44 ms·

Ticketmaster recruits pros for secret scalper program

517 points by rinze 8y ago

barking 8y ago
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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
lawnchair_larry 8y ago
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.
- atomical 8y ago
  How do you prevent scalpers? Better KYC?
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Tickets are associated to a name at purchase; you are then required to provide corresponding ID upon admission at the event. Very similar to non-refundable airline tickets (which was designed to kill the secondary market for airline tickets [1]). If you cannot attend, your ticket expires worthless. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame has been doing this as part of his fan club for over a decade, and is a vocal opponent of scalpers [2]. [1] https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-I-resell-my-air-ticket-to-someone-else-if-I-dont-want-to-travel?share=1 https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-I-resell-my-air-ticket-to-som... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=trent+reznor+ticket+scalping https://www.google.com/search?q=trent+reznor+ticket+scalping
    - monksy 8y ago
      They did say that they were doing that. However.. they're still selling tickets through Livenation. That was only happening via the Presales. Source: I have a ticket for NIN that I bought on Stubhub.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - NedIsakoff 8y ago
    Do what our glorious province did, make a cap on reseller pricing.
    - elorant 8y ago
      Then they'll sell them through unofficial channels.
  - monksy 8y ago
    Pre-Auctioning tickets. That'll increase their risk and exposure. Also, do the same as Kamakazie did... don't preannounce shows.
  - ScoutOrgo 8y ago
    Add a marketplace for resells to same place face value tickets are sold. Would be same site, but could be different pages or w/e. Cap resells at face value, removing incentive to flip. Then to prevent resells, would need an app with ticket barcode that changes over time, like most 2 factor auth apps. This should help prevent resells via printing and screen shots. I expect that's not foolproof, but could prevent the easiest alternative market. This would work offline too which is a plus since service at big events is generally bad. Could also make transfers as easy as venmo through the app. The whole idea is to remove incentives from resells and make it easy as possible for people to transfer legitimately.
  - ticmasta 8y ago
    I think you need to use basic supply/demand economics; the original sales price needs to be near the limit people are willing to pay scalpers. There's no secondary market if the scalper needs to pay near the maximum value of the seat. The entire legit reseller market is just TicketMaster trying to get a piece of the pie that the promoter left on the table. There's a misalignment of incentives for most events. The performer gets paid for the show regardless if there's one attendee or it's a sell-out (some acts do share in gate and/or merch). They want the lowest ticket prices. The promoter is on the hook for a lot of fixed costs so they need to sell enough tickets to break-even; everything beyond that is profit from selling more tickets or higher prices. The venue gets rented but then TM "offers" them a per-seat fee in exchange for exclusivity. Then TM gets big processing and assorted fees for every act. Then resellers, legit or not, buy blocks of tickets that they resell in a dynamic market, prices floating based on demand and timing. Now we have TM coming back and saying "we'll offer you a marketplace and make it easier for you to secure supply (via bots and other shady processes)".
  - quantum_magpie 8y ago
    Print the name of concert-goer on the ticket. Require photo ID at the entrance to the venue. No resales, get a refund from the ticket seller if you can't go.
- monocasa 8y ago
  The thing is, that the concertgoer isn't Ticketmaster's customer really as they see it. The venue is who they see as the customer as they are the ones who pick which ticketing agency will be used. And venues actually tend to like Ticketmaster overall. EDIT: Also, I'm going to throw out there that I've heard rumors in the industry where if a venue doesn't get the percentages they're looking for from the artist, they'll scalp the tickets themselves obfuscated slightly.
  - darkerside 8y ago
    > doesn't get the percentages they're looking for What does that mean? Not selling out the venue?
    - monocasa 8y ago
      They weren't able to negotiate the percentage of the proceeds of the ticket sale that they wanted.
    - jandrese 8y ago
      Artist negotiating too high a cut of each ticket.
- ewzimm 8y ago
  The difference is that people disliking Ticketmaster is actually a feature of their brand. The vast majority goes to the artist, but Ticketmaster takes a lot of blame for high prices, and everyone wins.
  - creaghpatr 8y ago
    I would say less on the artist side and more on the sports side. Artists at minimum pay lip service to prevent scalping and some appear to at least try and avoid scalping (by requiring cardholder to be present for example) Edit: also want to add that no one thinks Lebron James is having a hand in setting ticketing policies whereas Taylor Swift probably has someone asking for her input
    - chc 8y ago
      Eh, I don't know how much of a say artists have either. Back in the '90s, Pearl Jam tried to get the price on their tickets down and ended up canceling the tour and pursuing antitrust charges against Ticketmaster.
  - Yhippa 8y ago
    Financially, scalpers could take a hit too if they buy a ton of tickets and then have to sell them for a loss.
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    Considering how frequently this idea is trotted out(I count 4 times in this hn post), are the artists really fooling anyone?
    - ewzimm 8y ago
      It's more of an open secret, like the way certain terms are obscured by EULAs. The information is there for anyone who wants to look into it, but most people don't care or don't have the incentive to investigate. The important thing is to have a buffer to make certain details less obvious to the majority of customers without appearing dishonest.
- loceng 8y ago
  It's more likely to cause government and society pushback if a startup can't compete against the disliked behaviour, shooting themselves in the foot in the long-term for short-term gain.
- kevin_b_er 8y ago
