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The Man Who Broke Ticketmaster (vice.com)
Jason Koebler quotes a report from Motherboard: The scourge of ticket bots and the immorality of the shady ticket scalpers using them is conventional wisdom that's so ingrained in the public consciousness and so politically safe that a law to ban automated ticket bots passed both houses of Congress unanimously late last year, in part thanks to a high-profile public relations campaign spearheaded by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda. But no one actually involved in the ticket scalping industry thinks that banning bots will do much to slow down the secondary market. Seven years after his Los Angeles office was raided by shotgun-wielding FBI agents, Ken Lowson, the man who invented ticket bots, told Motherboard's Jason Koebler he's switched teams. Now, he's out to expose the secrets of the ticket industry in a bid to make sure tickets are sold directly to their fans.
TicketMaster and the like could easily stop bots IF THEY WANTED TO. But they don't, because they get sellouts, sometimes to things that wouldn't otherwise sellout.
You got scalpers and bots because some morons want to circumvent the rules of the market. When supply is limited and demand is high, prices should go up. Then no bots, no scalpers. Of course poor people would have to go see something else, like one of the many good scenes that fail to attract audiences.
...are hand in glove with the scalpers. I was offered a job once at a company that automates the purchasing process on ticket selling sites using bots, then resell at vastly inflated prices. they claimed that they get unofficial help from the ticket selling sites, and even give kickbacks. Rather than being shy about it, the guy was boasting about it. I declined. The guy interviewing was a douchebag.
You want a ticket, tell us how much you will pay for it. We'll sell the tickets to those making the highest offers. Done.
Scalping will continue at the edges, but the people putting on the shows will get the lion's share of the money, the only problem with scalping.
If Artists want to fuckover scalpers, all they've ever had to do was add shows. Let the scalpers buy all the tickets to shows 1 and 2. See how much the scalpers can get for them after they announce shows 3, 4 and 5 (continuing until they don't sell out).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
the tickets are already sold to fans of tickets
Before Ticketmaster, I really didn't have too much difficulty getting tickets to shows - I saw Yes, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and quite a few others in concert. Cost me around $30-$50 a pop (in 1976 dollars). With Ticketmaster, prices almost immediately doubled - and have continued to rise at a rate significantly higher than inflation could ever explain, that is when the show I want to see hasn't already been "Sold Out" to scalpers.
I guess that's why we nerds invented Pirate Bay, TOR and BitTorrent. Really, I'm too old for the concert scene anyhow. Wine, women and song got to be too much for me, so I gave up singing!
Have one buy a ticket and have the other one "want to sit next to (id)" when they buy it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And require a name for each ticket then require IDs at the door. Seems easy enough.
Because it takes 30 minutes to board 100 passengers. Go luck doing that with a 50,000 seat stadium.
And when that seat has already sold in the meantime? As well as the next 20 seats down the row? And one of the two people is a minor, say, a 10 year old?
It does, but not because they're checking tickets. Stadiums have much better flow for foot traffic, enforced by fire marshals who think they are God (and are correct). They have to check the ticket anyway, it's a small matter to check an ID at the same time. You do need people walking the line reminding everyone of that, and pre-checking that everyone has both. I've seen that done at concerts - and at airports with boarding passes and passports.
The biggest obstacles is that the people who would have to implement won't. They have too much invested in the current system of scalping.
I'm so glad I despise pretty much all popular entertainment.
Auctions.
A few last minute concert-goers would have to privately buy from someone, but an auction format would mean that the first sale price would rapidly approach the true price and thus eliminate the scalpers' profits.
Same thing that they should do for airline seats: Instead of assigning a seat, assign a set of preferences with ranked weighting. For example, sort the following in order of personal preference:
The first one might have a weight of 2,000, the second one might have a weight of 1,000, etc. Additional infinte badness weights would be given for things like children traveling with parents to ensure that they are never split up or placed in an emergency exit row if they do not qualify. Then, about an hour before the flight, you go through and place people based on those weights, giving priority (in cases of conflicts between equal weights) to the person who bought the ticket first, and you assign seats to everyone that maximizes everyone's experience as much as possible.
Obviously with something like a concert venue, the options would be different, and the timing would be different, but you might have things like:
And you charge different amounts of money for some of those options, obviously. But in some circumstances, you could offer to bump people up to a nicer section if the front isn't full or whatever, and you could rearrange people within the section almost arbitrarily up until you assign them a seat a couple of days prior to the event. Additionally, by requiring the participants to come back to the event website to get an actual seat assignment, scalping becomes much less practical.
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Market is already what this guy was doing, it's just a shadow one (auctions are unrelated in this scenario - those are for single items, not commodities).
And yes, the market of limited supply at a fixed rate is trivial to corner if you can buy it all out before with trivial amounts of capital. The proper trick is for tickcetmaster be the actual elastic supplier during the markets course until closing - by emitting new tickets / buying back to prevent fluctuations - in such a way that 1 hour before the event, last free ticket will be emitted.
