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CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

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Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#231

Post by lentil_soup »

majani wrote: post #227
lentil_soup wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that it reduces everything including culture to just one metric, money. Are you a fan of a band? can't go because you got outsold by some rich person that maybe cares or maybe not, it doesn't matter, they just have more money that you. The space at a concert is limited so some form filtering will have to happen, but if the only metric is market price that's a pretty sad society specially when we're talking about cult…

Two big leaps in your answer: 1. that the person paying more is rich and 2. that the person paying more likely doesn't care about the band The way I see it, it is also highly likely that the person paying more is of average income and just convinced themselves to pay more because they are superfans

ah, I tried to avoid that leap with the "it doesn't matter" but probably didn't come across properly.

The point I'm making is that market value reduces the problem to just money which is being taunted as a magic solution, which might work in some cases but market value doesn't exist in a vacuum and it has side effects. As the topic being discussed is culture it introduces a lot of biases into society that I would find problematic.

Also, if we want to talk in pure capitalist terms, Ticketmaster is already a monopoly of sorts in the music buisiness, there's no "market value" if there's no pressure to lower prices, they can make the experience as bad as possible without repercussions other than people not going to concerts anymore which as a society would suck

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#232

Post by sokoloff »

edoceo wrote: post #110
sokoloff wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely selling concessions, parking, and merch is a significant source of income for someone associated with the concert, game, or other event.

The way rents/expenses are, an $8 pint at your local has better margin than a $18 pint at the venue.

That seems to be confusing gross and net margin. When considering a question like “who cares if a ticket buyer ends up showing up?” that’s a marginal consumption question and the gross margin applies.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#233

Post by whoisthemachine »

dbspin wrote: post #216
vasco wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Artists charge what they get told to charge. And ticketmaster owns all the venues so if you want to play anywhere, you're going to list at whatever prices the venue lists artists of your level. Humans are all statistically similar for large cohorts. Artists want money as much as other people, specially the ones playing big venues. First thing to help would be to break up the venue monopoly that ticketmaster created.

The vast majority, hard to quantify, but I'd guess well over 99% of professional musicians (certainly outside the US) never play a ticketmaster venue. They're not operating at that scale. When they tour it's at smaller venues - there are orders of magnitude more small bars and dedicated venues not owned by ticket master. > Artists want money as much as other people, specially the ones playing big venues. This is exac…

> The vast majority, hard to quantify, but I'd guess well over 99% of professional musicians (certainly outside the US) never play a ticketmaster venue. They're not operating at that scale. When they tour it's at smaller venues - there are orders of magnitude more small bars and dedicated venues not owned by ticket master.

This is probably true, but I'm guessing smaller artists are also at much lower risk of scalpers (at least my anecdata backs that up) so probably much less applicable to the problem at hand.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#234

Post by whoisthemachine »

stavros wrote: post #134
kassner wrote: post #119

I can’t claim I’m the first one to think about this, but every time Ticketmaster shows up on HN I keep coming back to this idea: Sell the tickets with regressive price based on time. Sales starts say 2 months before event, initial price is truly exorbitant, say one million dollars. Price decreases linearly down to zero (or true cost price). At any point, people can see current price and the seats left. Now every pote…

The scalper problem is a mispricing problem: Scalpers are just arbitrageurs because ticket prices are artificially very low. If you want to fix that, you need to ask yourself "why are ticket prices artificially very low?" first. The answer probably isn't "artists/venues like leaving money on the table".

Sometimes you leave money on the table to increase demand.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#235

Post by Spooky23 »

kassner wrote: post #119

I can’t claim I’m the first one to think about this, but every time Ticketmaster shows up on HN I keep coming back to this idea: Sell the tickets with regressive price based on time. Sales starts say 2 months before event, initial price is truly exorbitant, say one million dollars. Price decreases linearly down to zero (or true cost price). At any point, people can see current price and the seats left. Now every pote…

Don’t worry, there’s no greedy, rent-seeking rock that hasn’t been overturned. Your idea would cost them way too much money. Since we’ve embraced scalping as a legal business model, Ticketmaster makes money on all sides of most transactions. It’s in their interest to for you to have maximum anxiety and buy as early as possible to increase the odds that you’ll resell.

The bots and scrapers aren’t black hat, Ticketmaster makes some nominal effort to “stop them”, but somehow those pesky hackers manage to figure out how to make Ticketmaster more money. Ticketmaster is adept at making the purchase experience high friction and difficult, so those bots must be really clever. (Lol)

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#236

Post by pornel »

EGreg wrote: post #225
rwmj wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ticket sellers can easily run their operations using a standard relational database. A blockchain solves no problem they have.