  You will not. Ticketmaster has exclusivity contracts with venues. You cannot bypass them unless the venue and ticketmaster want you to. The very nature of the exclusivity contract prevents your startup idea. Unless they are also scalpers in good graces with ticketmaster, there's no tickets for them in the first place.
  - soared 8y ago
    Cities had exclusivity contracts (medallions) with cab companies.
    - ascagnel_ 8y ago
      Ticketmaster has exclusivity on the infrastructure (venues) -- a rival service would need to create their own network of venues.
      - ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
        That's part of the issue but the bigger than venues, was the merger between LiveNation and Ticketmaster, that congress decided to approve. LiveNation is the promoter of every major artist and tour. When that merger happened Ticketmaster gained the ability to basically block any Arena Size artist of going on tour if they weren't using Ticketmaster.
  - benbristow 8y ago
    In the UK TicketMaster own many venues. They even own the companies that run the concerts too. For example in Scotland the main company that runs all the 'big' events is DF Concerts & Events who are owned by LiveNation who themselves are partially owned by TicketMaster. They also host festivals like 'T(ennents) in The Park' and 'TRNSMT' and own their own venues like 'King Tuts Wah Wah Hut'. LiveNation also own many venues around the country. Basically you're stuck with them. I find it's relatively easy to get tickets though. Presales (through Spotify, DF concerts themselves ('gigsinscotland.com' and Spanish/Telefonica owned telecom company O2) or just being fast on the website is normally good enough. There are other companies in the UK that run ticketing sales too. SeeTickets is quite big and the Ticketmaster owned TicketWeb. Both give better chances of getting tickets.
- gt2 8y ago
  ticketswap is a start. Most ethical ticket platform I've ever experienced and for multiple transactions. Granted it's for reselling but to me it's the same because approx 4 out of 5 times, I have waited to buy tickets expecting to be able to buy them reasonably priced there and succeeded. I like to think of it as other fans selling them there but I could be wrong. Just seems like people trying to recoup the face value +/- 20%. Never seen more of a markup than that.
- temuze 8y ago
  Seatgeek is moving into the primary market and they're crushing it. Hope they drive TM out of business.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  Never. Competitors show up once in awhile. If they see anyone with improved technology, they buy them. Otherwise, they have the market power to box competitors in. The only way they will ever lose is if some sort of regulatory action made it impossible to get exclusivity agreements. Taxis are the most overrated cartels. In most geographies taxis were just conduits for Medicare/Medicaid money who also gave rides to drunks and to the airport. Ticketmaster has more control of the market, and has it on a national scale.
- csteubs 8y ago
  I hope it happens, but there's been more than one startup out to take on the ticket resales issue that ends up drowning in their own obscurity. Some Stanford 20-something who's been robbed on a markup or some exorbitant fee inevitably shouts "BLOCKCHAIN!" in the same sentence as "ticketing" and nothing comes of it.
oflannabhra 8y ago
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-screwed/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/live-event-ticket-market-scr...
- jrockway 8y ago
  It's kind of unfortunate. I am perfectly willing to allow the artist to gouge me. If 2000 people want to see the concert and there are 1000 seats, what choice do they have? Sure, next time book a bigger venue, but this time... you just have to let people bid on the tickets and sell them to the 1000 highest bidders. I feel like I've always gotten a good deal on the secondary market. Every so often I am in Japan in late August and like to attend a 3 day anime song concert. The tickets are sold way in advance, and are $60 (ish) for a randomly selected seat in Saitama Super Arena. This means your $60 may get you a front row seat or one on the upper balcony behind a pillar, you don't know. And you have to physically buy the thing from a convenience store in Japan 6 months in advance. So the primary market is just bad. I end up just buying tickets on Yahoo Auctions and for $200 I get a front row seat. Would I have been just as happy to give that $200 directly to the people running the event? Yup! But they don't let me, so they lose out on $240. Multiply that by thousands of tickets sold, and you wonder whether or not any of these people ever attended business school. Similarly, you can get reverse gouged on unpopular events. My brothers are big basketball fans. Whenever they visit New York, we go see the Nets play. The Nets are historically terrible and never fill up the arena, but apparently they sell a lot of tickets for corporate events. These tickets end up on the secondary market for reasonable prices, and that's what I buy. The list price can be something like $1000 and yet we buy them for $100. (I also enjoy the banter with the coworkers of the people that sold us their tickets. Every time, it's "I can't believe so-and-so sold their tickets!" But people are drinking and you can't take yourself too seriously and be a Nets fan, so it's all in good fun.) Anyway, kind of wandered off topic... but the only way to make demand meet supply is to gouge people, so that supply falls to exactly meet demand. The artist deserves the money, not middlemen.
buf 8y ago
Eventbrite should be ringing the NYSE bell pretty soon, but even Eventbrite is unable to penetrate the decade long deals Ticketmaster has in place.
saudioger 8y ago
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.
- my_usernam3 8y ago
  What do you mean ticketing scam? Scalping? If so, I'm confused on how you might stop it without allowing people who can't go last minute to resell their ticket. This feels like a damned if you do, damned if you don't situations. Also which class action lawsuit are you talking about
  - saudioger 8y ago
