Freakonomics did a great deep dive [0] into the complexity of ticket markets. The short of it is that incentives are mixed and spread through the following parties: sellers, venues, promoters, artists, and fans.
Artists don’t want to look like they gouge their fans.
Promoters take a cut and need to hit volume milestones.
Fans want access, and are willing to pay extra.
[0] - http://freakonomics.com/podcast/live-event-ticket-market-scr...
Given how frequently they ran out of 65,000 tickets for <enter_any_big_ticket_event> within seconds (which would pop up under resale with > 200% markup minutes later), glad this is out in the open.
Also, Fenway Park is the worst. Had a terrible experience earlier this year while trying to book Pearl Jam tickets. Presale went live at 10:00 AM on February 10th (for shows in Sept) and they ran out of tickets at 10:01 AM, are you kidding me? Suddenly I see spike on StubHub an hour later with ridiculous markups.
Fortunately my Uber driver pointed out and suggested that I wait until day of the event (as fenway park puts up unsold scalper tickets back online at market price). I followed his advice and snagged couple of tickets on day of the event at market price as he suggested.
The whole experience was mind numbing.Can't wait for Amazon tickets to disrupt this space and drive 'em out.
Edit : When I said 65,000 tickets - I'm counting Pre-sale tickets as well including Verified Fan scheme they had going this year.
I bought 1 concert ticket from Ticketmaster that cost $45. My final total was $72. They charged me 60% extra in 'processing fees' for something I could have just printed out. How much 'processing' does it take to display information on a web page?
They also don't let you just print the ticket. I had to pay extra to have a physical ticket snail mailed to me.
Paying 60% of the cost of the product just to help the company continue to justify their existence is freaking ridiculous.
I wonder when we are going to see a startup do to ticketmaster what Uber did to cabs. They are asking for it with their escalating shitty rent seeking behavior. Unfortunately, due to their stranglehold on most venues in the country, they seem to enjoy more power over their industry than even the taxi lobby did.
I know that they did this in the United States. But one of the interesting things that is helpful for investigative journalism in Canada, the entire country is a one-party consent jurisdiction for recording of phone calls, and recording of conversations in person. investigative journalists in Canada have taken advantage of this fact for many years, and exposed a great deal of corruption.
I enjoyed reading the email chain linked from the article. Ticketmaster sent CBC the usual PR statement, CBC replied saying "we are going to say you declined to comment if that's your answer to our questions" and Ticketmaster replied that that's unfair and they were perfectly happy answering all the questions... off the record. Wow.
It's amazing how long this ticketing scam has continued, and so blatantly. Everyone knows it's a scam!
They even managed to make settling a class-action lawsuit into a huge fucking scam. It's infuriating. I feel like they should be sued for the way they settled the lawsuit.
When I see ticketmaster selling tickets for an event, I know it's not going to be worth my time, money or effort trying to go.
There are a ton of venues and artists out there. If you're put off by this action, understand that this action is taken by TM, the venue and the artist, and vote with your wallet. Spend your entertainment dollars elsewhere and support artists and venues that are more honest. Find a club that sells tickets with some other company or where you can buy tickets at the door.
Why aren't ticket sales an auction? That would allow Ticketmaster and the promoters (and hopefully artists) to extract maximum value for each ticket. It would simultaneously take all the profit out of scalping. Tickets could be exchanged at face value, but if the maximum value the market will pay is already extracted there will be no margin left for resellers.
I had no idea Ticketmaster had such a reputation for being consistently sleazy until I read all the comments here. They scammed me once and I thought it was an isolated screw up that they just didn't want to own up to.
One would think that review sites, etc. or the BBB might do something about companies like this, but even companies I always have good experiences with have some disgruntled former employees or customers trashing them online, and I've never known the BBB to do much. What's one to do? Are there sites for feedback on companies like this where it's not just paid shills and disgruntled people?
This doesn’t hurt ticket buyers as much as it hurts artists and producers. It’s they who get payed less from Ticketmaster, the consumer would have to pay market value anyway.
What they should really do to get market value ethically is simple, have an auction for the tickets. The going price would be transparent to buyers, artists/producers and Ticketmaster wouldn’t have the ability to doubly collect fees without paying the artists/producers their real cut in the end. Of course you could argue Ticketmaster would have the ability to benefits from resellers anyway, but in reality the price difference the second time would not be big enough to be benificial for scalpers and Ticketmaster.
