Earlier quoted context omitted.
$600 per ticket?
Yup; $600 per ticket.
There would probably be some backlash for a Taylor Swift concert where the whole arena was $600 VIP tickets.
Rolling Stones though? Maybe not.
How to sell tickets fairly
71–80 of 363 posts
Re: How to sell tickets fairly
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup; $600 per ticket.
There would probably be some backlash for a Taylor Swift concert where the whole arena was $600 VIP tickets. Rolling Stones though? Maybe not.
Seats 10+ rows behind us sold for $2,900 today… concert tickets are a crazy business these days.
Re: How to sell tickets fairly
#73Back in the day, The Who was presenting "Tommy". First time they were doing it live again. The "cheap" tickets were $75. This was a smaller venue. $75 was a bit of money to be sure. Back then you waited outside record stores to buy tickets. You'd line up, and sometime before the sale, they'd come out and hand out numbers, say 1 to 100. Then you'd sort by the number. Then they'd come out and say "We're starting the li…
I think randomized queues are pretty fair. You give everyone who arrives within a certain time the same chance. This wouldn't be too hard to implement as a system either.
Say ticket sales open at 2pm. From 1:45pm, everyone who gets to the site gets assigned a random queue number. Then from 2pm, users are given access to the ordering system in the order of their queue number. We can even limit throughput with that (e.g. let in n users per minute).
Ticket sites in South Korea already implement queueing systems to control server load. When sales open at 2pm, everyone refreshes the page at exactly that time, but the request is put in a waiting queue. This can be considered randomized in a way (the time someone refreshes the page is somewhat random), but I'd like to see the concept of "advance queue building time" added to that to reduce the stress of "I have to refresh the page exactly at the right moment." Give me a few minutes to get to the queue.
Re: How to sell tickets fairly
#74Or you could just be like Garth Brooks and keep adding shows until they no longer sell out. Boom, problem solved.
Adding shows seems like the best response if it's possible. More work for the artist though, and for the mega-popular (Taylor Swift atm) it might be hard to schedule enough shows.
It can be less work if they have to travel to less towns in total.
Re: How to sell tickets fairly
#75Or you could just be like Garth Brooks and keep adding shows until they no longer sell out. Boom, problem solved.
Adding shows seems like the best response if it's possible. More work for the artist though, and for the mega-popular (Taylor Swift atm) it might be hard to schedule enough shows.
They/she added more shows after the initial announcement[0], but they're still in insanely high demand.
0: 11/1 email with 27 show dates, then 11/4 additional 8 show dates, then 11/11 an additional 17 dates.
Re: How to sell tickets fairly
#76Or how about a lottery system. You get an email if you win the privilege of buying a tickets. Tickets are named and require ID check, to prevent scalpers. If you are unable to go, your ticket just goes back to the lottery pool.
They had a Verified Fan system to limit how many could purchase during a presale, but all that really required was being signed up for Taylor's email list and having purchased a Midnights CD from her online store.
I think they messed up here by only running one fan presale, since it made them predict how many tickets each person with a code would actually purchase. They probably underestimated this number (eg. from people tagging along with their friend who got into the presale), so they ended up selling way more than they thought they would. I suspect this because, at one point, I had 16k people in front of me for 1 night at Mercedes-Benz[0], which is a lot given concert capacity is probably around 50k.
With a two-wave presale (or even "verified fan presale only"), you can put out tickets in even smaller waves and continuously evaluate how many you're giving out based on demand and order ticket quantities.
0: while the queue-it frontend was set up to hide any number above 2,000, the API faithfully showed the actual amount of clients ahead of you in line.
Re: How to sell tickets fairly
#77I don't get what this has to do with combating scalping. This is just a new auction game to play. It levels the playing field for a time, as all new games do, but the scalpers will eventually win it. In this case the game is to find X where X is the percent of concert goers willing to pay scalpers. Then you buy the bottom X% of tickets for the current price and list them for more money. This is easy to do because the…
The idea is that everyone willing to pay more than $X for tickets bought their tickets before the scalpers can buy it for $X.
X isn't the price in my solution it's the percent of concert hopefuls who will hold their nose and pay a scalper. Once there's exactly that many tickets left, there's no point running the auction anymore. Scalpers should use their bots to completely buy up all remaining tickets, as they do now, and then set them for a higher price on the secondary market.
Buying the first 1-X% tickets nearly guarantees you will pay more than the scalp price except for a thin band right before X where the prices are within the scalper's margin.
Basically this system only beats scalpers if everyone is richer than scalpers, which most concertgoers are not. If you're rich you might like the sound of this new system on paper but it's actually cheaper for you to stay with the current system and buy all your tickets on the secondary market.
Re: How to sell tickets fairly
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wasn't able to go to a convention because my girlfriend already bought plane tickets to Las Vegas. If I weren't able to sell the ticket, there would be no way for me to recoup the cost
Shit happens? Lots of things have the same problem but if you bought steaks from a butcher and you came home to find that your girlfriend already prepare dinner?
In the system that I can resell my ticket I don't have a loss, in a system where it's by name I can't
I believe it should be auctioned anyway, so that the people with the highest desire to go can put their money towards it. This is the most practical solution to the problem - the organizers get paid what the tickets are worth, anyone who wants to go knows how much the tickets will go for, scalpers become futures traders
Re: How to sell tickets fairly
#79Pearl Jam tried to beat Ticketmaster. At the risk of sounding like the big fan I am, if Eddie Vedder and co. (at their commercial peak) can’t beat Ticketmaster, I’m not convinced that software can. I’ve been pasting this Rolling Stone link since I was in my teens. I can’t believe how old I am… https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taki...
Recently I went to see PJ with a friend. I had the tickets but I was going to be late so tried to transfer one ticket. Nope, not allowed. Both of us had to be there with my app. If I wanted to sell it I can but not to a person. I can just release it back at the original price and no fees. So PJ are still fighting the good fight and TM plays along. Unfortunately most artists don’t have PJ’s influence, so probably not…
What about a system where only some fraction of the ticket sale has to present matching ID?
Example 1: Limit of 6 tickets per purchase. I buy 6 tickets, I invite 5 friends. I show ID at the door and it doesn't matter which 5 friends I bring with me.
Example 2: Same deal, but instead we're allowed 1 "flex" ticket in case someone backs out. Or some proportion allowed as flex.
Obviously this still allows scalping, but it seems less attractive for a scalper to have to attend with the people they're scalping to. Especially if you make 50% of the group show ID.
Re: How to sell tickets fairly
#80Talk about fair distribution all you want, it doesn't matter. People who buy tickets are not the customers of Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster does not have any incentive to implement any system that better serves the people who actually attend ticketed events.
The customers for Ticketmaster are venues. That's the only party that Ticketmaster cares to please. Of course Ticketmaster wields their monopoly power such that venues have little choice but to go with them. But even if they did not do that, Ticketmaster serves the interests of the venues very very well.
If you want to defeat Ticketmaster with a market solution, you can't do it by creating a Ticketmaster competitor. No matter how good it is, venues can't be swayed. You will have no customers. The only market solution is to own venues. As a venue owner you could refuse to renew with Ticketmaster and use any other system you wanted.
Of course, if you do that, good luck booking anyone to perform in your venue. It better be a big famous one that they can't ignore.