> Artists pretend their tickets are affordable, Ticketmaster pretends they're fighting scalpers while giving kickbacks to artists, and fans pretend they won't pay whatever it takes to get in.
>fans pretend they won't pay whatever it takes to get in.
Uh, no, I've abandoned multiple carts after seeing the final ticket price with hidden fees is 175% the advertised price. Those shows didn't end up selling out, either, they just left revenue sitting on the table. Entire live entertainment industry would be double digit % larger if the ticketing experience wasn't uniquely dogshit
Oh me too, I've abandoned several ticket purchases just because the entire experience was so unpleasant and required signing up for extra layers of crap along the way.
Joking aside, for every you (or two you's), there's another person willing to shell out. Ticketmaster doesn't really care whether a venue is at 30% or 100% capacity so long as the artists and venue are happy, and fans keep buying tickets at a sustainable clip. Hell, they likely prefer a lower attendance so staffing costs are lower.
This is a bit like skiing now: I've accepted it's just an activity for the addicted or the rich.
scalping at scale is objectively evil. the scalper's bread and butter is exploiting the buyer's noble desire to support their favorite artist, make memories with friends, meet strangers, or have a transformative experience -- all for the sole purpose of financial profit.
people will never stop wanting these things, so scalpers will never stop making money. it's just a deeply gross thing to do
If you sell a ticket with no ability to transfer it, this stops scalpers. Certainly, it destroys secondary value of access to the event, but there are always tradeoffs.
Imagine, after a show is sold out, the ticket seller creates a waiting list. As long as the waiting list is longer than 0, anyone who purchased a ticket and no longer wants it can get a full refund.
Now you have tickets which are not transferrable but without removing the ability for people to access the event.
Right so the issue then becomes: how do we make sure the person at the concert is the person who purchased it. Are we IDing everyone? (We could, but now you (the promoter) are spending much more on gate agents to support a feature that probably cost you money.)
Do we tie it to your ticketing account? Ok fine, the scalpers just sell whole accounts.
Do we tie it to your phone? If so, scalpers get a really cheap Android to send the e-tix to. That’ll cut out the flippers on the less hot tours, but probably just make Taylor Swiftc resales more expensive. And what about people who get a new phone between ticket purchase time and the show (a lag of often several months).
Also you now just helped the scalpers every time they misfire. No more eating 30% on stubhub and selling below market!
It’s not a bad idea but it’s not as trivial as it sounds.
I personally think a better idea is to just break up live nation. This is a problem that could easily be solved if the venue owner, promoter, and ticket agent aren’t all one company.
Many years ago, when I purchased tickets to Nine Inch Nails concerts through their fan sales, they tied the ticket to the name on your government ID. And yes, they checked IDs. This was the cost of preventing scalping of premium tickets.
Some venues mandate facial recognition to get in [1]. I am not supportive of such corporate surveillance, but to rebut your comment, identity solutions exist to dissuade scalping, and some are in active use today. Even if you break up Live Nation, scalping will occur for events if profit is to be made.
Right, it’s a cost, and the people who’d have to pay it are Live Nation, who make money off the current system. So we’d be asking a corporation to pay to reduce its own profits.
That’s the sort of thing that only happens after a settlement with the government. Which, in the case of LN, is 100% what needs to happen.
I have a blanket policy of rejecting venues adding extra terms and conditions (facial recognition, ids, ...) after I've already paid. If they want to do that, they need to at a bare minimum make it plain and obvious when you're purchasing the thing, or at an even barer minimum mention the egregious terms somewhere in the legalese associated with purchasing.
The corporate surveillance angle is also important, but IME 0% of these companies bother to explain that the thing they advertised when they took your money isn't the thing you actually have access to.
Large concerts rarely ID and are almost always all ages in the US. (Source: I go to 30+ a year, don’t think I’ve seen one ID.) Gate agent staff would have to be significantly increased.
