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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."
Ticketmaster is like the Devil fucked himself, had a child, and that child grew up without any toys reading only out of context Scrooge McDuck comic panels.
If at all possible I try not to buy tickets from them, and don't go to many concerts any more because that is becoming increasingly harder to avoid.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Ticketmaster is the reason I never go to concerts.
Yes, the public will not be happy, but what are we going to do? TicketBastard pretty much has a monopoly on concert tickets. It's not like I can go to another ticket vendor to get tickets, if they are selling them they are the only one selling them. And it's not like bands have a lot of options because so many venues are owned by TicketBastard. Unless the government steps in and starts regulating shitty, scammy business practices (not likely, especially not with this administration) there is no consequences to being a shitty company.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
..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.
1. Open bidding
2. Everybody bids what they are willing to pay for tickets
3. Close bidding
4. Starting with highest bid, in descending order:
4a. Collect bid amount
4b. Allow bidder to choose seat or request bid refund
5. Repeat from 4 until all seats are sold
Scalpers? Everybody already bid what they would have paid. By bidding higher, the scalper is pricing themselves out of their own market.
Bots? It's either useless scalping (see previous line), or uselessly holding a spot only to request a bid refund.
Many of the scalpers will likely go to jail, BUT, this was a program being admined by Ticketmaster itself. Nearly all states have anti-scalping laws on the books. As such, Ticketmaster employees that KNEW about this should be going to prison (aiding/abetting or participating). BUT, I am guessing that not a ONE will see prison, esp the executives, even though they were almost certainly in on it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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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