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Box-Office Giant Ticketmaster Recruits Pros For Secret Scalper Program (www.cbc.ca)
Box-office giant Ticketmaster is recruiting professional scalpers who cheat its own system to expand its resale business and squeeze more money out of fans, a CBC News/Toronto Star investigation reveals. The report adds: In July, the news outlets sent a pair of reporters undercover to Ticket Summit 2018, a ticketing and live entertainment convention at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Posing as scalpers and equipped with hidden cameras, the journalists were pitched on Ticketmaster's professional reseller program. Company representatives told them Ticketmaster's resale division turns a blind eye to scalpers who use ticket-buying bots and fake identities to snatch up tickets and then resell them on the site for inflated prices. Those pricey resale tickets include extra fees for Ticketmaster. "I have brokers that have literally a couple of hundred accounts," one sales representative said. "It's not something that we look at or report." CBC shared its findings with Alan Cross, a veteran music journalist and host of the radio program The Ongoing History of New Music, who suspects the ticket-buying public will be far from impressed: "This is going to be a public relations nightmare." He said there have been "whispers of this in the ticket-selling community, but it's never been outlined quite like this before."
I suppose at the same time they're still busting non-company scalpers and insisting they're prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law?
Seems to me that Ticketmaster should put in for a corporate name change to East India Company. Then they can call their payrolled scalpers 'privateers'.
Isn't this that they're doing illegal? If not it should be. I hope they go bankrupt over this.
..of free markets, corporate greed and (most importantly) lack of accountability.
I wonder what would happen if the Sherman Anti-trust Act was aimed at Ticketmaster. They have a virtual monopoly on their business model.
I tried reselling some tickets on Ticketmaster for a concert we couldn't make it to because it seemed easier to just do it through their website. They were up there for several weeks without selling. When i tried to drop the price of the tickets the week before the concert to try and get rid of them i discovered the Ticketmaster site wouldn't let me drop them below a certain amount (an amount that i believe was higher than what i'd initially paid for them.) Maybe there was some way to get around the artificial limit, but if so i couldn't figure out how. I'd say that maybe they wanted to insure a minimum level of fees for themselves, but if the ticket is priced too high to sell they're not going to get _any_ fee, so that seems counter-productive.
So i canceled that offer and switched the tickets over to StubHub, which had a much better UI and let me lower the ticket prices to whatever i wanted. (I ended up managing to sell them about an hour before the concert for about $200 less than i originally paid for them after getting into a negative bidding war with someone else =P)
I'd strongly recommend checking out StubHub and any other ticket resellers before resorting to TicketMaster, especially after hearing this news.
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Actually, I think there is a more appropriate auction style for concert tickets -- the "Dutch" auction style.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Yet the regulators had no problem with them and Live Nation (another spawn of the devil) merging. Who didn't see this coming with no competition?
Maybe Amazon will one day getting into the ticket business.
Watch Out Ticketmaster: Amazon In Talks To Offer Event Ticketing In US
Ticketmaster isn't doing anything wrong
This is exactly why uber-capitalists and lolbertarians should die a thousand horrible deaths, I'll get started today!