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A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

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Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#191

Post by knodi123 »

newdayrising wrote: post #165
knodi123 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I am willing to pay the asking price for tickets, I should be able to buy them. If you're offering them so cheaply that I will happily buy all of the tickets then you're offering them too cheap and you can't really complain if I buy them. And if I'm an artist who wants to ensure that fans without a lot of money can see me? Should I be allowed to offer a concert where tickets cost 20% of market value, or should "…

How many artists, do you think, value their fans over money?

Plenty, I'd bet. I'd certainly expect the concentration of people with such ideals to be higher among the population of artists vs. the population of armchair economists.

But I think a better question is, how many artists should be free to value their fans over money?

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#192

Post by ChuckMcM »

supercanuck wrote: post #179
ChuckMcM wrote: post #172

I've wondered if you could price tickets with an algorihm where they start out high and then over time or volume get cheaper and cheaper. If a scalper jumped in first they would pay a high price, later buyers could get tickets much more cheaply, if they come in later they won't have the desirable tickets which sold early.

How would this be in the best interest of the venue/artist who want to move tickets quickly and reduce risk? Seems like this would favor only those concerts destined to sell out or be popular.

Ideally it would maximize the revenue going to the artist and not to the scalper. Lets assume you worked it this way.

Artist X, playing 3 shows (Friday eve, Saturday Mat, Saturday Eve) would normally put tickets on sale lets say a month in advance for $20/$30/$50 (General Admission, Main Floor, Orchestra (rows 1-3)) each. Now in this new system they put tickets on sale 6 weeks before the event and in the additional two weeks prior the prices start at $200/$300/$500 and decay in price linearly by date to their 'marked' price over those two weeks. So each day sees a 7% drop in the 'over' price (so from $200 -> $20). Landing at the one month mark at the 'regular' prices.

In scenario one, it does nothing and no one takes advantage of early access to higher priced tickets and the tickets are on sale at "list' price 1 month ahead of the date as usual.

In scenario two, some people are really looking forward to the show and wait until the prices come down to what they are willing to pay for the seats they want prior to the tickets reaching their "list" price. That gives the artist/venue a bit more money for the show.

Scenario 3, lots of people want to go, they buy out all the tickets during the first two weeks of availability at higher prices. The artist/venue get a lot more money for the show.

The challenge for scalpers is that if they buy the tickets when they are expensive, they might take a loss on them (they don't really want to go to the show).

What this scheme tries to do is to move the market dynamics around a potentially mispriced product so that the artist/venue benefits if it is mispriced rather than the scalpers.

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#193

Post by mattnewton »

ikeboy wrote: post #173
mattnewton wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes the market for the tickets more efficient, but that isn't what the artists are optimizing for. They want to be able to sacrifice ticket revenue for exposure. Maybe they want to select their audience for hardcore fans willing to spend time on getting tickets rather than money, maybe that translates into better brand referrals because it selects more devoted fans. You're more okay with barring people over 25 a…

>Right, but this assumes that there isn't an equivalently sized population of people willing to pay more that will buy them instead. My argument is that audiences aren't interchangable and that real harm is done when you force the artist to select the audience on ability to pay alone, as you are proposing. The set of all people willing to buy at $50 is at least as big as the set of all people willing to buy at more t…

There are several hypothetical problems with this in practice I can imagine.

First, it's still a problem of finite space. It is not going to be practical to scale out until supply reaches demand in many locations. There are only so many Friday nights in a month, which also makes fungible repeat shows finite, and repeat shows cost time that could be better spent increasing global coverage.

Second, price and venue-filling are signals of quality, so there may actually be some people who do not purchase tickets that appear to be too cheap or do not go because they do not feel invested when the ticket price is low. Then this results in empty seats which negatively impact the artists publicity.

Third, the discriminator when you have a low price point but low supply is the willingness to get in line. This can be a valuable metric to select audiences. Removing it makes it harder for artists to select their audiences.

