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Watch Out Ticketmaster: Amazon In Talks To Offer Event Ticketing In US (reuters.com)
According to Reuters, Amazon is seeking to partner with U.S. venue owners to sell event tickets -- a move that could loosen Ticketmaster's powerful grip on the lucrative ticketing business. From the report: The Seattle-based company sees the U.S. ticketing market as ripe for attack. Consumers dislike ticket fees, and venue owners, sports leagues and teams want more distributors for their tickets as they seek to boost sales. Access to tickets could be another means to lure members to the Amazon Prime shopping club. For music acts and sports teams, selling tickets through Amazon could help sell their merchandise. Currently Ticketmaster, owned by Live Nation Entertainment, is the exclusive seller of primary tickets for many top venues in the United States. Would-be challengers have struggled to compete in the face of Ticketmaster's strong relationships with the operators of major U.S. sports stadiums, arenas, concert halls and other venues. Amazon has had success with ticketing in Britain, where it has been selling seats to West End shows since 2015, even outselling Ticketmaster for some events, according to one of the sources, who owns venues in that country. It is less common for venues in Britain to have an exclusive ticket provider.
Uh, that's exactly how Ticketmaster operates.
Ticketmaster gets tickets to sell, and before they go on sale (or the very instant they do), they ship nearly all (or all) of them off to ticketsnow.com to sell at inflated (more so) prices.
If for any reason tickets don't sell out on ticketsnow.com , Ticketmaster moves some tickets back to ticketmaster.com and announces a new block of tickets as being available to drum up excitement and to get people to try to buy them on ticketmaster.com . When they get there, they'll find out that the situation has repeated itself. Ticketmaster is "sold out" yet there are tickets on a 3rd party ticket selling site, ticketsnow.com - better act fast!
This is why Ticketmaster has the option to check a box to be notified if more tickets become available. How can more tickets become available when you're already sold out? Answer: Because Ticketmaster is lying, cheating scum.
To be fair, the event organizers are lying cheating scum.
Because Ticketmaster only has around 30-40% of a venue's tickets to sell. Right off the top, 30% goes to credit card companies, promoters, etc as part of their "exclusive member benefits". Yes, if you want tickets, it often doesn't hurt to be a member of these cards. That's how credit cards and radio stations can offer tickets long after they sell out.
Another 30% goes to event employees themselves to pass out to friends and family. It's a fairly large group of people who get the opportunity to buy lots of tickets, cheap.
Then there's the remainder which are marked for general admission. Sometimes 10-20% are lopped off the top for VIPs and fan club members and early pre-sales people who can buy the tickets before the tickets go on sale.
That leaves the rest of the tickets to be sold as general admission. At which point the bots all take over.
That's why you see empty seats even at sold out events - sometimes the credit card companies simply don't release the unsold tickets, and the friends and family don't either. Add those VIP and fan club seats, and guess what? They go straight to the resale market. Only a very rare event organizer gets out, shakes down the leftover unsold tickets and then opens them up as a "new block of tickets". Sometimes it also plays to be last minute, those resale tickets from reserved blocks haven't been bought, so they release them as last minute sales (this is something regular scalpers do not have the ability to do - only the promo ticket and such can turn their reserved listings from resale back to unsold block. And no, reserved listing tickets are not paid for yet - credit card companies etc do not pay for them until you as a member book it. So the scores of resale tickets are really scores of companies all selling reserved tickets that haven't been paid for.