If the band/artist want to give more to dedicated fans, just set a side a set of tickets for their fan club and let them buy for a flat fee or from a private auction.
Eventbrite should be ringing the NYSE bell pretty soon, but even Eventbrite is unable to penetrate the decade long deals Ticketmaster has in place.
anyone else get a bunch of free tickets from ticket master in that lawsuit a few years back but then realize that basically none of the concerts are eligible ?
specifically talking about this: http://settlement.livenation.com/
Maybe this will finally get the FTC to pay attention to ticketmaster/livenation. It's been one of the most abusively anticompetitive companies out there for decades, blacklisting venues that don't use it for everything and setting ticket price requirements (and then of course charging bigger fees because of it).
It's insanely bad monopolistic behavior the FTC never appears to care about, I dunno, maybe because it's just entertainment or something.
This industry can only exist because labels and artists are not willing to sell tickets at the market clearing price, since they would be seen as exploitative by their own fans. So they sell the tickets are significantly discounted prices, in the hopes that at least some of them end up in the hands of the fans, saving face but creating a niche for a super-sleazy industry.
The solution I believe is to directly engage the fans and include with the price of the ticket benefits that only have value for fans. For example, when purchasing a ticket the market price is $100, out of which $40 is the price of the ticket and $60 is the "anti-scalping deposit" that fans get back when purchasing from their account with the band's site. So you would get $60 back in your account that you can use to purchase items valuable for fans such as limited edition CD, merchandise or even other tickets in the future (this is a bit tricky since scalpers can automate it, but exposes them to a major risk of detection and loosing the deposit, unlike the automation of the single ticket purchase, which either works or is risk free).
Providing this service seems like a nice idea to build a company on.
There's another essential component to this systems which is that the artists, managers and promoters are all often in on this. See:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123672740386088613
and
https://www.theringer.com/2016/6/3/16045790/ticket-industry-...
LiveNation often offers the artist guarantees for the tour up front. This is great for artists as the risk it transferred to LiveNation. LiveNation then extorts the fans via Ticketmaster.
Ticketmaster becomes the scapegoat, but since they're a near monopoly with a one of the worst public images it makes no difference to them. The artists also take a piece of those "convenience charges" that often make up a large percentage of the face value of a ticket. Again Ticketmaster takes the heat and everyone wins except the fans.
>> "This is going to be a public relations nightmare."
Lol. Does anyone think tickermaster cares one iota about its public image? They have been hated for decades, by fans and artists alike. The survive on their ins with venues, bulk purchasers, and CC companies.
So, my problems with this article, as someone that works in the industry:
1. It's not a secret. It's Ticketmaster's secondary market division, TM+. They may not advertise where people out of the industry would see it, but that's nothing special. They may not want to draw attention to themselves, for reasons such as this article, where they are portrayed very unflatteringly and given little chance to provide their own context. Tradedesk, their new POS offering, is new, and has been somewhat buggy (most might be worked out now), so they've targeted known brokers, but it's a free tool, so they would probably be happy to have anyone that buys and sells more than 1-2 sets of tickets a month (there are a LOT of people that do this as a little extra income, or to pay for their concert habit).
2. Ticketmaster has multiple divisions. The division responsible for proving primary market tickets and the division for running Ticketmaster's secondary market are sometimes at cross purposes. I can tell you from experience though, Ticketmaster does a LOT to prevent the more egregious use of bots, to the point where it can bleed over to regular fans. Every few months there's some new site feature that makes bots harder to utilize. Recently it's a new queuing system and new purchase mechanism, where you select seats off the map (which they've had for a long time, but not during sales).
3. Distinguishing a broker account with 100 purchases on it and a corporate account for bonus gifts or a concierge service may not be as easy as it sounds. It's also not that hard for a broker to just use an account for a few purchases. If I was running a concierge service and Ticketmaster cancelled hundreds of purchases all of a sudden, I would be a bit peeved that they took my money (credit, most likely) for months and then basically killed my business because they incorrectly identified me as a broker account. Also, artists/venues/promoters may not actually want to you cancel tickets and put them back on the market. Being sold out has it's own benefits (and nobody wants to return cash they've already gotten).