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#194

Post by [deleted] »

austenallred wrote: post #22

I spent some of my formidable years scalping and brokering event (mostly broadway) tickets in various forms. The company I co-founded made a few million and I learned an expensive lesson in equity at age 18 (I opted instead for the $14/hr salary). We worked in broadway (meaning the style of show, not just the street), and I met the Wiseguys folks at secondary market trade shows, but I had no idea they were this big,…

[deleted]

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#195

Post by k-mcgrady »

Arizhel wrote: post #157
ryandrake wrote: post #3

> "There's an emotional aspect to what artists do, which is to say 'I'm not willing to charge $500 even though clearly the market value is $500. I'm going to charge $100, and at the end of the day someone else is going to make that money,'" The bots are just a symptom. Seems like this is likely the root of the problem. If the primary market was efficient, then there would be no secondary market, and the whole point o…

Ok, the problem seems like a clear-cut supply-and-demand one. So if artists don't want to look like a bunch of greedy jerks selling tickets for $500+ apiece, and there's only so many seats in the venue, why not increase the number of shows? Maybe the venue is too booked-up and the artists get too tired playing the same venue 5 days in a row and being on the road 5x as long, but it's a thought. The other question I ha…

>> decades ago, concert tickets didn't cost this much

I'm willing to bet it's because in the old days artists could release a record and make a living from that without even touring. Now the record, for most artists, is a promotional tool, maybe even a loss leader, for concerts. As for 'why don't they just play more shows' I'd say the reason is quite similar. In the past artists didn't have to tour enough. Now they tour for incredibly long periods of time so they can extend that further (unhealthy and maybe even impossible) or play more shows in fewer places.

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#196

Post by ikeboy »

mattnewton wrote: post #193
ikeboy wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Right, but this assumes that there isn't an equivalently sized population of people willing to pay more that will buy them instead. My argument is that audiences aren't interchangable and that real harm is done when you force the artist to select the audience on ability to pay alone, as you are proposing. The set of all people willing to buy at $50 is at least as big as the set of all people willing to buy at more t…

There are several hypothetical problems with this in practice I can imagine. First, it's still a problem of finite space. It is not going to be practical to scale out until supply reaches demand in many locations. There are only so many Friday nights in a month, which also makes fungible repeat shows finite, and repeat shows cost time that could be better spent increasing global coverage. Second, price and venue-fill…

>Third, the discriminator when you have a low price point but low supply is the willingness to get in line.

Not when they're selling online.

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#197

Post by dkersten »

metaphorm wrote: post #80
jkoebler wrote: post #6

I wrote this story and am happy to answer any questions you guys might have. Lots of information I ended up not using because the article was already incredibly long or I couldn't corroborate it (but believe it to be true from various interviews), etc.

can you explain some more details about the attempt of the prosecutors to argue for "hacking" based on their (apparently wrong) assumption that Wiseguy's system was using OCR to answer a Captcha? this part just doesn't make any sense to me. you said > The government argued that OCR-using bots would need to use Ticketmaster's source code to be implemented properly on the site, and would therefore be a "circumvention"…

This is the exact question I came here to ask. Surely OCR is more "humanlike" and less "hacks" than the trick of indexing all of the images.

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#198

Post by mthoms »

1024core wrote: post #118

> The government's case hinged mostly on whether Wiseguy had "circumvented" Ticketmaster's system. While I hate scalpers, I have to ask: why is this illegal? Is using a screen reader "circumventing the system" if I get rid of all font and graphics? Is using an adblocker "circumventing the system" ?

The law is intentionally vague on what "circumventing" means. That's so that:

(a) It can catch previously unforeseen schemes

(b) It can be selectively enforced

(c) Both (a) and (b)

The answer is (c) IMHO.

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#199

Post by LordKano »

criddell wrote: post #180
LordKano wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. That's how things have always been. As long as we live in a capitalist society, that's how they'll always be. The market value of a thing is not just what someone tries to sell it for, it's what someone else is willing to pay for it. There have long been mechanisms by which the most dedicated fans have access to some of the tickets for less than market rates. Call it old fashioned if you like but fan clubs or th…

Right. The market doesn't work very well except for the very simple scenario of maximizing revenue.

That's precisely the opposite of both my point and observable reality.

Why doesn't every apartment rent for $1500 per month?

Because people aren't willing to pay that for every apartment. Because of this, every real estate market has a ceiling with regards to how much can be charged for rent.

If Lil Bow Wow goes on tour at the same venues as Eminem, will the tickets cost the same? No because people are willing to pay more for Eminem tickets. If someone tries to charge as much money to see Lil Bow Wow as they do for Eminem, a lot of tickets would go unsold. They would lose money and next time, they won't make the same mistake.

That's the market at work.

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#200

Post by r7000 »

chillwaves wrote: post #138
lixquid wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But.. they are exploiting people. That's literally what they are doing; expecting people to purchase these tickets at a higher cost for the simple reason that supply is short.

Artificially short by scalpers driving up demand.

Scalpers neither increase nor reduce total demand. Scalpers are not going to the event themselves.
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