How to sell tickets fairly

“nothing but time”

Time is expensive though…

It's not the ticket system that is broken; it's the people.

The problem with stadium tours is that 95 percent or more of the seats are awful. They provide an extremely poor concert experience.

The sound is very bad for most of the audience. Many technological innovations in stadium sound have tried to address this, but the underlying physics has been resistant to an acceptable solution.

The visuals are even worse. An enormous fraction of the audience cannot resolve the headliner on stage as a result of the size of the performer and the distance to the viewer. The visuals then devolve to the viewers ability to see an enormous television screen.

So why would anyone want to go to a stadium show, if not for the visuals and the audio?

It comes down to human competitiveness. Bragging rights. Ingesting mass media nonsense about how a product or experience will make one feel, and then disgorging it to a peer group as a method of creating an artificial distinction between the "haves" and the "have-nots".

Taylor Swift, in particular, has been a genius at creating hysteria among her fans. They have ingested the idea that, if Taylor is in town, and you are not there, then you are a resident of the outer, miserable, darkness.

The truth, however, is that if you attend a stadium show, the only positive aspect is that you "were there". You will not see, hear, or in any meaningful way, experience the object of your hysteria. You will be packed into a seat with a group of strangers also experiencing a mass-media induced mental derangement.

The foregoing may lead you to believe that I am not a fan, but you would be wrong. My opinion was formed by the experience of going to all the Taylor Swift stadium tours, up to a certain point.

What changed was that I stopped fighting Ticketmaster at one point. I opted out and did not buy a ticket. However, I still wanted to go to the show. All seats were prohibitively expensive on the secondary market; good seats, even more so.

There were two shows in my city on subsequent nights. The first night, I watched prices on the scalper sites and I discovered that, in the last few minutes before the start time of the show, prices for even the best seats tumbled dramatically.

This was simple economics; unsold seats are a cost that subtracts from overall profit. It makes sense to dump them for any amount, even at a loss.

The second night, I waited until the price for a single front-row seat fell below the original price of the least expensive seat anywhere. I bought it, printed my ticket, and went to the show.

This was a transformative experience because I was literally a few metres from the stage. I could get out of my seat and stand by the barricades and see and hear as if the show was at at my neighbourhood folk club or an open mic night. I then turned around, with Taylor directly behind me, and I could see the view of a packed stadium waving lights and singing along, just like what those on stage would see.

I learned the difference between what the few who had the money or influence to obtain the best seats experience, and what the great majority of stadium show concert-goers endure.

I was cured. I have never, since that day, had any desire to attend a stadium show or buy a ticket for a standard seat in any large venue.

Unfortunately, it isn't really practical to educate a significant fraction of fans by demonstrating this.

Maybe there is a technological solution, though. If we could arrange for people to have a feed from a front row observer in fully immersive VR, we could perhaps recreate enough of the experience that the rush to purchase a grossly substandard product would diminish.

There are probably significant economic forces that would oppose this (Ticketmaster, obviously) because education is often the enemy of mass-market driven capitalism.

The longer-term solution is probably to recognize that the innate social behaviour of humans has been exploited to our total destruction by those who would hoard all wealth for themselves, and to begin another great eugenics experiment: breeding selfishness, conflict and the tendency to self-destructive herd behaviour out of the human genome, But that is beyond the scope of this discussion.

Everything in the world discriminates against some class of people. Taylor Swift is optimizing for "verified fans" - i.e., people who will actively share how big of fans they are. It's just good business, because she's developing a lifetime customer base. Someone will need to attend the "final tours" she gives when she's 60, 70, 80. Also, Taylor Swift fandom is one of the most mainstream fandoms I can think of - there's little risk of a severe reputational risk for admitting it.

I don't understands how that system would help, can't you have multiple bank accounts? Except if all the banks transfer some strong common identifier like the social security number (and that sound pretty dangerous to share). Open 5 accounts in 5 different banks (I'm pretty sure you could even do it all at the same bank), and there you go... you will exist, but Ticketmaster would have no idea whether you are 5 different deanc or all the same one.

> I can't think of a better way to measure desire than willingness to spend a long time waiting in line.

Doesn't this have the same problem as using money? Some people have a lot less time to wait in line, just like some people have a lot less money to spend on tickets