261–270 of 285 posts
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The answer is mentioned in the article. Not all concerts want only people with means to attend. The venue might want to be accessible to low-income members of the community, or it might be a benefit concert, with free tickets and a donation drive.
What's wrong with giving out some free tickets to low income members of the community?
I work professionally in ticketing with ticket sales system. The problem with scalpers is completely solved, and the only reason why scalpers can operate is because the artists and venues deliberately allow for it. It's incredibly easy to remove scalpers: Sell each ticket with a name attached, ask for ID at the door. That's it. Whatever hacker argument against this you are thinking up right in this moment, it is just…
I work professionally in ticketing with ticket sales system. The problem with scalpers is completely solved, and the only reason why scalpers can operate is because the artists and venues deliberately allow for it. It's incredibly easy to remove scalpers: Sell each ticket with a name attached, ask for ID at the door. That's it. Whatever hacker argument against this you are thinking up right in this moment, it is just…
Implementing costs that not all parties want is tradeoff, not a solution.
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Implementing costs that not all parties want is tradeoff, not a solution.
What costs are you talking about?
Scalpers have helped me out several times when I didn’t hear about an event until the last minute, so I don’t always think of them as an enemy to eliminate.
Patio11 has a piece on how, often, the optimum amount of fraud is not 0. Scalpers aren’t exactly that but informs the discussion.
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>> 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. No, it's obvious. Anyone that has to choose between getting $100 right now or $100 trickled in over months would opt for it right now for many reasons (inflation, the ability it invest it, the ability to use if it needed for unexpected situation, etc). Wanting events to be popula…
> No, it's obvious. Anyone that has to choose between getting $100 right now or $100 trickled in over months would opt for it right now for many reasons (inflation, the ability it invest it, the ability to use if it needed for unexpected situation, etc). I disagree? Even if your conclusion is somehow true, it seems in no way obvious, and so far as I can the reasoning doesn't make sense. You've left out two crucial fa…
The actual situation is that it's $100 now or maybe $110 later or even $90 later, because you don't know what the market is going to do. That is the risk the resellers are taking on. The demand for the product is not static. At the time of sale, a lot of effort goes into making the artist appealing and interesting to audiences so they are more interested in buying a ticket.
> The payer is can factor in the time value of money, inflation, etc. just like you do; why would they completely ignore that and blindly pay the same amount they would at two different points in time?
Of course customers would prefer to pay at the last possible moment. With a static inventory that's released all at once (which isn't really how it's done most times now) they don't really have that luxury for popular events, resellers or not.
My point is that there's no guarantee the value of tickets. Depending on the event, they often reduce in cost. Selling a large amount early reduces risk exposure. These days there's a bit of everything going on, and usually there are certain amounts of inventory released initially, and more come in clumps over time, possibly at different prices depending on demand and what the secondary market looks like, as well as there being a subset of inventory from the very beginning that has dynamic pricing to respond quickly to market conditions and serve some of the need of the secondary market. As Ticketmaster started tun run their own secondary market they quickly utilized the data that gave them to change how they functioned on the primary market.
> We're not talking about free money, we're talking about payment in exchange for work. You're taking out a loan that comes with obligations. ... And I don't know about you, but I sure as heck don't enjoy being perpetually in debt to someone. I'm not saying it's bad if you're fine with it, I'm saying it doesn't seem remotely true that everyone is fine with it.
Importantly, there are many links in this chain, and people taking their cut along the way (although less than there used to be since Live Nation /Ticketmaster has serves the role of multiple parties in many cases). This is how the industry works at the large tour level. You contract for a lot of work over a long period, sometimes more than a year, and then proceed to execute on that plan. As someone that gets a normal paycheck, I admit it's not that appealing to me either, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking it's strange. All sorts of small businesses work on this idea, and when you're doing fixed cost work, you would rather have the money up front, as it allows for more options. Any tradesperson that does large projects has to deal with this to a lesser degree. General contractors, electricians, etc. It's a normal part of contract based work. Most people are forced into what the industry has settled on as acceptable practices and can't dictate difference, so for the vast majority "if you're fine with it" is a foregone conclusion because if you're not you've probably found some other way to make a living.
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>> 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. No, it's obvious. Anyone that has to choose between getting $100 right now or $100 trickled in over months would opt for it right now for many reasons (inflation, the ability it invest it, the ability to use if it needed for unexpected situation, etc). Wanting events to be popula…
If it’s a normal function then we sure go through a whole lot of effort to make sure a human and not a python script is buying tickets. If it’s normal, why doesn't the industry embrace it wholesale?
