441–450 of 737 posts
I'd also like to highlight another bad practice by Ticketmaster. When you purchase a ticket from them and resell it on their marketplace, once someone purchases it, they(Ticketmaster) hold your funds and only give you the money ~7-14 business days after the event is over. They say this is to verify the validity of the ticket. On the buyer side, you purchase the ticket from the marketplace and it gets added to your ac…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting how the real problem here is that our economic system has no way to sell a product at what the seller will bear, only what the buyer will bear. I think this is a fascinating feature, a lot of artists would be more than happy to make $X for a show so that their fans can come see them. The problem ends up that a free market has no mechanism for that, the artist can sell the tickets such that they end u…
The scalper provides no value to the market The scalper allows the devoted fan who is gladly willing to pay $X+N to actually get a ticket rather than having to wake up at 6am and repeatedly refresh the site and probably still not get one. I find market failures like this fascinating because it really shows the limits of how "free" markets operate. How would central planning handle this better? There are more people w…
You can be interested in market failures without proposing an alternative. Complex systems are fascinating and their boundaries and failure conditions are fascinating. That’s all I’m talking about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>We check IDs for flights because airline yield management demands that there be no resale, or business travelers would be traveling on leisure fares. Sorry, what? Surely business travelers pay more just by virtue of traveling by business class? Or, if travel through business portals was consistently significantly more expensive than just buying the ticket directly on the airline's website, businesses would just star…
Yeah, I don't think that's right either. They don't check your ID at the gate, it's just TSA that checks your id (if you have one).
Back in the old days, sales like this were common. No ID checks, non-passengers allowed through security, and the classified ads in newspapers would say “round-trip coach ticket May 8-12 JFK to SFO, male name, call 212-555-1234”. So you met them, got your paper ticket, got a boarding pass at the counter or the gate, and flew.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Flying requires an ID. Attending a concert should not. Any solution that is solved by "simple, just require an ID" is not a solution.
that's really just an opinion. and I'd argue that if people really care about a fair and sustainable concert going, given how ridiculous the live event situation is, you'd support pretty common and standard requirements like ID to be shown. as others said: ID is already required to validate age in many events/venues
Can no longer pay cash, have a paper ticket, be anonymous. Those are much more important to me than preventing scalping.
Scalpers out front have provided a valuable service to me a dozen times over the years, when I didn’t plan well.
Any solution (I didn’t ask for) that turns concerts in an international flight experience means they are dead to me.
Age was traditionally checked separately and manually. Not put into a database to be bought and sold and breached.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't trust your OS to sandbox it? With a threat model like that, I wouldn't use any apps other than the browser
I mean, that horse has already bolted.. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/ticketmaster-hac...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our options shouldn’t be see no concerts from successful musicians or pay monopoly pricing. This is something government should solve.
Expecting the US government to properly handle monopolies and anti-trust issues is a fool's errand. It's like saying the US government should solve the issue of gun proliferation in the US: it's simply not going to, in our lifetimes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting how the real problem here is that our economic system has no way to sell a product at what the seller will bear, only what the buyer will bear. I think this is a fascinating feature, a lot of artists would be more than happy to make $X for a show so that their fans can come see them. The problem ends up that a free market has no mechanism for that, the artist can sell the tickets such that they end u…
People don't understand that the free market system is essentially a law of physics. You saying that a producer/seller of a limited good (in this case, space in a concert venue) cannot choose their own price is true, like it's also true that a person can't decide whether gravity pulls them down or not. You explained it pretty well yourself, the effect of supply and demand is unavoidable
I want to sell those apples for $1 each. There’s plenty of apples to satisfy the demand. But let’s say that the market would bear a higher price, people would love to buy apples for $1 but due to a love of apples would be willing to pay up to $5.
In that scenario, the arbitrage opportunity still exists. Apple scalpers knowing that people would be willing to pay up to $5 would want to buy up lots of cheap apples and make the $4 profit that I’m leaving on the table for themselves.
And there’s just nothing we can do about it. I think we’d say that when the equilibrium price of $5 is met that the market is efficient but it’s a market where the producer of the good can fully satisfy the demand of the market for $X and yet the consumers have to pay $5X and this arbitragers get $4X.
It’s just interesting is all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> tickets are currently sold under the wrong terms, which encourages scalping The incentive to scalp arises from the likelihood that a ticket will be worth more in the future (buy low, sell high) and that future worth is established by scarcity (sold out shows). To help eliminate this likelihood, the original price (face value) needs to decrease over time, ideally in such a way that the final original ticket sale occ…
This is terrible - right now the random 17 year old middle-class kid at least has a small chance of getting a somewhat reasonably priced ticket to a popular show. In your model, they have zero chance. Auction models are good for price discovery but this isn’t a price discovery problem, it is a supply problem. Believe it or not, artists don’t always want to maximize revenue from a ticket, they want fans from lower inc…
If face value is constant over time (i.e., the current model), scalpers can buy at any time that original tickets remain available. If they predict huge scalping margins, they'll buy up tickets ASAP, competing with the 17yo buying ASAP. And scalpers are more likely to have bots/scripts to help get in the moment tickets go on sale, putting them at an advantage over the 17yo. The 17yo probably ends up finding that the show has sold out to scalpers, so now tickets are too expensive. If the scalpers overbought, they'll eventually let the tickets go at reasonable prices (maybe even below face value) as the event nears, so maybe the 17yo has a chance that way, and many seats will be empty. If the scalpers underbought, great.
If face value decreases over time (i.e., my proposed model) from the original seller, then you've sort of got the exact same thing going on in terms of the rich buying early and the 17yo buying late, except the 17yo has one less middleman to contend with. Less chaos. Authoritative information about how many seats are yet to be filled. Bots that simply react to slow price changes like a human could, instead of bots that rush the release of tickets faster than humans.
In either model, the rich get their way and the 17yo gets whatever is left. But when well-controlled, this gap can be filled through need-based programs, student programs, etc. -- Broadway has some examples. These programs can be layered on top of, as they are orthogonal to, eliminating the incentive to use bad bots for scalping.
I don't have all the answers, but as someone who has been a musician for 30 years, programmer for 24, FoH audio engineer for 21, stock trader for 15, booked several shows, and buys tickets to shows every month or two, this is something I truly think could benefit the ticket-buying experience without excessive downside. The prices don't need to be astronomical (i.e., for the richest of the rich) when they first go on sale. They just need to be set, and reset continuously over time, so as to have N% be sold equal to N% of sale window elapsed, with the window ending at doors; sales would be almost exclusively to genuine show-goers because scalpers would almost exclusively be bag-holders.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
900mhz networks like halow or even lorawan should do Even at huge venues i dont expect requests would be over 5 rps
5 RPS, per scanner, surely?
I think maybe 4-15 seconds between scans per scanner, at best.
This sort of ticketing thing is a trivially solvable problem. It is solved at every airport in the entire world millions of times per day. You provide the name of each concertgoer when you buy a ticket, and they show up with their ticket and ID. You often need to show your ID at these kinds of venues to prove you're old enough to drink beer anyway.
I’ve heard the argument that forcing people to have an ID is anti folks with disabilities and anti-poor since it requires someone to go to an issuing agency to obtain and pay for one, which could be putting someone out who has a mobility disability or doesn’t have a lot of money. I’m not making the argument but it’s an argument I’ve heard.