4. One of Ticketmaster's main purposes is to offload anger about pricing from artists, promoters and venues to a separate entity. There's a reason why there are often over 50% additional fees per ticket (and they are higher for higher costing seats, how interesting...). It's because many of those are set and received by the artist, promoter and venue. It allows for pricier tickets which is hidden up-front, and the blame goes to Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster of course tacks on their own fees for this service.
5. I believe the secondary market provides a useful function (otherwise I would seek other employment). It helps artists, promoters and venues offload risk (up-front usable money now, instead of little by little as the tour goes on), it helps spread tickets to those that have more money than time (people that devote time still often get tickets, brokers very rarely get everything), and it allows fans to get tickets well below original cost in some (fairly common) cases, such as when a tour is overbought or demand lessens as it goes on. I could find any number of events with secondary market tickets under primary market cost at any moment.
In the end, it's a market. There are tried and true ways to alter it if that's what you want, but for the most part, I think most people are happy with how it works, and happy being able to complain about the time is doesn't as well. Fix and/or make an example of the market participants that are too greedy (such as the broker that got in trouble for buying ALL the Hamilton tickets), and it mostly functions in a way that people expect and find useful. I'll tell you this, getting rid of brokers (if you could) wouldn't result in much cheaper tickets. A lot of the money left on the table would just shift to other market participants, and I doubt it would be the fans.
Ticketmaster is also largely pushing behind the scenes for digital only / digital first ticketing.
The experience of being gifted tickets for an event is no longer the same.
A side effect of this is that Ticketmaster alternatives (Stubhub) etc, are also better frozen out of the secondary ticket market, and ironically, Ticketmaster takes their place through their fan-to-fan resale platform.
TM has acquired Stubhub as well, so there are likely other competitors/targets they are targeting too.
One of the few blockchain companies I actually see the value in is https://guts.tickets Their technology prevents reselling tickets for anything other than the original price, among other things. (Disclaimer: I just happen to know one of the founders from a past endeavor, I do not own any of there token)
This is exactly why we built rystband! We're an all digital ticketing company so we can do what the big companies can, but better. We sell tickets with $0 service fees, forever. Check us out! https://www.rystband.com
Artists/celebrities keep using it (i'd even want to say endorse it). Customers keep buying from it. Unless politicians pick this up and do something like condemn this practise and threaten regulations, nothing will happen.
The dark side of this is how they damage the total sales in their "explorations". The actual performer doesn't get a cut. They don't get to know their market value, or how bad the pricing hurts the fan experience.
So HFT taking advantage of ticket sales arbitrage?
Has Ticketmaster hit the point where their brand image is so bad that they aren't hurt at all by bad press?
Ages ago I was paid by professional scalpers to build bots on TM to get the "fruit". Fun times.
excuse my ignorance but why can't artists just setup a stripe page and collect money from fans and set up a location and date? why are market makers needed in tickets market that create incentives for scalpers?
Guess it's not so secret anymore
"secret"
hello?..... FBI?
How is the artist not getting absolutely screwed in this situation?
Sell tickets by auction, it would extract maximum value and kill the scalping market.
I bought my son a ticket for a music festival that was sold out within hours of ticket release from ticketmaster's reseller site seatwave and paid triple the price to some guy with an Indian name who I'm fairly sure never had any intention of attending.
This is super sleezy and I think Ticketmaster is one of the most awful companies in the world. But given the ridiculous levels of scalping that goes on every day (including all the companies that attempt to normalize it, like StubHub), doesn't it all imply that the fair market price of a lot of tickets is way higher than what they sell for? Obviously demand is way outstripping supply or people wouldn't pay $500-$1000 for $100 tickets on a daily basis.
By making all event tickets available at exactly the same time for an effectively-lower-than-market price, of course professional scalpers are going to snap up almost all of them and normal people without scripts won't be able to compete. I wonder what would happen if tickets went on sale for a really high price (like $500 each) and then the prices kept dropping automatically every hour until they were all sold. That would kill a lot of advantage that the scalpers have.
I guess customers would hate it and promoters would hate it, but I wonder if there isn't some other kind of sales model that would make this kind of sleezy self-scalping less profitable. Because with market forces this strong, companies are going to do anything that is legal-ish to get a piece of it. If Ticketmaster doesn't figure out a way to get a piece of the massive resell market, they are essentially just giving away free money to StubHub (from their point of view).