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Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

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Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#241

Post by dataflow »

aczerepinski wrote: post #88
827a wrote: post #5

For those against this: I'm curious to hear your take on how you'd stop/mitigate scalping.

The only real solutions to scalping are to impact supply/demand by increasing supply (extra show in each city) or lower demand (raise prices). As a jazz fan I don’t know much about shows that sell out and attract scalpers, but I’m curious why the artists don’t double prices to cut out middlemen.

> by increasing supply

Er, I don't feel like you're thinking of what "supply" means here. We can't clone humans (yet). How many times do you expect a singer to sing in each city in a tour?

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#242

Post by ssl-3 »

crazygringo wrote: post #135
HDThoreaun wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with scalping is scale. A single person reselling a single ticket is completely fine, because that is not a viable business model for enough people to distort the market. Just limit the number of tickets someone can buy to 3-5.

A scalper just pretends to be 200 different people. With 200 different emails and 200 different credit cards. Limiting the number of tickets someone can buy doesn't protect against scalping.

Or they just hire other people to move tickets around.

It works at a small scale: 5 people, 5 tickets each, and $100 profit on each seat after everyone else gets paid? That's not so hard to keep track of, and it brings in $2,500.

It also works at a larger scale: 50 people. 5 tickets each, and $100 profit on each seat? Keeping that all in-line is definitely sounding like Real Work, but it also sounds like a tax-free $25,000.

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#243

Post by 9rx »

mckn1ght wrote: post #194
raincole wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the libertarians on this. Scalping isn't an issue. People who are willing to pay more for tickets should get them. Concert tickets are not basic needs like housing or food. If there is room for arbitrage (which is what scalping really is) then the tickets are too cheap in the first place.

I agree with supply and demand dictating the price on scarce items. I don’t agree with letting middlemen butt in and drive the price up by exacerbating the scarcity, and making a profit with no value add to the market.

> no value add to the market.

Markets are more efficient than you give them credit for. If there was no value-add it wouldn't happen. The value-add is that the scalpers take the risk and hassle off of the artist/venue. They can instantly sell out and then get back to worrying about the actual performance. Selling the tickets at their fair market value initially sounds good in theory, but then you have to spend weeks and months trying to get them sold, which is not a core competency a musical artist really wants to have. It is advantageous to underprice and know that you are sold out upfront and let someone else deal with the slog.

It's much the same as why wholesalers sell to Walmart for pennies on the dollar instead of trying to capture the retail market themselves. Selling direct to retail seems like a good idea... until you have to do it and realize you'd rather get back to what it is you're actually good at producing.

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#244

Post by ssl-3 »

lbreakjai wrote: post #133
ascorbic wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would make sense if they were an airline and only need to maximise profits. An artist – even one who really wants to make as much money as they can – still needs to think about other things, like atmosphere (that gig with one very rich person won't be much fun), and happy fans. If she sells all tickets at $10k each then maybe she'd clear the market, but she'd piss off a lot of fans, so maybe there won't be as mu…

There's a very easy solution. Put the name of the owner on the ticket. Limit the number of tickets per person. Verify the identity before entering the premises. Allow the resale at face value via the organiser's platform. Allow to resell your ticket at face value to a specific person, for the case where the friend who bought the tickets six months ago is suddenly sick. I don't know why this is being made to look like…

> Allow to resell your ticket at face value to a specific person, for the case where the friend who bought the tickets six months ago is suddenly sick.

This allows scalping.

And then, since scalping is not prevented, all that these measures really accomplish is to theatrically increase the burden for everyone else.

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#245

Post by dataflow »

iamalizard wrote: post #178
csb6 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want view ticket pricing as a pure economics problem (it is not), consider that live shows are also a way to build up and expand a fanbase. If only a handful of rich people (or people who bought tickets the second they went on sale) are at your show, you are not expanding your audience. Since streaming has decimated most artists' income from record sales, it makes sense to try and build a large fanbase who wil…

I understand what you're saying but it still mostly an issue for the artist - building a fan base. Otherwise if you have X amount of tickets to be distributed, you'll get X people at the venue, at most. Since the same number of people will show up, it's a matter of distribution. What should the distribution be? You, and many others, say it shouldn't be the richest people, or more accurately those who'd pay the highes…

> What should the distribution be? You, and many others, say it shouldn't be the richest people, or more accurately those who'd pay the highest price for the ticket. What about the poorest people, if we're talking about fairness? Should we have a quota for homeless people, too? For people of certain ethnicities, political views, sexualities, etc.?

Geez. It is really not that hard to imagine a better outcome here.

A reasonable distribution distribution could be whatever is the result of the following: (a) each seat is priced by the artist/venue/whatever however they wish, and (b) everyone who genuinely intends to attend the concert themselves and/or is purchasing on behalf of another known person whom they believe would genuinely attend the concert themselves gets an equal opportunity to purchase the tickets at the time of release.

