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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.
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'
My hunch is that at least some of the bots are their's.
At any rate, the face value of a concert ticket is meaningless. Since Ticketmaster and the venues find so many clever ways to hold back tickets, distribute them to resellers and other parties before you ever get your hands on one, the dollar value is just pointless. They might as well have tickets called "Cheapest, Cheap, Affordable, Expensive, Really Expensive and HOLY FUCKING SHIT YOU REALLY LOVE THIS BAND!!!!"
After I went to see AC/DC in 2015 in Vancouver, I said that was it for me and big venue concerts. It was an incredible concert, to be sure, but the amount of money and time it took to get there was just outrageous. My wife and I had just as good a time heading over to watch King Crimson in December 2015 in a nice 3000 seat venue where you could actually see the band without the need of a video screen, where volume levels weren't so insane that you were still functionally deaf 48 hours later, and where the venue wasn't filled with beer-swilling psychotics. When I went to my last Rush concert there was literally a drunken couple in the row ahead of us who got into a fucking brawl. Seriously, those people must have paid over $300 for tickets, and to do that and then spend god-knows how much to get pissed up on venue beer, and then get into a fight and get thrown out! Fuck it, big venues suck, and Ticketmaster's evil schemes to fuck you out of more money than the face value of the ticket just puts the cork on it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
My hunch is that at least some of the bots are their's.
Most are. In fact, TicketMaster skips the bots entirely.
TicketMaster owns and operates TicketsNow, which is ticket scalping site.
TicketMaster pinches off a chunk (often the bulk) of tickets and gives them to TicketsNow BEFORE they go on sale.
If they don't sell on TicketsNow, TicketMaster takes some back and releases them on TicketMaster. This is why TicketMaster has the option to be alerted in case more tickets become available.
TicketsNow (and they probably have other sites that are the same damned thing) is their primary business because it lets them get out of any pricing contracts. TicketMaster "sells" the tickets to TicketsNow in advance (or at T 0), and TicketsNow resells them at a much higher price.
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?
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
Inflation calculator says $30-$50 in 1976 dollars is $126-$210 dollars now. Tickets for Guns n' Roses current tour range from $155 to $280 for front row pit (standing area directly in front of the stage) tickets. Pretty sure inflation explains most, if not all of that. Ticketing middlemen suck for sure and they add their cut to the top of the pile, but inflation plays a much bigger role than you're leading us to believe.
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
big venues suck
Not necessarily. I think it's more a case of "mainstream audiences suck" or "people who aren't used to going to concerts suck". I see it all the time, especially mainstream rock concerts. There is always a segment of (usually middle-aged) people there, who only go to a concert every other year. They don't know their limits when it comes to beer, they don't know basic concert etiquette, they get angry if they accidentally get bumped, and they especially get pissed off if someone spills a little beer on them, even though they're standing in the dense crowd close to the stage.
I have never seen this type of behavior at a death metal show, for instance. And I probably attend at least 2 metal shows every month.
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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Just wait 20 years and then see them for free at the State Fair.