It’s not unfeasible by any means, it just would cost money, and promoters like the scalpers. Most of the failures mentioned in this article involve a scalper buying tickets that would otherwise have gone unsold, and even for a show that would sell out eventually, LN gets the cash earlier and then maybe even gets a cut of online resale.
How about partial refund? (For example: 90% refund when the event is a week away, 66% up to 3 days away, 33% up to 24 hours away, 20% up to 3 hours away.)
Yes, otherwise for ticket owners who are not sure if they will make it to the concert, waiting until the last minute to request a refund becomes a dominant strategy.
It doesn't have to be like that. There are valid reasons you have to resell your ticket. There is a way to make it work without scalpers - ticket provider can provide resell platform and force that tickets are sold at purchase price.
This was the case in David Gilmour's concert in Rome a month ago. TicketOne.it has their own resalle site fansale.it. Good business for Ticketone as they also take a fee for resale, good for sellers because they have a safe way to sell if something comes up and they can't go. Good for buyers because they know these tickets are valid, and price is the original one.
I believe Ticketmaster or Ticketek do this already and earn now double their fees. When they first sell it and when they handle the secondary resell on behalf of the first buyer. Most of their tickets are digital now.
Price is one way to allocate scarce resources. History suggests it is the least worst.
But why, morally, should someone who had the free time to sit in a queue, or was lucky enough to win a lottery, be more entitled versus someone willing to pay 10x what someone else is? Scalpers facilitate this. I don't have time to try to get face value tickets. But I work hard in a good job and I have disposable income. So I can, effectively, pay a scalper to do this for me. Am I less deserving of a ticket?
The reality is that the vast majority of secondary market supply comes from artist/venue/promoter related parties. Taylor Swift cannot price tickets at $5,000 because it would be a PR nightmare. So she sells a small amount publicly, which are snapped up by scalpers who know the true price is much higher. And TS quietly sells a ton more at these true prices while saving face.
Why is it objectively evil? Is it because the consumer pays more? Is it because the artist and venue don't make as much as they could? I didn't like scaling, but I don't consider it evil.
> exploiting the buyer's noble desire to support their favorite artist, make memories with friends, meet strangers, or have a transformative experience -- all for the sole purpose of financial profit
Sorry for the off topic, but the first image in the linked article has a crazy long and surprisingly descriptive alt and title tag. Is this some weird\new SEO practice?
>alt="A wide image divided into two contrasting halves by a large barrier. On the left, a group of young fan girls, wearing pop star t-shirts and accessories, stand outside the stadium with dejected expressions, some leaning against the barrier while others look desperately toward the stadium. On the right, inside the stadium, an enthusiastic crowd dances and cheers under colorful lights. At the center of the stage, a blonde female singer-songwriter in a sparkling outfit performs energetically, holding a microphone as the audience celebrates the moment. In between the fan girls and the concert crowd, ticket scalpers aggressively wave tickets and cash, some holding signs with inflated prices, greedily capitalizing on the situation. The contrast between the fans' frustration and the joyful concert scene emphasizes the emotional divide."
I'm surprised "entering a business where you know customers hate you and where any of your friends who you explain your job to will hate you" wasn't on the list.
Ticketmaster now offers both dynamic pricing, as a response to the complaints that artists don’t get a cut of the price of scalped tickets, and Verified Fan pre-sales as a response to fan clubs.
I kinda gave up on it all, and go to see shows at a small venue near me. I can buy tickets in person and skip the BS most of the time. I won’t see big acts but these days that’s not what I’m into anyways.
> Those $100 face-value tickets were selling for 10 to 50x their price on secondary markets. Either she truly believed her tickets were only worth $100 (unlikely), or she was deliberately underpricing to maintain her image as an artist who cares about fan access.
No, those $100 tickets are mostly worth $100. There are a lot of reasons why someone will overpay to get a ticket; but don't delude yourself: If Taylor Swift decided to charge $1000 for each ticket, many less people would go. She might sell 1/10th of the tickets, and it would be a wash, she might sell 1/3rd of the tickets, and make more money, or she might sell 1/20th of the tickets, and make less money.