How you achieve such an outcome is an interesting question with lots of possible approaches, but what outcome would be adequate to achieve than the status quo really isn't some sort of unanswerable question.

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#246

Post by ssl-3 »

9rx wrote: post #243
mckn1ght wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with supply and demand dictating the price on scarce items. I don’t agree with letting middlemen butt in and drive the price up by exacerbating the scarcity, and making a profit with no value add to the market.

> no value add to the market. Markets are more efficient than you give them credit for. If there was no value-add it wouldn't happen. The value-add is that the scalpers take the risk and hassle off of the artist/venue. They can instantly sell out and then get back to worrying about the actual performance. Selling the tickets at their fair market value initially sounds good in theory, but then you have to spend weeks…

Yeah, it's just arbitrage.

They're just profiting from the difference between the cost of the item and what people are willing to pay for an item. Simple market economics, right?

As should be obvious: Since it can be explained by capitalism and we even have a nice neat concise word with which to describe it, then there's nothing to hate there. /s

> It's much the same as why wholesalers sell to Walmart for pennies on the dollar instead of trying to capture the retail market themselves. Selling direct to retail sounds good... until you have to do it and realize you'd rather get back to what it is you're actually good at.

It is not the same. Unlike Wal-Mart, scalpers do not buy truckloads of tickets at wholesale prices. They instead buy truckloads of tickets at retail prices -- and then increase the price even more.

And unlike a manufacturer like Proctor & Gamble (with zero or very limited direct-to-consumer sales), the combination of venue, artist, and ticket broker (eg Ticketmaster) is already equipped to handle direct consumer sales. They're quite good at doing so and their entire business model revolves around maintaining this ability.

The scalper is just an added, unnecessary layer. If scalpers somehow disappeared completely today, then yesterday's sell-out shows will still be sell-out shows tomorrow.

Scalpers provide zero value to the transaction.

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#247

Post by riffraff »

crazygringo wrote: post #41

Honestly, this could turn out to be a really great thing. When artists become popular, they often complain that the people they are making their music for, their biggest fans, tend to be the people least able to afford the concert tickets. The artists are often totally willing to set aside a chunk of tickets at a much cheaper price, but they need to be able to guarantee that these tickets aren't just purchased by sca…

Isn't scalpers a solved problem with nominal tickets?

I'm pretty sure some bands were doing this a decade ago.

Even UEFA, among the most corrupt organizations in the world, does this for football tickets, you can buy 2 tickets and can change one name exactly once or sell them back to the organization.

At this point if you allow scalpers it's a decision not a technical problem.

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#248

Post by etrautmann »

4d4m wrote: post #225
crazygringo wrote: post #41

Honestly, this could turn out to be a really great thing. When artists become popular, they often complain that the people they are making their music for, their biggest fans, tend to be the people least able to afford the concert tickets. The artists are often totally willing to set aside a chunk of tickets at a much cheaper price, but they need to be able to guarantee that these tickets aren't just purchased by sca…

Actually the artists set aside tickets specifically for resale. At a company i worked at we did this on behalf of the artists and content-rightsholders directly to maximize their profit. Your favorite artist loves money and resale more than affordability

How does resale help the artist? By inflating expectations for ticket prices for the next show?

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#249

Post by oefrha »

paxys wrote: post #37
827a wrote: post #5

For those against this: I'm curious to hear your take on how you'd stop/mitigate scalping.

There are many solutions. For example - allow ticket resale only through the official platform and cap it at the original sale price. Another approach - check IDs at the door and only let the original ticket purchaser through. The real problem is that scalping is insanely profitable for Ticketmaster & co. They take a cut of the original sale and every subsequent transfer, most of them at highly inflated prices, from…

> allow ticket resale only through the official platform and cap it at the original sale price.

That obviously doesn’t work because money can still change hands outside the official platform, unless you mean resale to a random buyer selected by the platform, in which case the resale is not terribly different from a refund and restock for any event where scalping is a problem.

You simply can’t stop scalping if you allow resale. Heck, people even attempt to scalp things where there’s no official resale mechanism (e.g. I change my id at this second, you immediately change yours).

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#250

Post by nomilk »

So long as something can be bought for x and sold for y (where y>x) there'll be an economic incentive to do so.

So instead of scalpers trying to simply get to the front of the queue, they'll be automating plays on spotify (hogging bandwidth, something spotify is already stingy with), and 'sharing' tracks with others, meaning it incentivises spam and fake activity.

Probably not a big issue to be fair, and if it only works legitimately 10% of the time it's still a win.

But if there's one company that can take a decent idea and execute poorly, it's Spotify.

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