- Ticketmaster is known to add additional fees to tickets which are actually given in part or in whole to the artist or venue, allowing customers to blame Ticketmaster for high ticket prices so Artists can claim they wanted cheaper tickets that were only $25 (but are actually $40 when you get to the final check out). This has been covered by the major news outlets a few different times and discussed here, so shouldn't be hard to find information on.
- Ticketmaster runs their own secondary exchange now, which verified re-issuing of digital tickets out of their own back-end and guaranteed entry. Can't embrace it much more than that. They get a cut of the sale price on the secondary exchange like all the exchanges do.
- Ticketmaster also reserves a portion of their tickets for dynamic pricing and their price will adjust on the fly during the initial sale period based on demand and what they see them showing up on the resale market as (some tickets show up on the resale market almost immediately).
- Artists want to side with their fans, or at a minimum appear to side with them. That means releasing tickets for "cheap" or at least in a way they can claim they did. Some artists care, some pay lip service. Kid Rock actually seemed to care, as he would play Detroit for seven consecutive days or more to make sure his cheap tickets stayed cheap by providing enough supply that demand was never too high, at least for most seats. I'm sure he would rather not do such a grueling schedule though, which is why he's always been very active trying to get legislature passed targeting resellers.
To me, having worked in this industry in the past, it's always been very clear that the industry does embrace the secondary market, to a degree, while also using it as a convenient scapegoat. If the secondary markets were to be shut down tomorrow, everyone would find at least some aspect of that worse than the current status quo. Some might ultimately find is better, some worse, but it's not nearly as simple as secondary markets just being a problem (for example, they're not just rent-seeking, they're offloading risk and providing liquidity).
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>> 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. No, it's obvious. Anyone that has to choose between getting $100 right now or $100 trickled in over months would opt for it right now for many reasons (inflation, the ability it invest it, the ability to use if it needed for unexpected situation, etc). Wanting events to be popula…
> No, it's obvious. Anyone that has to choose between getting $100 right now or $100 trickled in over months would opt for it right now... As usual, there are real life edge cases where folks don’t choose just on what makes the most sense financially. Many teachers work less than 52 weeks a year but choose to have their pay distributed over 52 weeks.
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What costs are you talking about?
Loss of privacy, slowdown at the entrance, employee training on validation, not being able to hand a ticket to a friend later (you mentioned). Other things I’ve forgotten but others have mentioned on this page. Scalpers have helped me out several times when I didn’t hear about an event until the last minute, so I don’t always think of them as an enemy to eliminate. Patio11 has a piece on how, often, the optimum amoun…
Your name is on your bus card also, and your airline ticket, but I don't hear anybody complaining about loss of privacy for that.
Employee training on validation? They look at the ID and see if the name matches the name on the ticket. Anybody can do that without any training.
> Scalpers have helped me out several times when I didn’t hear about an event until the last minute, so I don’t always think of them as an enemy to eliminate.
They helped you by screwing over other people. You do not have higher value than any other person. Besides, organizers can save expensive last-minute tickets without needing scalpers.
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Loss of privacy, slowdown at the entrance, employee training on validation, not being able to hand a ticket to a friend later (you mentioned). Other things I’ve forgotten but others have mentioned on this page. Scalpers have helped me out several times when I didn’t hear about an event until the last minute, so I don’t always think of them as an enemy to eliminate. Patio11 has a piece on how, often, the optimum amoun…
Loss of privacy? That your name is on your ticket? Then don't go, or reach out to the organizers and let them know you are a person who needs special protection and they will accommodate you and your entourage. Your name is on your bus card also, and your airline ticket, but I don't hear anybody complaining about loss of privacy for that. Employee training on validation? They look at the ID and see if the name matche…
I understand TM has a lot of power, but they do have to keep the average consumer on board.
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> but it will definitely fix the scalpers problem Nobody wants to fix the scalpers problem because, to the Ticketmaster monopoly, scalpers aren't a problem . The Ticketmaster monopoly values known, consistent, derisked revenue over possible lottery ticket windfalls with the possibility of complete wipeout. Scalpers do exactly that. Scalpers are only a problem to fans. And scalpers are only a problem online because th…
Let’s put busting the ticketmaster monopoly to the side for a second, and look at the issue regardless of players If you want to remove scalpers, just make sure tickets are non-transferrable and run an auction for price discovery. I built it on the blockchain years ago.
If I spend $nnn on a ticket, there's some reassurance that if I get sick/called into a work or family emergency I can throw the ticket on Craigslist or some officially-sanctioned double-dipping scheme and at least get some of my expenditure back.
How much cheaper does it have to be to compensate for greater risk?