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Internal emails reveal Ticketmaster helped scalpers jack up prices, FTC says

arstechnica.com

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Re: Internal emails reveal Ticketmaster helped scalpers jack up prices, FTC says

#11

Post by leetrout »

leakycap wrote: post #4

Hard to care what happens to a company like TicketMaster. As you build your company, ask yourself how they ended up like this. Do you think the founders had this outcome in mind when they started (everyone hating them and seeing them as an evil money grab)? They probably started with a different ethos. A good reminder that what we do can change - we need to instill our values into the basics of everything we build, o…

> Do you think the founders had this outcome in mind when they started?

Maybe not this _exact_ outcome but largely yes I suspect they did. Capitalists rent seeking all the way through their history and if you put money first in any business venture you will always feel pressure to enshitify. See 1994 Pearl Jam vs TM and monopolistic behavior 30 years ago.

Re: Internal emails reveal Ticketmaster helped scalpers jack up prices, FTC says

#12

Post by TheJoeMan »

Not in any way to defend Ticketmaster's unscrupulousness, but my undergraduate university used TM for the student football tickets and we had none of the unfairness, which leads me to agree with the sentiments that TM is actually following the will of the artists / event managers. At school, we could sell our tickets to other students gray-market, and just "transfer" them for "free" in the TM app without issue. They even started out with static QR codes, but decided to enable the "live" updating QR codes due to embarrassments with duplicate ticketers denied entry. So not only is TM to blame, they are the henchmen.

Re: Internal emails reveal Ticketmaster helped scalpers jack up prices, FTC says

#14

Post by hnuser123456 »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #5
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #2

There is no reason that event tickets couldn't be sold similarly to airline seats.

The issue that spawned scalping and Ticketmaster is that musicians want to sell tickets under their market value. There's no analogous issue with airline pricing.

The issue is that scalpers can buy a significant portion of tickets at initial pricing and artificially drive up demand when the event says they're "sold out". Plus, many events like to set low initial prices to try to get money flowing in earlier, and raise prices closer to the day of the event, which makes them a potential "investment" for people who have no plans to attend.

Re: Internal emails reveal Ticketmaster helped scalpers jack up prices, FTC says

#15

Post by yard2010 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #6

We bought $700 tickets to see a show we really wanted to see, but ended up being unable to make it. We tried selling it on Ticketmaster, where you can in theory set your own price, or accept their "best offer". Our best offer was somewhere in the neighborhood of $150, and given that it was the night of the show, we accepted it. We paid $54 per ticket in "processing fees" when purchasing, and paid $50 in more "process…

Their whole business is based on bullying, dark patterns and ripoff, they either go out of business and become homeless or turn out to be the next president of the united states.

Re: Internal emails reveal Ticketmaster helped scalpers jack up prices, FTC says

#16

Post by KumaBear »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #6

We bought $700 tickets to see a show we really wanted to see, but ended up being unable to make it. We tried selling it on Ticketmaster, where you can in theory set your own price, or accept their "best offer". Our best offer was somewhere in the neighborhood of $150, and given that it was the night of the show, we accepted it. We paid $54 per ticket in "processing fees" when purchasing, and paid $50 in more "process…

Solution that might be anti user friendly. Tickets are bought and assigned to a persons name at time of purchase. They can only be refunded at cost and resold at cost to buyers. Release of tickets refunded shall be reposted for resell at a random time after attempting a refund.

This will however allow people to pay for bots that will purchase tickets on their behalf. But I believe a verification system can prevent that from happening if one would like. But the incentives aren’t there to do so.

Re: Internal emails reveal Ticketmaster helped scalpers jack up prices, FTC says

#17

Post by zer00eyz »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #5
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #2

There is no reason that event tickets couldn't be sold similarly to airline seats.

The issue that spawned scalping and Ticketmaster is that musicians want to sell tickets under their market value. There's no analogous issue with airline pricing.

NO

Scalping has existed since forever.

The thing was it was local promoters + local sales (aka criminals) who would get tickets from management (yes thats the artists management) and kick the money back to the artist if they were lucky (if not the management kept it).

Now TM owns the venue, they are the promotor, they are the manager(to an extent) and have full control of the tickets, and the secondary market. The artist is now 100 percent in on the action making fans buy a fan club membership then get "face value" tickets at presale only with expensive meet and greet packages that range from a few hundred bucks to a 1000. An artist can tack on 50k to several 100k doing this at every date/venue.

As for TM's uncharges, most of that is because the artist either demands they do it (my prices are reasonable) making TM the scape goat, or they want a sum that is the total of the door and TM needs to cover venue costs and make profit so that just gets baked in as a "fee".

Just to put a fine point on this. In the old model promoters, venues all of those entities being separate and charging a markup made sense. When TM consolidated they didnt change the markup they just kept the margin...

Re: Internal emails reveal Ticketmaster helped scalpers jack up prices, FTC says

#18

Post by fkyoureadthedoc »

leakycap wrote: post #4

Hard to care what happens to a company like TicketMaster. As you build your company, ask yourself how they ended up like this. Do you think the founders had this outcome in mind when they started (everyone hating them and seeing them as an evil money grab)? They probably started with a different ethos. A good reminder that what we do can change - we need to instill our values into the basics of everything we build, o…

Took my daughter to see something recently. Show was good, venue was fine. Buying the tickets was fast and easy, they were just expensive af scalped tickets.

Re: Internal emails reveal Ticketmaster helped scalpers jack up prices, FTC says

#20

Post by username332211 »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #5
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #2

There is no reason that event tickets couldn't be sold similarly to airline seats.

The issue that spawned scalping and Ticketmaster is that musicians want to sell tickets under their market value. There's no analogous issue with airline pricing.

Worse still, they want to sell it below market value, but they want to be paid as if they were selling tickets at market value.

I remember finding some story about a contract for Ke$ha or Kathy Perry or some other pop-concoction of the previous decade getting leaked (*) , and one of the ways in which the artist got paid was trough a percentage of the tickets to distribute trough unofficial resale channels.

The issue that spawned Ticketmaster is that as a class artists are greedy, but they want to pretend they aren't. Being hated is a vital part of that company's business model.

(*) I think it must have been Ke$ha, as that one was involved in some financial dispute, but I can't find the story right now.

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