Their argument is that if ticket resale were allowed, "speculators" would buy up all the tickets to games and concerts and sell them off at exorbitant prices.
Here in Arizona, ticket resale for any event from a string quartet to the Super Bowl has been legal for years, and I have not heard of a single case of market distortion caused by ticket hoarding for resale. There are even special resale areas near stadiums where ticket resellers gather.
Given this open market situation, no reseller wants to take on the risk of monopolizing blocks of event tickets that they may suddenly find they can't sell. Rather than trying to be better at judging the market than the event promoters themselves, they make lesser but certain money on the brokerage spread, providing a resale market for people who cannot make use of a purchased ticket when their plans change.
http://cronkitenewsonline.com/...
Arizonans wish we had jurisdiction to provide a resale market for all those non-refundable airline tickets that people have to throw away when something comes up and they can't make a flight. Airlines would be able to sell non-refundable flights without needing a tribunal to read doctor's notes and listen to endless sob stories. AT the same time, passengers would be able to recoup part of their loss for a foregone flight. Can we get the new DOT to take another look at this idea?
If a specific venue wants to reduce the problem of ticket bots, they could simply have ticket purchases to be at the box office only. After all, if you are physically going to the show, you are physically capable of going there to buy tickets.
Edge cases: the venue is not in your current city; you have a physical limitation that greatly increases the inconvenience of going there to get the tickets (e.g., in a wheelchair); I'm sure people can think of others. Possible solution? For these cases, purchase over the phone.
(Note that the added fees that Ticketmaster and their ilk charges would disappear. ("Convenience fee" my ass))
What obvious problem with this idea did I miss, thus proving that I am an idiot?
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
Auctions are not unrelated because show tickets are not a commodity. A certain ticket is for a certain seat for a certain show. Some shows may be general admission, but then a ticket is still reasonably distinct as it is for a certain show.
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ticket Lotty
There's not many companies I hate worse than AT&T and Sony, but there is one. Ticketmaster.
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I know this may be a bit off topic, but idiotic games are just part for the course.
I wanted to buy tickets to see Steve Martin at Boston Symphony Hall a few years back, and visited the TicketMaster web site. I wasn't surprised to find I had an offer for a front-row seat, since I was very early and this wasn't exactly AC/DC or some massively popular band. However, the web site insisted I needed to buy the tickets within 10 minutes, or I'd most likely lose my seats to another buyer. I messed around for a bit to see what the rates were for other seats, and sure enough, once the 10 minute timer was up, the front-row seats were no longer available and I was offered a new selection a few rows back. Rinse and repeat a few times, and I soon found myself in the middle of the venue, with all the front row seats having sold out, and the site urging me to buy RIGHT NOW before I risk losing out and every seat has been sold. No matter what I did, the web site wouldn't give me a decent seat again.
I knew very well the seats weren't selling out, so I simply cleared my web browser cookies, and... found myself in the front row again.
Another lovely bonus is how they offered to mail me the tickets for free, but they would charge (if I remember correctly) a $17 convenience fee for electronic tickets I could print myself. They employ e-book logic, apparently.
This type of bologna is why I stopped going to major concerts entirely. Also, it was surprisingly fun to visit a local race track (Seekonk Speedway in MA) for a mere $20, rather than one of the regional NASCAR races. Small shows may not have as much spectacle, but they're still lots of fun and you don't have to put up with all this ticket gouging nonsense
Make it illegal to profit from tickets, by mandating that tickets may only be sold at face value or below. This also encourages possible ticket buyers to report scalpers.
Of course, it also requires a population that's not likely to just think "screw everyone else, I'm getting my ticket!", which may be problematic in the US.
Eat the rich.
That brings a whole new set of problems, like people buying no-refund tickets being unable to even give them to their friends if they realize that they can't make it to the show for whatever reason... not to mention all the empty seats that make the concert seem unpopular, thus reducing demand for future shows.
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Ticketbastards.
They have exclusive contracts with so many venues that an artist cannot find a place to perform that does not have a "Ticketmaster-only" contract for shows. Ticketbastards run an obscene, monopolistic racket.
Fair point. With seat numbers you get something akin to bonds or options instrument market, not real commodity.
Maturity times are different for each piece of instrument, but it is lumped together with each being priced by the slight variation in demand for each variant. Because in general, the market does not care about the slight differences between variants. They're fine as long they get *some*.
What I'm trying to say is that auction technically is very limited form of market - where your bid is allocated to only one item. Which is simple to understand, but inefficient in market terms - on financial instrument markets, you put a bid for classes of parameters (seat range, if you buy two seats, ensure those are next to each other etc) - basically a set of seat numbers you're ok with, in given price range, and you get first ticket which will match. The whole point is to not limit your capital to one item, when near-identical seats around are potentially cheaper.
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