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.

Comments

Supply and demand

[Doub]

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.

Re:Supply and demand

[ShanghaiBill]

The problem is that demand for many performances is hard to forecast, and the performers want sell-out crowds. So they price the tickets low to ensure that every seat is filled. But then the scalpers come along and buy up the tickets, boost the price, and often have unsold inventory, which means empty seats.

The solution is NOT to ban scalping. Scalping is a response to a market failure, and trying to ban it is not going to work. A better solution is to put the tickets on sale at a high price with a publicly announced sliding price scale, so the price drops each day as the performance gets closer. So customers have a choice of either paying now and having a guaranteed seat, or waiting and maybe getting a cheaper ticket next week. This will maximize revenue, fill every seat, and leave no space for scalpers.

Re:Supply and demand

[ShanghaiBill]

For example, simply set it up so that you can only buy tickets either a) an hour before the show using cash abd getting your hand stamped, or b) with a credit card - that must be shown to pick up the tickets upto an hour before the show.

1. Many people are not going to go to a show that requires them to waste an hour of their time, with no guarantee of even getting a ticket.
2. Scalpers can simply pay homeless people to stand in line and buy up the tickets.
3. This scheme would likely INCREASE demand for scalping, since in addition to getting a guaranteed ticket, you don't have to stand in line.

Re:Supply and demand

[whoever57]

The problem is that demand for many performances is hard to forecast, and the performers want sell-out crowds.

How is it that the scalpers can predict demand, but Ticketmaster cannot?

Re:Supply and demand

[sexconker]

The scalpers ARE TicketMaster, most of the time. TicketMaster owns TicketsNow, which is basically eBay for scalpers. TicketMaster moves its own tickets to TicketsNow to charge obscene prices, preventing anyone from buying them on TicketMaster.

Many of the ticket sites....

[bazmail]

...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.

Ticket sellers should just run dutch auctions.

[HornWumpus]

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).

Re:Put a captcha on

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:Put a captcha on

[sexconker]

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.

They're breaking themselves

[Waccoon]

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