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Why scalpers can get tickets

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Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#261

Post by jfengel »

kelnos wrote: post #106

Ignoring how Ticketmaster is complicit in all this... it makes me really sad for humanity that people choose a "job" that is 100% about exploiting people. And that's it entirely legal and "normal" for the most part. A decade ago or so I went on a first date with a woman who was a professional scalper. Unfortunately I didn't have the balls to ask her about the ethics of what she does. (I expect it would have been some…

If it's only the worst .01% of humanity, you're talking about 80,000,000 people on the planet.

The Internet has a remarkable way of introducing you to the absolute dregs. It's like computer security: everything not 100% locked down perfectly will belong to someone else minutes later. And even a gigantic corporation with intense experience handling money cannot lock things down 100%.

Most of humanity is ok. But the parts that suck, suck so hard that on the whole I think it averages out to really bad.

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#262

Post by oehpr »

patrickscoleman wrote: post #247
rs999gti wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple fix then, ban reselling. The artist and TM still get the revenue, but the scalper gets inventory they can't move. What about the fans? Similar to airlines, let people buy standby tickets, at the event, check attendance, if there is space let the stand bys in. TM still gets paid twice, scalper has garbage, and fans get in. What about fans who can't go? Buy the insurance at checkout, if you can't go the insuranc…

Also actual fans sometimes can’t make a show and need to resell their tickets

you have to make tradeoffs. If you want to ban reselling, you ban reselling.

Scalpers locking out fans is a universal concern. How often do you hear the success story of "I can't make the concert so I sold the ticket online". Come on. An industry has propped up. This is small potatoes.

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#263

Post by maeil »

notyourwork wrote: post #132
hyldmo wrote: post #80

I’m not going to speak on how this could be hard to implement in other countries, but in my country selling a ticket above the price it was bought for is illegal, and as a result (maybe there is other factors in in play but) it’s basically a non-issue here

I’ve never heard this, what country?

South Korea too.

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#264

Post by phone8675309 »

rtpg wrote: post #242
josephcsible wrote: post #4

Why do the organizations putting on events like these leave so much money on the table? Why don't they just charge the market-clearing price themselves, leaving no room for scalpers to make any profit?

Because while the point is to make money, the point is not to maximize the earnings for tours. Instead, it's to make enough to make it worthwhile, while giving fans "what they want". Artists care about doing fun/good/cool stuff! This is similar to stuff like auctions to have dinners with certain successful people. Those people have many dinners where they don't ask for a bunch of money from the participant, because t…

The cynical side of me says that they do this to minimize what they have to pay the band for touring - some dodge where perhaps they only pay the band based on what the face value of the tickets are.

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#265

Post by smugcentrist »

mattmaroon wrote: post #237

I have some recent experience in live events and I can tell from the comments here that most people don't understand how the economics work. Don't feel bad, I didn't either until I was involved. It's... confusing. We all think that when Major Band goes on tour, they just rent a bunch of big arenas and sell tickets. If you think that, a lot of the comments about the bands getting paid by TicketMaster make sense, but t…

It would seem that to some extent this ultimately does lead to Major Band getting paid by Ticketmaster though, albeit through indirect means. Let's say a show is going to generate $1M in profit for LiveNation/Ticketmaster because of the fees and the reselling but would only make $250K without, the promoter (who because of monopoly is also the ticket seller) is going to be much more willing and able to offer Major Band a larger payment to get them to perform in the former instance given that they stand to profit much more from the performance.

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#266

Post by nomilk »

josephcsible wrote: post #4

Why do the organizations putting on events like these leave so much money on the table? Why don't they just charge the market-clearing price themselves, leaving no room for scalpers to make any profit?

I was thinking about this recently, and came up with two possible reasons:

1. The enjoyment of attendees can be partly dependent on the enthusiasm of other attendees. Consider the extremes: an audience entirely comprised of people who hardly know the artist, but can afford it Vs an audience comprised of only die-hard fans, irrespective of their ability to afford a ticket. The first has a flat atmosphere, the second, a special one.