What drives the price of the tickets up is scarcity: Once the venue is sold out (or close to sold out,) it's useful to only sell the tickets to people who really, really want to pay.
Edit: I should add that, unless I really want to see an artist, I tend to buy my tickets shortly before the show, and only if they are a reasonable price.
For example, last summer Green Day & Smashing Pumpkins was $200 / ticket. I kinda wanted to go, but I didn't want to pay that much.
In contrast, Weezer was $70 a ticket and playing around the corner from my office. I went to Weezer. (And wished I bought a floor ticket sooner because the Flaming Lips were the opening band.)
There are reasons to prefer full avenue instead of half full, even if second one brings more money for this single event:
- artist might prefer the full-avenue energy
- it produces positive hype (it's often newsworthy when show is sold out)
- you can sometimes add new dates in the same avenue, maximising profits since lot of stage, travel, staff, marketing costs don't increase if you have another concert the next day.
- You grow fan base instead of shrinking it. It's better to have twice the number of satisfied fans when you revisited the city in few years. But it can also increase future album sales, streaming revenue, etc.
I think it's very clear that her tickets were worth much more than $1000 - especially when 15 million people competed for tickets for only 1.5 million fans.
"I would never buy a $200 ticket, therefore there does not exist a taylor swift ticket worth $200"
As you point out, different people have different price elasticities. Is it so hard to believe that some people really are willing to pay $5000 to attend?
You rightly point out that resale market prices are likely higher than the market clearing price compared to if there were a single-price auction for all the tickets, but saying that they're worth $100 is just flat out wrong.
> > Those $100 face-value tickets were selling for 10 to 50x their price on secondary markets. Either she truly believed her tickets were only worth $100 (unlikely), or she was deliberately underpricing to maintain her image as an artist who cares about fan access.
> No, those $100 tickets are mostly worth $100.
No, all of those tickets were worth more than $100, which you see from the fact that, if you had one, you could sell it for more than $100.
Selling 1 ticket for 100x != Selling all tickets for 100x
Especially not when many of those 100x prices are from scalpers or rescalpers in the first place. Once a ticket is seen as an investment vehicle it gets divorced from the intrinsic value of "seat at concert I'd like to go to".
The article claims that 95% of tickets are grabbed by "The profiteers, the bots, the scalpers, the ticketing reseller". I'm not sure if it's hyperbole or not.
This is a totally idiosyncratic definition of "worth". If I say a company is worth $100 a share, that doesn't imply that you could simultaneously sell every single share for at least $100
But if you are not able to eventually sell all the tickets for more than $100, clearly not all of them are worth more than $100. Some, at the right time and place, might be, but not all.
> Artists pretend their tickets are affordable, Ticketmaster pretends they're fighting scalpers while giving kickbacks to artists, and fans pretend they won't pay whatever it takes to get in.
this is very well put
don't forget the venue is likely also owned by ticketmaster and is all part of the game too.
>fans pretend they won't pay whatever it takes to get in.
Uh, no, I've abandoned multiple carts after seeing the final ticket price with hidden fees is 175% the advertised price. Those shows didn't end up selling out, either, they just left revenue sitting on the table. Entire live entertainment industry would be double digit % larger if the ticketing experience wasn't uniquely dogshit
Never seen it in Europe, visited concerts in dozen countries. There are some platform fees, but let's say 5% or at most 10%.
That is why it was cheaper to buy a flight, hotel, and ticket to see Taylor Swift in Paris than to buy tickets to any show in the US.
Apparently 20% in the U.K.: https://www.which.co.uk/policy-and-insight/article/which-cal...
Also a problem down under: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-16/dynamic-pricing-hidde...
Sadly, didn't visit any concert in UK, so couldn't include that datapoint in my anecdote.
The UK article (from March this year) says the law was about to change to require clearer pricing
‘Murica!
Oh me too, I've abandoned several ticket purchases just because the entire experience was so unpleasant and required signing up for extra layers of crap along the way.
