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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
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"
TM is the perfect example of a monopoly, and what happens once one is allowed to exist. It is most definitely NOT an example of a free market. A market that is dominated by a monopoly is the opposite of a free market. In order for a market to qualify as free, there must be no barriers to entry. A market owned by a monopoly has impenetrable barriers to entry.
So, there is your lesson in economic for the day.
Forcing a breakup of TM would go a long way to making that specific market free again.
You wrote all that without even once using the phrase "Market Failure." However, neither side in our dual party has any interest in imposing regulations or forcing competition (forcing competition is little more than creating market conditions that allow competitors to arise, thus promoting a free market; not being in opposition to it).
One side feels that the magic of the market is all that is needed. The other side sees these tickets as nothing more than a luxury item, in no need of being addressed. Applying the sacrificial lamb principal, someone will have to die before it is on the screen of anyone in a position to address it. Frankly, I don't see that happening soon, after all, they are just concert tickets.