    This is a professional reseller program. It's not about individuals reselling tickets last minute. This is specifically about squeezing more money out of average customers using scalping methods. Sorry for being vague about the lawsuit/settlement, it's just enraging that ticketmaster has been so shitty for so long... yet my options are still generally: 1. use ticketmaster 2. don't get tickets The settlement was: http://settlement.livenation.com/ http://settlement.livenation.com/ — in which Ticketmaster ended up giving tons of borderline _unusable_ vouchers to customers in settlement (the lawsuit was over fees and took a decade to reach settlement). You have to sit and watch their site for specific availability to generally lower-tiered events and hope you're fast enough to actually get the available slots (you're competing against millions of people who also have vouchers). https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/22/business/media/ticketmaster-lawsuit-vouchers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/22/business/media/ticketmast...
    - jandrese 8y ago
      I'm sure the attorneys were well paid at least. Those things are almost as bad as those coupons for $10 off your next IOMega product because your Zip drive was a piece of overpriced garbage.
ageitgey 8y ago
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).
- josh2600 8y ago
  It's subtly more complicated than this. There's the price people are willing to pay before something is "sold out" and exclusive, and the price people are willing to pay to get access to an experience they can't otherwise get. It's the fact that someone can press a button and get summoned to a show that they wouldn't otherwise have access to that provides some kind of dopamine rush that isn't the same as waiting in line on a website madly refreshing a page hoping for a ticket.
  - SilasX 8y ago
    Lesson: If you base your buying decision on whether it's sold out, expect the market to exploit you.
  - ageitgey 8y ago
    I agree that is one factor at work, but performers have caught onto this in the last couple of years and have started to offer a lot of exclusive VIP packages to try to capture this price-insensitive market. I'm thinking more about mass scalping for events like Hamilton where every single ticket is bought up instantly by bots for the next four months. There is essentially no way to reliably buy the tickets at normal prices. I tried to buy tickets for Hamilton's touring show and there were hundreds of resell tickets listed on StubHub while I was still trying to get through the process of even seeing if I could find tickets myself. It was completely absurd. A significant percentage of the total available seating must have been scalped. I've done a little work in this space tangentially in the past. The resale market is highly developed with a lot of money at stake and inventory is readily available at every price level and ticket type. Have you ever noticed how every resale site has more or less the same tickets for sale? There are a few middlemen companies that provide the ticket inventory for any reseller to sell instantaneously via API feeds. Stubhub is in both businesses - selling to customers and acting as a middleman to other sellers. It's way more developed than most people think.
walrus01 8y ago
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.
jrockway 8y ago
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.
- Sgt_Apone 8y ago
  I really like that they add supplementary and primary source documents. Seems like something that more news organizations should do.
- devhead 8y ago
  i'm a huge fan of the work cbc does; IMHO they strongly exemplify a more true journalistic enterprise. kudos on the excellent reporting as usual.
soperj 8y ago
How is the artist not getting absolutely screwed in this situation?
jdblair 8y ago
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.
- baddox 8y ago
  Because many performers want their concerts to be accessible to their broad fanbase, and this is probably better for their bottom line in the long run, since there is sure to be animosity towards a popular performer once fans discover that only very rich people can attend their concerts.
  - jdblair 8y ago
    If that's the goal, then active measures to deter reselling tickets should be used. Thom Yorke succeeded at this when I saw him earlier this year. All tickets were Will Call and you had to enter immediately after ticket pickup. Selling tickets in a way that puts fans in direct competition with well-resourced resellers doesn't help fans either.
- derrekl 8y ago
  I worked for Ticketmaster back in the early 2000s and helped build an auction platform for them. Some artists did use it for the highest quality seats, and a few even did it for the entire venue, but many artists were afraid of it because they felt like they would then be the responsible party for 'squeezing' their fans. Perhaps the idea that they would get the money along with other people running the event, as opposed to scalpers didn't resonate. I wasn't around when the platform was decommissioned so I can't say for sure all the factors at play but, for sure many artists didn't like the idea.
- analog31 8y ago
  This could backfire if the social makeup of the fan base / audience is part of the band's market appeal.
sandworm101 8y ago
>> "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.
wnmurphy 8y ago
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.
- kbenson 8y ago
  Part of Ticketmaster's purpose is to allow the artist, promoter and venue to charge extra but in a way that shifts blame to Ticketmaster. They are wildly successful in that, as evidenced by the number of people that bring up this exact point. If you look at the fees, often there's a "venue fee" and other ones. They are different per event, but often are similar per tour and per venue... which means it's being set by artists, promoters and venues. It's trivial to show all-in pricing (some events have it turned on, so it's what you actually see on the main page). They don't do so on purpose.
  - somebodythere 8y ago
    I hear this a lot, and it might just be me, but I'd feel better about a $50 purchase where the $50 dollars all go to the artist/venue, vs a $50 purchase where $30 goes to the artist and $20 purportedly goes to Ticketmaster.
    - kbenson 8y ago