That’s not true. The problem of whether the person actually has the money for the ticket. If it’s done by credit card then you have the problem of refunding so many people and getting a bad reputation with the middleman processor. See, unlike a blockchain, that middleman has policies that penalize legitimate price discovery mechanisms like auctions. So you have to take risks for no reason other than to appease a midd…

That's just an overcomplicated way of doing pre-authorization.

Talk about decentralisation and anti-deplatforming makes no sense here. Concerts are a physical thing happening in the real world, organized by selected "centralized" entities. Venues can refuse to host an artist. Artist can "rug pull" by refusing to host. Imaginary tokens can't do anything about that, and we already have laws, contracts, and currencies that have been dealing with that for as long as these things existed.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#237

Post by Spooky23 »

bko wrote: post #161
stavros wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scalper problem is a mispricing problem: Scalpers are just arbitrageurs because ticket prices are artificially very low. If you want to fix that, you need to ask yourself "why are ticket prices artificially very low?" first. The answer probably isn't "artists/venues like leaving money on the table".

Ticketmaster has it's own resale platform. It's able to double dip. They basically say tickets are relatively cheap and scalpers are the bad guys. They encourage the scalpers. Then they can resell using their own resale platform and they get fees on top of that. The fees on re-sellers are crazy, and they take fees from both seller and buyer. Seller Side: List price: $100 StubHub seller fee (15%): -$15 Seller receives…

Ticketing is like dating websites, many are affiliated in various ways. Ticketmaster doesn’t down StubHub… Livenation (the company that owns them), and operates most of the venues, does. They are structured to have nominal competition to meet competitive bidding requirements for .gov owned facilities.

Long ago I worked for a company that did some novel work in the ticketing and contained reservation space. We didn’t do resale due to the nature of the product, but the fees we extracted were bonkers - the facilities operators basically paid a nominal amount to stand up the platform, and we derived all (and it was a lot of) revenue from the customer - often on a white label basis.

Long story short, Ticketmaster elbowed in and bought the company and the tech once we had traction. That pattern holds in many similar business models.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#238

Post by dataflow »

toast0 wrote: post #183
theamk wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's obviously preferable to get paid for the entire tour on the day it's announced it's only obvious to "private equity" type people. There is energy in the concerts - and a lot of people go to live shows for that. Otherwise, one would listen to the recording / watch music videos instead - it is cheaper and the seats are nicer too. If the seats are half-empty, or only full of people who are ready to pay exorbitant…

>> it's obviously preferable to get paid for the entire tour on the day it's announced > it's only obvious to "private equity" type people. I mean, who wouldn't look at their current expenses, look at their future cashflow, and be like hey, it would sure be nice to be paid today for work I'll do over the next year? Venues need deposits (maybe), transportation needs deposits, set builders need materials, marketing nee…

> I mean, who wouldn't look at their current expenses, look at their future cashflow, and be like hey, it would sure be nice to be paid today for work I'll do over the next year? Venues need deposits (maybe), transportation needs deposits, set builders need materials, marketing needs budget, merchandise production needs to pay vendors, etc. Insurance needs to be purchased.

This sounds just like taking out a loan. That money isn't really yours until you do the work. How different is the outcome here vs. taking out a loan for the same purpose, then? Is it cheaper?

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#239

Post by bugtodiffer »

kassner wrote: post #119

I can’t claim I’m the first one to think about this, but every time Ticketmaster shows up on HN I keep coming back to this idea: Sell the tickets with regressive price based on time. Sales starts say 2 months before event, initial price is truly exorbitant, say one million dollars. Price decreases linearly down to zero (or true cost price). At any point, people can see current price and the seats left. Now every pote…

Or maybe stop all the bullshit and sell the tickets at their real value.

Ticketmaster should be destroyed!

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#240

Post by bugtodiffer »

Spooky23 wrote: post #235
kassner wrote: post #119

I can’t claim I’m the first one to think about this, but every time Ticketmaster shows up on HN I keep coming back to this idea: Sell the tickets with regressive price based on time. Sales starts say 2 months before event, initial price is truly exorbitant, say one million dollars. Price decreases linearly down to zero (or true cost price). At any point, people can see current price and the seats left. Now every pote…

Don’t worry, there’s no greedy, rent-seeking rock that hasn’t been overturned. Your idea would cost them way too much money. Since we’ve embraced scalping as a legal business model, Ticketmaster makes money on all sides of most transactions. It’s in their interest to for you to have maximum anxiety and buy as early as possible to increase the odds that you’ll resell. The bots and scrapers aren’t black hat, Ticketmast…

Ticketmaster is reselling themselves, so they only prevent other peoples bots lol
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