281–290 of 397 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Combatting scalping is the easiest thing ever. Just put the name of the attendee on each ticket and if you want to be nice you can have a buyback period until a certain date before the show, where the venue purchases back your ticket if you can't go.
And then what, check the ID of 50k people at the door?
In the past year, I've tried this a few times and there is simply nobody selling tickets near the venues at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Potentially, a big player with money to burn can undercut them I guarantee you that Ticketmaster's pockets are much deeper. They have entrenched themselves. This romantic notion that consumers should strike against situations like this or that smaller players should find edges in are just not realistic to me because of the entrenchment, coercion and scarcity at play here. A very popular band in the 90s tried to fig…
I’m talking about someone like a big venture capital fund or a big bank. Or someone like Saudis. That’s a lucrative field. Ironically, any company doing this will want to take the place of monopoly, not increase competition in the long run.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Combatting scalping is the easiest thing ever. Just put the name of the attendee on each ticket and if you want to be nice you can have a buyback period until a certain date before the show, where the venue purchases back your ticket if you can't go.
And then what, check the ID of 50k people at the door?
resellers really don’t enjoy cc charge backs to pile up on their accounts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's go the other way! Any of these corporate entities that control am entire vertical were produced by the centralizing logic of the US economy and legal landscape. Boeing is but the USG's plane manufacturing division, masquerading as a public company. Live Nation is the defacto ticketing provider. As government (created, controlled) entities, it's entirely reasonable to me to call this a tax.
Boeing is not the only airplane manufacturer in US. If you look how it operates, it runs the government’s civil aviation, not the other way around. FAA has basically trusted Boeing to self-certify everything. It looks like without government interventions the only outcome is total monopolization. It’s really funny that anti-governmental slogans of the ideological fights of the Cold War during which US Government was…
Airframe certification is so costly that nobody's making new ones would be the counterargument re Boeing, but like I said they're a cheap example.
More broadly, "regulatory capture" is another driver of the centralizing black hole at the heart of the USG.
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I think they are referring to the ability to resell your ticket. In the airline model, your ticket is tied to your identity. If you don't want to use it, you get a refund instead of selling it. You can also choose a ticketing agent instead of being forced to use just a single outlet. In the concert model, you (or a complex entity) buys as many tickets as you can get your hands on from the only seller, and if you don'…
No. I'm referring to the fact that I can book the same airline seat through dozens of companies because of the airline GDS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system Why not this but for concert seats?
There isn't a lot of obvious utility in allowing anyone in the world to buy a concert ticket (unless you want speculative resellers in your ecosystem). For people travelling to an event, that's what the will-call window is for, and it requires a matching ID. Whereas airlines cannot reasonably maintain a network capable of selling a ticket to anyone worldwide despite their being a very good set of reasons for that to happen.
This probably also explains why airlines allow independent agents, but no reselling. The original market (pre-internet) required it, but the airlines didn't really want to sacrifice their margin to speculative resellers (scalpers).
Concerts used to be sold in a centralized way (you could buy tickets to a specific show at one of a few authorized venues, in person). This worked fine before the internet, since it meant that fans stood on equal footing with speculative resellers. If I want to scalp tickets, I have to go stand in the rain with the fans, and I can't buy 50 tickets since the sellers won't sell more than a few at a time.
Contextualized with how the different industries were created, we can see why GDS made sense at one point, but doesn't really anymore, and why it would never make sense for event ticketing.
The fees alone are one thing. But the fees that are a percentage of the purchase price are quite another. That transforms them from fees into a tax.
Then tips are taxes as well? Fee is a fee, no matter it is fixed sum of percentage. Same with taxes - they are not always a percentage.
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If I understand correctly Ticketmaster is still the one creating this problem, they demand exclusivity in their contracts which often means the venue has no choice if they want to participate in a large enough market to continue operating. Similarly artists have trouble securing large venues if not participating in their scheme. This is the problem with most 'monopolies', they reach a certain critical mass where they…
Taylor swift is big enough that she could build a venue in each location if she wanted, so that not an issue. If Taylor and a few other large artists gave the middle finger to ticketmaster and basically created their own ticket system, i promise you that they would have enough pull to basically solve this. However, like you said, thats not in their or their labels interest.
It was a hit with their fans, but the problem is that only so many acts have the ability to do so (and as you say - it's actually not in their best fiscal interest, so you're going to self-select even further).
Ticketmaster willingly plays the bad guy role, and makes a fuck ton of money in the process.
That said, the vertical integration it has with Live Nation should be considered a monopoly, and trust-busted as such.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: kill the secondary market. Live nation should be broken up but a big driver of cost is the scalpers/hedgers who buy out everything and put it on StubHub. Just make all sales final. Check IDs at the door, or use technology to speed up identity verification (mail out rfids, etc). Sucks if you get sick or whatever, just like many things in life where you cancel last minute. It’…
> a big driver of cost is the scalpers/hedgers who buy out everything and put it on StubHub Not true. About "10% of [performing arts] tickets sold in the primary market are later re-sold by ticket scalpers," increasing to "20-30% of top-tiered seats" [1]. Banning scalping increases attendance but results in "fewer distinct productions...shown in metropolitan areas or states that require ticket resellers to be license…