      Except a vanishingly small number of tickets for popular events are even going for $50 any more, and how do you feel with the ticket costs $95 but you're actually paying over $20 extra for it? Sticker shock is real. Avoiding a $115 ticket price helps avoid some of that outrage. Here's a case study: The last couple weeks Paul McCartney went on sale in a few places. At PNC Arena[1], the the prices for standard tickets were as follows[2]: 25.50 + 15.59 = 41.09 (+61%) 65.50 + 18.54 = 84.04 (+28%) 95.50 + 20.41 = 115.91 (+21%) 165.50 + 27.92 = 193.42 (+17%) 250.00 + 39.24 = 289.24 (+16%) That doesn't look too bad, until you consider that the lowest price offer, which is just over $41 all said and done, but there were only about 250 tickets at that price level releases, for a venue that holds about 20,000 people. That's just over 1% of capacity. Less than 1,000 tickets of the $65.50 price level were released (and you had to pay $84 to get them). Less than 3,000 of the $95 price level (almost $116 for those) were released. Now, I'm not sure exactly how you interpret that, but I suspect I know why they put put in a very low price level but didn't stock it with much inventory, and it wasn't to make sure deserving fans got a chance. It does conveniently allow them to to say that brokers grabbed all the cheap inventory in the beginning though... That's not to say every artist does this. Some provide quite a large amount of low priced tickets, but the trend on that is down, not up, from what I've seen. 1: https://www1.ticketmaster.com/event/2D00551BBC524826 https://www1.ticketmaster.com/event/2D00551BBC524826 2: Feel free to check for yourself. Use this JS snippet in a developer console from the event page: _storeUtils.eventJSONData.tickets.filter(offer=>offer.description.match(/Standard Admission/))[0] .prices.sort((a,b)=>a.amount>b.amount).forEach(pl => console.log(`${pl.combinedFees} + ${pl.combinedFees} = ${pl.displayAmountWithFeesTaxes} (+${Math.round((pl.combinedFees/pl.amount)*100)}%)`) )
howeyc 8y ago
Sell tickets by auction, it would extract maximum value and kill the scalping market.
satanic_pope 8y ago
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.
- kbenson 8y ago
  > 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. Well, a lot of that is because more and more tickets are sold during presales (passworded or not, such as Amex presales). Sometimes there's less than 10% of inventory available on the regular sale. Sometimes there's more, but they hold back a few thousand to drop on the market to sell later. The majority of stuff you see on Stubhub within minutes might have been listed on Stubhub for a day or two, or been primed to be pushed to stubhub at that moment for a day or two, since they were bought previously. It's not hard to get access to most presales. If you have an Amex, you're already qualified for one of the earliest presales they have on most events. Same for Citi for some venues. Other than that, you can sign up for fan clubs to get passwords, or just search around. > 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? Alternatively to what I said above, sometimes very little is released in a presale. It's a crap shoot, and depends on the tour strategy. Yes, brokers will buy. Sometimes they over-buy too, and you can get tickets cheaper (this can be fairly common, actually). I'll tell you this, regardless of what this article says, Ticketmaster is always rolling out new mechanisms to make it easier for fans and harder for brokers. Recently they started using new queue systems for some sales, and a new ticket buying interface, as well as much more complicated bot detection heuristics. Ticketmaster has multiple divisions. The secondary market division (TM+, their new Point of Sale offering) might not necessarily want brokers excluded, but the rest of the company must put a lot of engineering effort into it, given what I've seen. That they don't go seeking out accounts makes sense to me, because there are legitimate reasons to buy a lot of tickets (corporate bonus gifts, a concierge service, etc), and inaccurately targeting one of those will cause a lot of trouble, and maybe even a court case (if I was a concierge service with a few hundred tickets in their system, and they cancelled them all, I would consider a lawsuit because they've had my money for months and been able to capitalize on it, and if the alternative is a crippled business...) > The whole experience was mind numbing.Can't wait for Amazon tickets to disrupt this space and drive 'em out. It's a market, with supply and demand. If you think a new entrant will change anything, I'm sorry, but I think it's unlikely. There's already multiple ticketing companies, Ticketmaster is just the largest. AXS ticketing does some large venues as well.
misiti3780 8y ago
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/ http://settlement.livenation.com/
forkLding 8y ago
So HFT taking advantage of ticket sales arbitrage?
edoceo 8y ago
Ages ago I was paid by professional scalpers to build bots on TM to get the "fruit". Fun times.
jiveturkey 8y ago
"secret"
brian-armstrong 8y ago
Guess it's not so secret anymore
throwawaymanbot 8y ago
hello?..... FBI?
kbenson 8y ago
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.
TallGuyShort 8y ago
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?
En_gr_Student 8y ago
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.
bumholio 8y ago
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.
browsercoin 8y ago
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?
- bluetidepro 8y ago
  It's because the venues are the ones partnered with these types of companies. Unless the artist themselves own a venue, they usually have to go through the ticketing of whatever that venue itself uses. The artists sadly don't get that much control on that type of thing, esp the average artist that doesn't have the type of "klout" to demand X Y Z happen for them to play that venue.
allworknoplay 8y ago
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.
wilgertvelinga 8y ago
One of the few blockchain companies I actually see the value in is https://guts.tickets 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)
dfxm12 8y ago
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.
tantalor 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RICO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RICO
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j45 8y ago
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.
kaveh_h 8y ago
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.
bogomipz 8y ago
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 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123672740386088613 and https://www.theringer.com/2016/6/3/16045790/ticket-industry-problem-solution-e4b3b71fdff6 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.
rystband 8y ago
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 https://www.rystband.com
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aidenn0 8y ago
Has Ticketmaster hit the point where their brand image is so bad that they aren't hurt at all by bad press?
- Deestan 8y ago
  Their reputation doesn't matter. If Favorite Artist comes to town to play, you will buy a ticket because you love the artist. Whether the ticket handler is a piece of shit is inconsequential.
porscheburnaby 8y ago
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.

