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Why scalpers can get tickets

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481–487 of 487 posts

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like theres a lot of missing legislation. The situation creates a huge conflict of interests. Then again, scalping itself out to be illegal; it’s just a form of exploiting someone else’s work to extract money from average folk without creating any value or meaningful work.

I'm honestly not sure anymore if scalping should be delegalized. I'm increasingly convinced that it's only the problem because everyone is in on it , with artists using scalpers as "heat sinks", to get more money while pretending they're the victim, and everyone is well compensated for the role they play in the scheme. If that's the case, then the entire structure is the problem, and it starts with artists exploiting…

Isn’t it basically auction-based pricing with more steps? That’s not a fundamentally evil thing.

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#482
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess if you don't use a streaming music service you're SOL seeing an artist you look. This is such a Hacker News suggestion.

Also I suspect that it would be trivially easy to script your client to open up spotify and play a never ending stream of Taylor Swift, dumping the audio to /dev/null, and to have multiple tabs playing other popular artists using other accounts, so that at least one account always looked like a superfan.

Alas, every metric that isn’t “paying more money” can be horrendously gamed and corrupted. This is why despite all its flaws, the “price signal” is still the tried and true “least bad way to allocate scarce resources” for most cases.

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#483
post #317
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess if you don't use a streaming music service you're SOL seeing an artist you look. This is such a Hacker News suggestion.

> This is such a Hacker News suggestion. Also the fact that it's assumed that everyone attending wants to sit in the audience and go crazy and MAKE SOME NOISE. It can and is annoying to many people. One other thing is artist may want an active crowd for their own benefit ie they are making a video live recording for further sale or to post to youtube whatever. (Point is good for artist but not for many all of those a…

It’s really disturbing to pass a value judgement about what kind of fans are more desirable than others, and social-engineering it into the pricing structure.

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1/ attending a concert is not a civil right 2/ can't emphasize enough, but _get an ID_. While ID posession was used to discriminate against groups of people, the real problem here is "why doesn't everyone have an ID"?

Right, but I didn't say that attending a concert is a civil right. I also didn't say what the real problem was. What I brought up was, knowing this, is still using ID discriminatory?

Who knows, if voting doesn’t motivate them, but concerts do, maybe it will cause more people to get IDs. Isn’t that a good thing?

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#485
post #320

Some of my favorite bands have done simple things which drastically (but not completely) reduce the levels of scalping. On a previous tour, Wilco made tickets only valid for the original holder with matching photo ID at the door. So I couldn’t sell my ticket. I was able to bring any guest I wanted with my second ticket though. For a while now Phish has done tickets via lottery and all tickets come in the physical mai…

Weird place you live in. In my country, scalping (selling above face value) is illegal, simple as that. Tickets still sell very quickly to popular events, and you often find people reselling them in the days/weeks before the event for below face value due to their own circumstances.

I'm unsure why the bands or the ticket vendors should be involved at all, it's a simple and sensible area for regulation.

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#486
post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You’re missing the point: every ticket has a name. Not the same single name on 4 tickets. Every ticket is personalised. At which point you can no longer exchange one for a different name and have pissed off legitimate customers. That was the point of the suggestion that you could get 2-4 tickets in the same name -- so that you could change 1-3 of them in case of a conflict. But then scalpers can too.

So what? People will always be pissed off. Millions are pissed off today because they had no chance to afford tickets to popular shows thanks to scalpers. Plane tickets are all virtually as this person described. Someone in your party can’t go to Jamaica with you because they got sick/broke up with you/whatever? Nobody cares, AND no refunds. This Names-and-IDs policy is actually much nicer than plane tickets, because…

> Millions are pissed off today because they had no chance to afford tickets to popular shows thanks to scalpers.

They had no chance to afford tickets to popular shows thanks to artists not providing enough seats or dates. If there is more demand than supply then your options are high prices or shortages.

> Plane tickets are all virtually as this person described. Someone in your party can’t go to Jamaica with you because they got sick/broke up with you/whatever? Nobody cares, AND no refunds.

People do in fact care, it's a common gripe about airlines screwing you, and the people who care a lot pay extra for a transferable ticket -- which are available. Which in turn allows the airlines to point to that and say you should've bought the more expensive ticket. But you can only say that if it's available, and if it is then the scalpers just buy those.

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, I think it's excellent. Turn up, show your ID along with your ticket, and you have not been screwed by a scalper. Need a refund? Log on to the site, get a refund, and your ticket goes back into the pool for a round 2 public release.

Those are all possible without data mining. Have always gotten a decent ticket when I planned ahead and resellers have helped me out on more than one occasion when I didn’t. Oh, and they were usually poorer folks that I’d much rather get a brokerage fee than ticket master.

Those poorer folks already paid ticketmaster the brokerage fee when they bought the ticket.

Resellers in the sense of those scalping are not "helping you out". There wouldn't be a shortage if they didn't scab everything available.

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