It's just part of the ongoing Sovietization of America. An illegitimate monopoly actor propped up by a decayed legal system. Are we having fun ?
Well, you're not really a fan then, huh?
Joking aside, for every you (or two you's), there's another person willing to shell out. Ticketmaster doesn't really care whether a venue is at 30% or 100% capacity so long as the artists and venue are happy, and fans keep buying tickets at a sustainable clip. Hell, they likely prefer a lower attendance so staffing costs are lower.
This is a bit like skiing now: I've accepted it's just an activity for the addicted or the rich.
scalping at scale is objectively evil. the scalper's bread and butter is exploiting the buyer's noble desire to support their favorite artist, make memories with friends, meet strangers, or have a transformative experience -- all for the sole purpose of financial profit.
people will never stop wanting these things, so scalpers will never stop making money. it's just a deeply gross thing to do
If you sell a ticket with no ability to transfer it, this stops scalpers. Certainly, it destroys secondary value of access to the event, but there are always tradeoffs.
Edit: @margalabargala Great idea.
There are ways to address that easily.
Imagine, after a show is sold out, the ticket seller creates a waiting list. As long as the waiting list is longer than 0, anyone who purchased a ticket and no longer wants it can get a full refund.
Now you have tickets which are not transferrable but without removing the ability for people to access the event.
Right so the issue then becomes: how do we make sure the person at the concert is the person who purchased it. Are we IDing everyone? (We could, but now you (the promoter) are spending much more on gate agents to support a feature that probably cost you money.)
Do we tie it to your ticketing account? Ok fine, the scalpers just sell whole accounts.
Do we tie it to your phone? If so, scalpers get a really cheap Android to send the e-tix to. That’ll cut out the flippers on the less hot tours, but probably just make Taylor Swiftc resales more expensive. And what about people who get a new phone between ticket purchase time and the show (a lag of often several months).
Also you now just helped the scalpers every time they misfire. No more eating 30% on stubhub and selling below market!
It’s not a bad idea but it’s not as trivial as it sounds.
I personally think a better idea is to just break up live nation. This is a problem that could easily be solved if the venue owner, promoter, and ticket agent aren’t all one company.
Many years ago, when I purchased tickets to Nine Inch Nails concerts through their fan sales, they tied the ticket to the name on your government ID. And yes, they checked IDs. This was the cost of preventing scalping of premium tickets.
Some venues mandate facial recognition to get in [1]. I am not supportive of such corporate surveillance, but to rebut your comment, identity solutions exist to dissuade scalping, and some are in active use today. Even if you break up Live Nation, scalping will occur for events if profit is to be made.
[1] https://www.marketplace.org/2024/10/23/facial-recognition-th...
Right, it’s a cost, and the people who’d have to pay it are Live Nation, who make money off the current system. So we’d be asking a corporation to pay to reduce its own profits.
That’s the sort of thing that only happens after a settlement with the government. Which, in the case of LN, is 100% what needs to happen.
I have a blanket policy of rejecting venues adding extra terms and conditions (facial recognition, ids, ...) after I've already paid. If they want to do that, they need to at a bare minimum make it plain and obvious when you're purchasing the thing, or at an even barer minimum mention the egregious terms somewhere in the legalese associated with purchasing.
The corporate surveillance angle is also important, but IME 0% of these companies bother to explain that the thing they advertised when they took your money isn't the thing you actually have access to.
I'm surprised that people think that id'ing is a big deal, considering you get your ID scanned when going to a nightclub these days.
Also most large concerts, especially if it's not all ages
Large concerts rarely ID and are almost always all ages in the US. (Source: I go to 30+ a year, don’t think I’ve seen one ID.) Gate agent staff would have to be significantly increased.
It’s not unfeasible by any means, it just would cost money, and promoters like the scalpers. Most of the failures mentioned in this article involve a scalper buying tickets that would otherwise have gone unsold, and even for a show that would sell out eventually, LN gets the cash earlier and then maybe even gets a cut of online resale.