517 points by rinze 8y ago

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.

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lawnchair_larry 8y ago

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.

atomical 8y ago
How do you prevent scalpers? Better KYC?
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Tickets are associated to a name at purchase; you are then required to provide corresponding ID upon admission at the event. Very similar to non-refundable airline tickets (which was designed to kill the secondary market for airline tickets [1]). If you cannot attend, your ticket expires worthless. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame has been doing this as part of his fan club for over a decade, and is a vocal opponent of scalpers [2]. [1] https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-I-resell-my-air-ticket-to-someone-else-if-I-dont-want-to-travel?share=1 https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-I-resell-my-air-ticket-to-som... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=trent+reznor+ticket+scalping https://www.google.com/search?q=trent+reznor+ticket+scalping
  - monksy 8y ago
    They did say that they were doing that. However.. they're still selling tickets through Livenation. That was only happening via the Presales. Source: I have a ticket for NIN that I bought on Stubhub.
    - deleted 8y ago
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- NedIsakoff 8y ago
  Do what our glorious province did, make a cap on reseller pricing.
  - elorant 8y ago
    Then they'll sell them through unofficial channels.
- monksy 8y ago
  Pre-Auctioning tickets. That'll increase their risk and exposure. Also, do the same as Kamakazie did... don't preannounce shows.
- ScoutOrgo 8y ago
  Add a marketplace for resells to same place face value tickets are sold. Would be same site, but could be different pages or w/e. Cap resells at face value, removing incentive to flip. Then to prevent resells, would need an app with ticket barcode that changes over time, like most 2 factor auth apps. This should help prevent resells via printing and screen shots. I expect that's not foolproof, but could prevent the easiest alternative market. This would work offline too which is a plus since service at big events is generally bad. Could also make transfers as easy as venmo through the app. The whole idea is to remove incentives from resells and make it easy as possible for people to transfer legitimately.
- ticmasta 8y ago
  I think you need to use basic supply/demand economics; the original sales price needs to be near the limit people are willing to pay scalpers. There's no secondary market if the scalper needs to pay near the maximum value of the seat. The entire legit reseller market is just TicketMaster trying to get a piece of the pie that the promoter left on the table. There's a misalignment of incentives for most events. The performer gets paid for the show regardless if there's one attendee or it's a sell-out (some acts do share in gate and/or merch). They want the lowest ticket prices. The promoter is on the hook for a lot of fixed costs so they need to sell enough tickets to break-even; everything beyond that is profit from selling more tickets or higher prices. The venue gets rented but then TM "offers" them a per-seat fee in exchange for exclusivity. Then TM gets big processing and assorted fees for every act. Then resellers, legit or not, buy blocks of tickets that they resell in a dynamic market, prices floating based on demand and timing. Now we have TM coming back and saying "we'll offer you a marketplace and make it easier for you to secure supply (via bots and other shady processes)".
- quantum_magpie 8y ago
  Print the name of concert-goer on the ticket. Require photo ID at the entrance to the venue. No resales, get a refund from the ticket seller if you can't go.
monocasa 8y ago
The thing is, that the concertgoer isn't Ticketmaster's customer really as they see it. The venue is who they see as the customer as they are the ones who pick which ticketing agency will be used. And venues actually tend to like Ticketmaster overall. EDIT: Also, I'm going to throw out there that I've heard rumors in the industry where if a venue doesn't get the percentages they're looking for from the artist, they'll scalp the tickets themselves obfuscated slightly.
- darkerside 8y ago
  > doesn't get the percentages they're looking for What does that mean? Not selling out the venue?
  - monocasa 8y ago
    They weren't able to negotiate the percentage of the proceeds of the ticket sale that they wanted.
  - jandrese 8y ago
    Artist negotiating too high a cut of each ticket.
ewzimm 8y ago
The difference is that people disliking Ticketmaster is actually a feature of their brand. The vast majority goes to the artist, but Ticketmaster takes a lot of blame for high prices, and everyone wins.
- creaghpatr 8y ago
  I would say less on the artist side and more on the sports side. Artists at minimum pay lip service to prevent scalping and some appear to at least try and avoid scalping (by requiring cardholder to be present for example) Edit: also want to add that no one thinks Lebron James is having a hand in setting ticketing policies whereas Taylor Swift probably has someone asking for her input
  - chc 8y ago
    Eh, I don't know how much of a say artists have either. Back in the '90s, Pearl Jam tried to get the price on their tickets down and ended up canceling the tour and pursuing antitrust charges against Ticketmaster.
- Yhippa 8y ago
  Financially, scalpers could take a hit too if they buy a ton of tickets and then have to sell them for a loss.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Considering how frequently this idea is trotted out(I count 4 times in this hn post), are the artists really fooling anyone?
  - ewzimm 8y ago
    It's more of an open secret, like the way certain terms are obscured by EULAs. The information is there for anyone who wants to look into it, but most people don't care or don't have the incentive to investigate. The important thing is to have a buffer to make certain details less obvious to the majority of customers without appearing dishonest.
loceng 8y ago
It's more likely to cause government and society pushback if a startup can't compete against the disliked behaviour, shooting themselves in the foot in the long-term for short-term gain.
kevin_b_er 8y ago
You will not. Ticketmaster has exclusivity contracts with venues. You cannot bypass them unless the venue and ticketmaster want you to. The very nature of the exclusivity contract prevents your startup idea. Unless they are also scalpers in good graces with ticketmaster, there's no tickets for them in the first place.
- soared 8y ago
  Cities had exclusivity contracts (medallions) with cab companies.
  - ascagnel_ 8y ago
    Ticketmaster has exclusivity on the infrastructure (venues) -- a rival service would need to create their own network of venues.
    - ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
      That's part of the issue but the bigger than venues, was the merger between LiveNation and Ticketmaster, that congress decided to approve. LiveNation is the promoter of every major artist and tour. When that merger happened Ticketmaster gained the ability to basically block any Arena Size artist of going on tour if they weren't using Ticketmaster.
- benbristow 8y ago
  In the UK TicketMaster own many venues. They even own the companies that run the concerts too. For example in Scotland the main company that runs all the 'big' events is DF Concerts & Events who are owned by LiveNation who themselves are partially owned by TicketMaster. They also host festivals like 'T(ennents) in The Park' and 'TRNSMT' and own their own venues like 'King Tuts Wah Wah Hut'. LiveNation also own many venues around the country. Basically you're stuck with them. I find it's relatively easy to get tickets though. Presales (through Spotify, DF concerts themselves ('gigsinscotland.com' and Spanish/Telefonica owned telecom company O2) or just being fast on the website is normally good enough. There are other companies in the UK that run ticketing sales too. SeeTickets is quite big and the Ticketmaster owned TicketWeb. Both give better chances of getting tickets.
gt2 8y ago
ticketswap is a start. Most ethical ticket platform I've ever experienced and for multiple transactions. Granted it's for reselling but to me it's the same because approx 4 out of 5 times, I have waited to buy tickets expecting to be able to buy them reasonably priced there and succeeded. I like to think of it as other fans selling them there but I could be wrong. Just seems like people trying to recoup the face value +/- 20%. Never seen more of a markup than that.
temuze 8y ago
Seatgeek is moving into the primary market and they're crushing it. Hope they drive TM out of business.
Spooky23 8y ago
Never. Competitors show up once in awhile. If they see anyone with improved technology, they buy them. Otherwise, they have the market power to box competitors in. The only way they will ever lose is if some sort of regulatory action made it impossible to get exclusivity agreements. Taxis are the most overrated cartels. In most geographies taxis were just conduits for Medicare/Medicaid money who also gave rides to drunks and to the airport. Ticketmaster has more control of the market, and has it on a national scale.
csteubs 8y ago
I hope it happens, but there's been more than one startup out to take on the ticket resales issue that ends up drowning in their own obscurity. Some Stanford 20-something who's been robbed on a markup or some exorbitant fee inevitably shouts "BLOCKCHAIN!" in the same sentence as "ticketing" and nothing comes of it.

