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Rammstein Get Restraining Order Blocking Viagogo from Reselling Concert Tickets

205 points by nabilhat 4y ago

bheadmaster 4y ago
I hope scalping in general become outlawed. The practice is just pure opportunism - it literally brings no value to anyone, it only extracts value from hotspots of popular demand.
- t-writescode 4y ago
  Arguably, scalping is capitalism in motion. In situations where the supply and demand curves are unbalanced, especially due to things like MSRP (which tend to be agreements between manufacturer and seller) when supply and demand are wildly out of sync (like the graphics card supply shortage), scalpers may more accurately reflect the "true price" of things. Of course, it can go too far and become a monopoly, just like anything in capitalism without restraint; but they do have a purpose
  - mertd 4y ago
    Scalping is unpleasant for everyone involved other than the scalper. Entertainment industry is finally catching up to the real fix, which is increasing the supply. If there is way too big of a demand for a single concert, just hold more concerts at the same spot. It's basically the Vegas residency model. Sure you might visit less cities overall but not rebuilding a stage every other day yields a substantial savings in logistics, too.
    - cortesoft 4y ago
      > Scalping is unpleasant for everyone involved other than the scalper. It is more pleasant than the alternative for the person buying a ticket from the scalper; not going at all. If there weren’t scalpers, you just don’t get a ticket at all because they are already sold out. Scalpers are what let you get a ticket so at all. You can’t just play more shows at a single location. What if every show at every venue is sold out? A band can only play so many total shows.
      - m000 4y ago
    - happyopossum 4y ago
      > Scalping is unpleasant for everyone involved other than the scalper No, it’s also pleasant for the person who wants to go to the event and can afford to buy a ticket on the secondary market.
      - throw_m239339 4y ago
        > No, it’s also pleasant for the person who wants to go to the event and can afford to buy a ticket on the secondary market. This isn't a secondary market, this is scalping at an industrial level and provide strictly no added value whatsoever. This is only pleasant for Viagogo making a quick buck with scalp bots.
  - cbozeman 4y ago
    The graphics card shortage is probably one of the worst examples you could have tried to use. The root cause of the graphics card shortage was rampant central bank printing of currency. This is a long ride, so buckle up... TL;DR at bottom. How do we get there? Everyone got scared of a virus that was so lethal half the people who had it didn't even know they had contracted it. Yes, early on, COVID-19 looked like a contender, but six months in, we knew... we knew it killed fat people, old people, immunocompromised people. In other words, people that Nature herself is already stalking. Even with the delta variant, arguably the "worst" of the bunch, as long as you took moderately good care of yourself, weren't old, and didn't have compromised immunity, you very likely were going to be okay. In response to this, politicians, always fucking terrified of being held accountable for any decision they make, decided to lock everything down in the Western world and send out a metric ass-ton of money to everyone. Well the only way to do that is for Jerome Powell to make the money printer go "brrr". Obviously, Europeans will do whatever America does, so all their central banks made money printer go "brrr". What exactly does happen when you pour trillions of dollars into the global worldwide market? People start doing idiotic speculative investment, that's what... hence some of the most hilarious /r/WallStreetBets posts we've seen since the subreddit's creation. Meanwhile, a few people who still have their heads on straight realize that their life savings are being rapidly devalued and they start looking seriously at cryptocurrency for the first time. Even Grandma and Grandpa are buying a few of these "Byte-pieces". Meanwhile my neighbor, a bald, greying man of 53 who was literally a maintenance supervisor for manufacturing plants, ends up with a 18 GPU Ethereum farm running out of a shed on his 4 acre property in rural North Texas. That's how easy it became for the average person to set up a crypto-mining farm. A guy who graduated high school and spend 35 years turning wrenches on conveyor belts, fucking around with PLCs (which I do admit, you can't be a fool and do that...), manages to not only hoover up a shitload of GPUs during the pandemic, but also figures out how to buy mining motherboards, hook the shit all up together, and set it up so it's 24/7 mining Ethereum. He also has three 15,000 BTU air conditioners in the shed windows keeping the temps on the GPUs tolerable. So if a beer-swilling, "God, guns, and country" blue collar laborer-turned-manager can figure out how to set up an Ethereum mining farm, and if Grandpa and Grandma can figure out how to put some money into Coinbase to buy Bitcoins, then you can imagine just how easy it was for more technologically adept people to get their hands on GPUs and start mining. In Dallas, Texas at our MicroCenter, for pretty much the entire pandemic, it turned into a miniature version of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. Tents everywhere, everyone waiting for the daily lottery to see if they would get the chance to buy a GPU, so they could then go repost it on eBay, or sell it directly to a miner buddy, or just go home and install it into their own crypto-mining rig. Moving on to NVIDIA, AMD, and their board partners... they were directly selling to miners. All of them. Thus bypassing the chance for gamers to even get their hands on the cards in some instances. TSMC and Samsung were at maximum capacity every single month of the pandemic. It never slowed down, except for "acts of God". This made sense as a lot of the white collar workers found themselves in need of laptops, webcams, monitors, blah blah blah, all shit that TSMC/Samsung makes chips for. That's another reason GPU demand was so dramatic. TSMC/Samsung couldn't focus every single wafer on GPUs. They had to make all kinds of shit for all kinds of devices. So you have a two-fold hit on demand. Everyone wants a GPU, but we're having to reduce capacity for other stuff we also need. Turns out you don't actually need an RTX 3090. Talk about a "perfect storm". But wait... people are now flush with cash for getting $600 unemployment payments every week for a year or two. So they do what any rational person does... THEY INVEST IT... HAHA, JUST KIDDING! They buy... new fucking cars. Yes, people buy new cars instead of paying off mortgages early or investing their hard-earned dollars into the market. So anyway... that's how you get a GPU shortage. TL;DR: Bad virus scare people. Politicians coward. JPow make money printer go brrr. People use pandemic money to buy Magic Internet Money printers called GPUs. Everyone has to make spreadsheets at home. Everyone has to buy electronics. No more capacity to make extra GPUs. Gamers have no GPUs, go play NES on an emulator.