How about partial refund? (For example: 90% refund when the event is a week away, 66% up to 3 days away, 33% up to 24 hours away, 20% up to 3 hours away.)
Yes, otherwise for ticket owners who are not sure if they will make it to the concert, waiting until the last minute to request a refund becomes a dominant strategy.
The US airline industry requires you to pay more to transfer a ticket or get a refund. Do the same for concert tickets.
I generally go to low cost events (<20 USD) and sometimes buy tickets speculatively (eg at a date/time when I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it).
It’s surprisingly hard to let many venues know you won’t attend and the tickets can be reallocated, even if you don’t expect / want and refund!
It's much easier to just resell
It doesn't have to be like that. There are valid reasons you have to resell your ticket. There is a way to make it work without scalpers - ticket provider can provide resell platform and force that tickets are sold at purchase price.
This was the case in David Gilmour's concert in Rome a month ago. TicketOne.it has their own resalle site fansale.it. Good business for Ticketone as they also take a fee for resale, good for sellers because they have a safe way to sell if something comes up and they can't go. Good for buyers because they know these tickets are valid, and price is the original one.
I believe Ticketmaster or Ticketek do this already and earn now double their fees. When they first sell it and when they handle the secondary resell on behalf of the first buyer. Most of their tickets are digital now.
One issue is that the promoters and artists are getting a cut of the resale.
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It has nothing to do with morality.
Price is one way to allocate scarce resources. History suggests it is the least worst.
But why, morally, should someone who had the free time to sit in a queue, or was lucky enough to win a lottery, be more entitled versus someone willing to pay 10x what someone else is? Scalpers facilitate this. I don't have time to try to get face value tickets. But I work hard in a good job and I have disposable income. So I can, effectively, pay a scalper to do this for me. Am I less deserving of a ticket?
The reality is that the vast majority of secondary market supply comes from artist/venue/promoter related parties. Taylor Swift cannot price tickets at $5,000 because it would be a PR nightmare. So she sells a small amount publicly, which are snapped up by scalpers who know the true price is much higher. And TS quietly sells a ton more at these true prices while saving face.
> Am I less deserving of a ticket?
This is literally a question of morality.
It's called a leading question.
I am, imho, not less deserving, and therefore it's not a moral issue.
you should read some blake or wordsworth to balance how much you read lesswrong.com
Nice. Have never read lesswrong once in my life.
interesting how their influence works like that
> But I work hard in a good job and I have disposable income. So I can, effectively, pay a scalper to do this for me. Am I less deserving of a ticket?
No, but you're not more deserving either.
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Why is it objectively evil? Is it because the consumer pays more? Is it because the artist and venue don't make as much as they could? I didn't like scaling, but I don't consider it evil.
> exploiting the buyer's noble desire to support their favorite artist, make memories with friends, meet strangers, or have a transformative experience -- all for the sole purpose of financial profit
Buddy, what do you think Ticketmaster is doing?
Plenty of shade to throw around, Ticketmaster+livenation sucks too.
If you believe that fans that put in time are more deserving than fans that pay then this is correct.
Sorry for the off topic, but the first image in the linked article has a crazy long and surprisingly descriptive alt and title tag. Is this some weird\new SEO practice?
>alt="A wide image divided into two contrasting halves by a large barrier. On the left, a group of young fan girls, wearing pop star t-shirts and accessories, stand outside the stadium with dejected expressions, some leaning against the barrier while others look desperately toward the stadium. On the right, inside the stadium, an enthusiastic crowd dances and cheers under colorful lights. At the center of the stage, a blonde female singer-songwriter in a sparkling outfit performs energetically, holding a microphone as the audience celebrates the moment. In between the fan girls and the concert crowd, ticket scalpers aggressively wave tickets and cash, some holding signs with inflated prices, greedily capitalizing on the situation. The contrast between the fans' frustration and the joyful concert scene emphasizes the emotional divide."
Probably just the prompt they used to create the image, since people always ask
I'm surprised "entering a business where you know customers hate you and where any of your friends who you explain your job to will hate you" wasn't on the list.