oflannabhra 8y ago

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-screwed/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/live-event-ticket-market-scr...

jrockway 8y ago
It's kind of unfortunate. I am perfectly willing to allow the artist to gouge me. If 2000 people want to see the concert and there are 1000 seats, what choice do they have? Sure, next time book a bigger venue, but this time... you just have to let people bid on the tickets and sell them to the 1000 highest bidders. I feel like I've always gotten a good deal on the secondary market. Every so often I am in Japan in late August and like to attend a 3 day anime song concert. The tickets are sold way in advance, and are $60 (ish) for a randomly selected seat in Saitama Super Arena. This means your $60 may get you a front row seat or one on the upper balcony behind a pillar, you don't know. And you have to physically buy the thing from a convenience store in Japan 6 months in advance. So the primary market is just bad. I end up just buying tickets on Yahoo Auctions and for $200 I get a front row seat. Would I have been just as happy to give that $200 directly to the people running the event? Yup! But they don't let me, so they lose out on $240. Multiply that by thousands of tickets sold, and you wonder whether or not any of these people ever attended business school. Similarly, you can get reverse gouged on unpopular events. My brothers are big basketball fans. Whenever they visit New York, we go see the Nets play. The Nets are historically terrible and never fill up the arena, but apparently they sell a lot of tickets for corporate events. These tickets end up on the secondary market for reasonable prices, and that's what I buy. The list price can be something like $1000 and yet we buy them for $100. (I also enjoy the banter with the coworkers of the people that sold us their tickets. Every time, it's "I can't believe so-and-so sold their tickets!" But people are drinking and you can't take yourself too seriously and be a Nets fan, so it's all in good fun.) Anyway, kind of wandered off topic... but the only way to make demand meet supply is to gouge people, so that supply falls to exactly meet demand. The artist deserves the money, not middlemen.

buf 8y ago

Eventbrite should be ringing the NYSE bell pretty soon, but even Eventbrite is unable to penetrate the decade long deals Ticketmaster has in place.

saudioger 8y ago

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.