2. A simple desire by the artist to make their show available to a cross-section of society (this could be viewed as altruistic, since most other products/services don't usually offer the same thing at a lower price just to help those who can't afford it).

A possible solution to problem 1: If the goal is to ensure that only die-hard fans get the tickets, why not use their spotify/apple music/other histories to work out who's really a fan of that artist? It should be trivial to get a very high degree of accuracy, and would be costly for scalpers to imitate (they'd need a subscription and to listen to random music years in advance).

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#267

Post by charcircuit »

LadyCailin wrote: post #244
charcircuit wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It also is up in the air of the market value is really what people are paying or if it’s being inflated by scalpers Then use some form of a Dutch auction to sell them.

Dutch auction + no reselling, or only reselling at the exact price bought or lower. Otherwise scalpers just buy them all as soon as they’re released, and now they do whatever kind of auction they want, with the (previously) max price as the floor.

>Otherwise scalpers just buy them all as soon as they’re released

Scalpers would end up holding the bag if they did that. If no one is willing to pay $10k for a ticket, but then scalpers buy every ticket for $10k each they aren't going to me able to find anyone to resell the tickets to and will end up losing money.

Anyone can protect themselves from being scalped by just participating in the auction.

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#268

Post by RajT88 »

A fix for some venues: only sell tickets at the door.

Scalpers will have to work for it the old fashioned way then.

This, of course, obviates the need for Ticketmaster (which needs to die in a fire).

Realistically, Ticketmaster has a monopoly because they merged with the biggest artist management company, so if you want big artists you have to contract with them.

The situation will not improve until antitrust enforcement comes into vogue again.

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#269

Post by AnthonyMouse »

costco wrote: post #177
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason SMS verification is popular isn't because it's effective against sybil attacks. It's not. You can get access to phone numbers in bulk for little money. It's because most honest users only have one phone number, which makes it a useful unique ID for tracking the honest users. Anyone using it should immediately be under suspicion of selling you out.

Well, I mean there's no way I can prove this but I think it has more to do with the fact that compared to email verification ($0.002/hotmail address), CAPTCHA ($0.003/reCAPTCHA), it substantially raises account creation costs because real US/EU phone numbers will be at least a couple cents per verification.

There are a bunch of services that put any SMS received by a bunch of phone numbers on a public website, and they change the phone numbers all the time. You can go to any one of them and use it to create an account for free.

Of course, this is another reason why the practice is harmful -- legitimate users with a legitimate desire to be anonymous will do this, and then if you use the number provided for account recovery, someone can steal their account after the number gets recycled. (This also happens to normies when people change their phone number and don't update it with your service; don't use phone numbers for password recovery. The near-100% probability of being reissued is a disaster.)

But what happens at scale, for actual wholesale-level spammers? They get a contact with a phone carrier who lets them use all their unissued numbers. They operate one of these public SMS websites, which not only doesn't cost them money but turns a small profit because of the ad revenue. They do the same thing, but privately, and sell the availability of thousands of phone numbers to other spammers. Then they resell the SIMs to recover the money because they never actually used any of the prepaid data. Which makes offering the service to other spammers cheap, which keeps the price low if you want to be a buyer instead of a seller. The more people who try to do this on their service, the better this scales, because the customer base increases.

It's just not meant for this and the inconvenience and privacy invasion to legitimate users is unreasonable.

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#270

Post by charcircuit »

emodendroket wrote: post #260
charcircuit wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could have it go from $10k to $50 over a single weekend. It's not bad optics if you don't sell out a venue at $10k per ticket.

Having to slash the prices so drastically is also embarrassing and doesn't build hype the way the tickets being instantly sold out everywhere does.

There is nothing embarrassing about a Dutch auction. What's the point of generating hype by selling out tickets? All of the tickets get sold out either way, it's just that now more fans end up with tickets instead of scalpers.
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