It’s business!
Rule of Acquisition 21: "Never place friendship above profit."
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Ticketmaster now offers both dynamic pricing, as a response to the complaints that artists don’t get a cut of the price of scalped tickets, and Verified Fan pre-sales as a response to fan clubs.
I kinda gave up on it all, and go to see shows at a small venue near me. I can buy tickets in person and skip the BS most of the time. I won’t see big acts but these days that’s not what I’m into anyways.
Such a great read. It'd be fascinating to know more about the secret relationships between artists and scalpers.
> Those $100 face-value tickets were selling for 10 to 50x their price on secondary markets. Either she truly believed her tickets were only worth $100 (unlikely), or she was deliberately underpricing to maintain her image as an artist who cares about fan access.
No, those $100 tickets are mostly worth $100. There are a lot of reasons why someone will overpay to get a ticket; but don't delude yourself: If Taylor Swift decided to charge $1000 for each ticket, many less people would go. She might sell 1/10th of the tickets, and it would be a wash, she might sell 1/3rd of the tickets, and make more money, or she might sell 1/20th of the tickets, and make less money.
What drives the price of the tickets up is scarcity: Once the venue is sold out (or close to sold out,) it's useful to only sell the tickets to people who really, really want to pay.
Edit: I should add that, unless I really want to see an artist, I tend to buy my tickets shortly before the show, and only if they are a reasonable price.
For example, last summer Green Day & Smashing Pumpkins was $200 / ticket. I kinda wanted to go, but I didn't want to pay that much.
In contrast, Weezer was $70 a ticket and playing around the corner from my office. I went to Weezer. (And wished I bought a floor ticket sooner because the Flaming Lips were the opening band.)
Had Weezer charged $200, I never would have gone.
There are reasons to prefer full avenue instead of half full, even if second one brings more money for this single event:
- artist might prefer the full-avenue energy
- it produces positive hype (it's often newsworthy when show is sold out)
- you can sometimes add new dates in the same avenue, maximising profits since lot of stage, travel, staff, marketing costs don't increase if you have another concert the next day.
- You grow fan base instead of shrinking it. It's better to have twice the number of satisfied fans when you revisited the city in few years. But it can also increase future album sales, streaming revenue, etc.
I think it's very clear that her tickets were worth much more than $1000 - especially when 15 million people competed for tickets for only 1.5 million fans.
"I would never buy a $200 ticket, therefore there does not exist a taylor swift ticket worth $200"
As you point out, different people have different price elasticities. Is it so hard to believe that some people really are willing to pay $5000 to attend?
You rightly point out that resale market prices are likely higher than the market clearing price compared to if there were a single-price auction for all the tickets, but saying that they're worth $100 is just flat out wrong.
> > Those $100 face-value tickets were selling for 10 to 50x their price on secondary markets. Either she truly believed her tickets were only worth $100 (unlikely), or she was deliberately underpricing to maintain her image as an artist who cares about fan access.
> No, those $100 tickets are mostly worth $100.
No, all of those tickets were worth more than $100, which you see from the fact that, if you had one, you could sell it for more than $100.
Selling 1 ticket for 100x != Selling all tickets for 100x
Especially not when many of those 100x prices are from scalpers or rescalpers in the first place. Once a ticket is seen as an investment vehicle it gets divorced from the intrinsic value of "seat at concert I'd like to go to".
The article claims that 95% of tickets are grabbed by "The profiteers, the bots, the scalpers, the ticketing reseller". I'm not sure if it's hyperbole or not.
You would only see it if you sold all of them for more than $100.
This is a totally idiosyncratic definition of "worth". If I say a company is worth $100 a share, that doesn't imply that you could simultaneously sell every single share for at least $100
You inserted 'simultaneously', not me.
But if you are not able to eventually sell all the tickets for more than $100, clearly not all of them are worth more than $100. Some, at the right time and place, might be, but not all.
The more scalpers suffer, the better. May they suffer infinite pain.
I had no idea scalping was so complicated.