my_usernam3 8y ago
What do you mean ticketing scam? Scalping? If so, I'm confused on how you might stop it without allowing people who can't go last minute to resell their ticket. This feels like a damned if you do, damned if you don't situations. Also which class action lawsuit are you talking about
- saudioger 8y ago
  This is a professional reseller program. It's not about individuals reselling tickets last minute. This is specifically about squeezing more money out of average customers using scalping methods. Sorry for being vague about the lawsuit/settlement, it's just enraging that ticketmaster has been so shitty for so long... yet my options are still generally: 1. use ticketmaster 2. don't get tickets The settlement was: http://settlement.livenation.com/ http://settlement.livenation.com/ — in which Ticketmaster ended up giving tons of borderline _unusable_ vouchers to customers in settlement (the lawsuit was over fees and took a decade to reach settlement). You have to sit and watch their site for specific availability to generally lower-tiered events and hope you're fast enough to actually get the available slots (you're competing against millions of people who also have vouchers). https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/22/business/media/ticketmaster-lawsuit-vouchers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/22/business/media/ticketmast...
  - jandrese 8y ago
    I'm sure the attorneys were well paid at least. Those things are almost as bad as those coupons for $10 off your next IOMega product because your Zip drive was a piece of overpriced garbage.

ageitgey 8y ago

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).

josh2600 8y ago
It's subtly more complicated than this. There's the price people are willing to pay before something is "sold out" and exclusive, and the price people are willing to pay to get access to an experience they can't otherwise get. It's the fact that someone can press a button and get summoned to a show that they wouldn't otherwise have access to that provides some kind of dopamine rush that isn't the same as waiting in line on a website madly refreshing a page hoping for a ticket.
- SilasX 8y ago
  Lesson: If you base your buying decision on whether it's sold out, expect the market to exploit you.
- ageitgey 8y ago
  I agree that is one factor at work, but performers have caught onto this in the last couple of years and have started to offer a lot of exclusive VIP packages to try to capture this price-insensitive market. I'm thinking more about mass scalping for events like Hamilton where every single ticket is bought up instantly by bots for the next four months. There is essentially no way to reliably buy the tickets at normal prices. I tried to buy tickets for Hamilton's touring show and there were hundreds of resell tickets listed on StubHub while I was still trying to get through the process of even seeing if I could find tickets myself. It was completely absurd. A significant percentage of the total available seating must have been scalped. I've done a little work in this space tangentially in the past. The resale market is highly developed with a lot of money at stake and inventory is readily available at every price level and ticket type. Have you ever noticed how every resale site has more or less the same tickets for sale? There are a few middlemen companies that provide the ticket inventory for any reseller to sell instantaneously via API feeds. Stubhub is in both businesses - selling to customers and acting as a middleman to other sellers. It's way more developed than most people think.

walrus01 8y ago

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.

jrockway 8y ago

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.

Sgt_Apone 8y ago
I really like that they add supplementary and primary source documents. Seems like something that more news organizations should do.
devhead 8y ago
i'm a huge fan of the work cbc does; IMHO they strongly exemplify a more true journalistic enterprise. kudos on the excellent reporting as usual.

soperj 8y ago

How is the artist not getting absolutely screwed in this situation?

jdblair 8y ago

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.

baddox 8y ago
Because many performers want their concerts to be accessible to their broad fanbase, and this is probably better for their bottom line in the long run, since there is sure to be animosity towards a popular performer once fans discover that only very rich people can attend their concerts.
- jdblair 8y ago
  If that's the goal, then active measures to deter reselling tickets should be used. Thom Yorke succeeded at this when I saw him earlier this year. All tickets were Will Call and you had to enter immediately after ticket pickup. Selling tickets in a way that puts fans in direct competition with well-resourced resellers doesn't help fans either.
derrekl 8y ago
I worked for Ticketmaster back in the early 2000s and helped build an auction platform for them. Some artists did use it for the highest quality seats, and a few even did it for the entire venue, but many artists were afraid of it because they felt like they would then be the responsible party for 'squeezing' their fans. Perhaps the idea that they would get the money along with other people running the event, as opposed to scalpers didn't resonate. I wasn't around when the platform was decommissioned so I can't say for sure all the factors at play but, for sure many artists didn't like the idea.
analog31 8y ago
This could backfire if the social makeup of the fan base / audience is part of the band's market appeal.

sandworm101 8y ago

>> "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.

wnmurphy 8y ago

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.

kbenson 8y ago
Part of Ticketmaster's purpose is to allow the artist, promoter and venue to charge extra but in a way that shifts blame to Ticketmaster. They are wildly successful in that, as evidenced by the number of people that bring up this exact point. If you look at the fees, often there's a "venue fee" and other ones. They are different per event, but often are similar per tour and per venue... which means it's being set by artists, promoters and venues. It's trivial to show all-in pricing (some events have it turned on, so it's what you actually see on the main page). They don't do so on purpose.
- somebodythere 8y ago
  I hear this a lot, and it might just be me, but I'd feel better about a $50 purchase where the $50 dollars all go to the artist/venue, vs a $50 purchase where $30 goes to the artist and $20 purportedly goes to Ticketmaster.
  - kbenson 8y ago
    Except a vanishingly small number of tickets for popular events are even going for $50 any more, and how do you feel with the ticket costs $95 but you're actually paying over $20 extra for it? Sticker shock is real. Avoiding a $115 ticket price helps avoid some of that outrage. Here's a case study: The last couple weeks Paul McCartney went on sale in a few places. At PNC Arena[1], the the prices for standard tickets were as follows[2]: 25.50 + 15.59 = 41.09 (+61%) 65.50 + 18.54 = 84.04 (+28%) 95.50 + 20.41 = 115.91 (+21%) 165.50 + 27.92 = 193.42 (+17%) 250.00 + 39.24 = 289.24 (+16%) That doesn't look too bad, until you consider that the lowest price offer, which is just over $41 all said and done, but there were only about 250 tickets at that price level releases, for a venue that holds about 20,000 people. That's just over 1% of capacity. Less than 1,000 tickets of the $65.50 price level were released (and you had to pay $84 to get them). Less than 3,000 of the $95 price level (almost $116 for those) were released. Now, I'm not sure exactly how you interpret that, but I suspect I know why they put put in a very low price level but didn't stock it with much inventory, and it wasn't to make sure deserving fans got a chance. It does conveniently allow them to to say that brokers grabbed all the cheap inventory in the beginning though... That's not to say every artist does this. Some provide quite a large amount of low priced tickets, but the trend on that is down, not up, from what I've seen. 1: https://www1.ticketmaster.com/event/2D00551BBC524826 https://www1.ticketmaster.com/event/2D00551BBC524826 2: Feel free to check for yourself. Use this JS snippet in a developer console from the event page: _storeUtils.eventJSONData.tickets.filter(offer=>offer.description.match(/Standard Admission/))[0] .prices.sort((a,b)=>a.amount>b.amount).forEach(pl => console.log(`${pl.combinedFees} + ${pl.combinedFees} = ${pl.displayAmountWithFeesTaxes} (+${Math.round((pl.combinedFees/pl.amount)*100)}%)`) )

