. The much touted advantage of capitalism is that market competition drives down prices, which increases utility to the consumer. But it doesn't work so well, as in the cases you suggested, where there is a limited supply of non-fungible goods.
Exxon provides value by moving the oil from one place to another where it is more useful. In your example, if Xbox 360s are in short supply in one part of the country but plentiful in your local Walmart, you are providing value by moving the goods to where they are needed. If you are selling them on to locals, the value you are providing is that some people can translate a higher price into getting their Xbox earlier than if they'd had to wait for new stock - an Xbox now is worth more than an Xbox in the future. This is only really true if the demand outstrips the supply - if the demand and supply are similar, then you're just hoarding Xboxes for profit. But the supply chain for Xboxes is such that you can be reasonably sure that some more will be along soon.
In the case of concert tickets, there is no value to geographic translocation (the concert is in a fixed venue), or early acquisition (the concert is at a fixed time). The value the scalper is providing is that you don't have to queue to get your ticket, and you have a higher probability of getting a ticket because fewer people want to pay their higher price.
The problem being that the scalper is part of the reason they provide value ; they quickly buy up large quantities of tickets from the vendor, which artificially increases the scarcity of the goods. That isn't free-market capitalism, because they are distorting their market. If the organizer did their sums right, they should have enough seats for everyone willing to pay their stated ticket price. I'm not saying they do ... but in this case, the scalper is the reason for their own existence - the reason you're willing to pay the scalpers prices for a ticket is because the scalpers have bought them instead of you. They're not adding value and making a fat buck doing it and that annoys people. It's rent-seeking behaviour - they are profiting from the mere ownership of those tickets for a while.
If concert goers didn't have to pay their inflated prices, they'd have more disposable income remaining and organizers might put on more dates in bigger venues to capture that, resulting in money going toward what people actually want, which is live music performances.