howeyc 8y ago

Sell tickets by auction, it would extract maximum value and kill the scalping market.

satanic_pope 8y ago

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.

kbenson 8y ago
> 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. Well, a lot of that is because more and more tickets are sold during presales (passworded or not, such as Amex presales). Sometimes there's less than 10% of inventory available on the regular sale. Sometimes there's more, but they hold back a few thousand to drop on the market to sell later. The majority of stuff you see on Stubhub within minutes might have been listed on Stubhub for a day or two, or been primed to be pushed to stubhub at that moment for a day or two, since they were bought previously. It's not hard to get access to most presales. If you have an Amex, you're already qualified for one of the earliest presales they have on most events. Same for Citi for some venues. Other than that, you can sign up for fan clubs to get passwords, or just search around. > 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? Alternatively to what I said above, sometimes very little is released in a presale. It's a crap shoot, and depends on the tour strategy. Yes, brokers will buy. Sometimes they over-buy too, and you can get tickets cheaper (this can be fairly common, actually). I'll tell you this, regardless of what this article says, Ticketmaster is always rolling out new mechanisms to make it easier for fans and harder for brokers. Recently they started using new queue systems for some sales, and a new ticket buying interface, as well as much more complicated bot detection heuristics. Ticketmaster has multiple divisions. The secondary market division (TM+, their new Point of Sale offering) might not necessarily want brokers excluded, but the rest of the company must put a lot of engineering effort into it, given what I've seen. That they don't go seeking out accounts makes sense to me, because there are legitimate reasons to buy a lot of tickets (corporate bonus gifts, a concierge service, etc), and inaccurately targeting one of those will cause a lot of trouble, and maybe even a court case (if I was a concierge service with a few hundred tickets in their system, and they cancelled them all, I would consider a lawsuit because they've had my money for months and been able to capitalize on it, and if the alternative is a crippled business...) > The whole experience was mind numbing.Can't wait for Amazon tickets to disrupt this space and drive 'em out. It's a market, with supply and demand. If you think a new entrant will change anything, I'm sorry, but I think it's unlikely. There's already multiple ticketing companies, Ticketmaster is just the largest. AXS ticketing does some large venues as well.

misiti3780 8y ago

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/ http://settlement.livenation.com/

forkLding 8y ago

So HFT taking advantage of ticket sales arbitrage?

edoceo 8y ago

Ages ago I was paid by professional scalpers to build bots on TM to get the "fruit". Fun times.

jiveturkey 8y ago

"secret"

brian-armstrong 8y ago

Guess it's not so secret anymore

throwawaymanbot 8y ago

hello?..... FBI?

kbenson 8y ago

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.

TallGuyShort 8y ago

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?

En_gr_Student 8y ago

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.

bumholio 8y ago

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.

browsercoin 8y ago

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?

bluetidepro 8y ago
It's because the venues are the ones partnered with these types of companies. Unless the artist themselves own a venue, they usually have to go through the ticketing of whatever that venue itself uses. The artists sadly don't get that much control on that type of thing, esp the average artist that doesn't have the type of "klout" to demand X Y Z happen for them to play that venue.

allworknoplay 8y ago

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.

wilgertvelinga 8y ago

One of the few blockchain companies I actually see the value in is https://guts.tickets 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)

dfxm12 8y ago

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.

tantalor 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RICO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RICO

deleted 8y ago

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j45 8y ago

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.

kaveh_h 8y ago

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.

bogomipz 8y ago

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 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123672740386088613 and https://www.theringer.com/2016/6/3/16045790/ticket-industry-problem-solution-e4b3b71fdff6 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.

rystband 8y ago

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 https://www.rystband.com

deleted 8y ago

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aidenn0 8y ago

Has Ticketmaster hit the point where their brand image is so bad that they aren't hurt at all by bad press?

Deestan 8y ago
Their reputation doesn't matter. If Favorite Artist comes to town to play, you will buy a ticket because you love the artist. Whether the ticket handler is a piece of shit is inconsequential.

porscheburnaby 8y ago

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.