- cortesoft 4y ago
  I disagree. Why is it bad to let the free market determine the price for an item with limited supply? With scalping, I know that I can get a ticket at at least some price. If I want to go to an event bad enough, I can pay more and get a ticket. Without scalping, it doesn’t matter how badly I want to go to an event, if I am not lucky enough or fast enough, or able to wait in line, I can’t get a ticket. Scalping does provide a value… it creates liquidity in the market.
  - ChildOfChaos 4y ago
    But one of the reasons why you can't get a ticket in the first place, is because scalpers are buying tickets for the simple reason of reselling the ticket for a higher price. Scalpers increase market demand just as much as people that actually want to go and the only person profiting here is the scalper, who is not really deserving to do so here. If you are going to increase price with demand, at least let it go to the people behind the event/artist in a fair way.
    - josephcsible 4y ago
      > But one of the reasons why you can't get a ticket in the first place, is because scalpers are buying tickets for the simple reason of reselling the ticket for a higher price. But the only reason that scalping is profitable is that more people want to go to these events at the original ticket price than there are seats available. > If you are going to increase price with demand, at least let it go to the people behind the event/artist in a fair way. I agree with this. When a show sells out in 5 minutes, the organizers should take note and charge more the next show.
      - ChildOfChaos 4y ago
        > But the only reason that scalping is profitable is that more people want to go to these events at the original ticket price than there are seats available. In general yes, however I have seen plenty of events that didn't sell out and scalpers where left still selling tickets and perhaps some people only knew about sites like ViaGoGo so bought of there. I'm sure times when demand closely matches supply, it's still going to the scalpers because they get in there first.
- dangero 4y ago
  It definitely brings value to people who have money to buy marked up tickets and exposes the inefficiency of ticket pricing algorithms.
  - bheadmaster 4y ago
    Do you really want to live in a society where every single thing is priced as high as it's possible to extract from the people who have a lot of money? Should only rich people be allowed to afford anything?
    - pkroll 4y ago
      You do live in that society. Everyone selling something IS trying to get the highest price they can for it.
      - Thiez 4y ago
        The article is literally about a band not trying to charge the highest price they can.
        pkroll 4y ago
        That's one. And, I'll even grant that many bands would like to see their poorer fans get tickets, vs. rich fans (I mean they are still fans, right? Nobody rich is buying a ticket so they can see a band they hate... unless it's a gift. To a fan.). Anyhow that's a really tiny segment of the economy.
    - dangero 4y ago
      > Should only rich people be allowed to afford anything? How else do you recommend dispersing items of extreme scarcity where everybody can't have it?
- dec0dedab0de 4y ago
  Well you could say that the scalper takes risk away from the promoter, and allows the lazy consumer with money to see an event that they might have missed out on. They also usually provide cheap tickets the day of an event that has not sold out.
- benburton 4y ago
  This issue isn't as cut and dry as simply banning scalping. I spend most of my discretionary income on music... merchandise, vinyl, concert tickets. At any given point in time I have tickets to about 7-8 performances in the future. Sometimes life gets in the way, and I simply cannot attend an event. In those situations, I have a very legitimate reason to want to sell concert tickets, and I do. Sometimes I will end up selling for under what I paid, other times I will make a small profit, more rarely I will say fuck it and just give the tickets away on social media to friends or coworkers. In the long term, this generally nets me out at zero in terms of gaining/losing money on ticket purchases. My point, I guess, is that there's a legitimate, healthy reason for a resale market. Throwing the ticketing resale market out with the scalper bathwater is a myopic solution.
  - BoorishBears 4y ago
    You wrote an entire paragraph that has literally nothing to do with ticket scalping. Reselling your ticket your purchased for yourself at face value because you can't go isn't scalping.
    - benburton 4y ago
      You wrote an entire sentence that has literally nothing to do with the ticket resale market and how scalping is related. A secondary ticketing market enables scalping. There are legitimate reasons for the resale market to exist. If you think that the existence and dynamics of a resale market are unrelated to scalping... I would encourage you to look into critical reasoning courses which are perhaps available at your local community college at a low cost. How do you propose we eliminate scalping, while preserving the secondary market? Go ahead, I'm waiting. Literally all ticketing companies are waiting for your profound insight.
      - xboxnolifes 4y ago
        > How do you propose we eliminate scalping, while preserving the secondary market? Go ahead, I'm waiting. Literally all ticketing companies are waiting for your profound insight. Mark the ticket (physical or digital) with the price paid for it, and make it illegal to resell over this price. You may still have smaller scalping rings, but you would be enabled to go after the bigger scalpers.
- noxvilleza 4y ago
  Pre-COVID there was actually an EU Parliament vote in favour of adding extra laws against scalping: https://www.kerrang.com/eu-parliament-votes-in-favour-of-new-legislation-against-ticket-scalping https://www.kerrang.com/eu-parliament-votes-in-favour-of-new... - although I haven't heard much since.
sschueller 4y ago
Good, Viagogo is a horrible company and has been scaming people in Switzerland as well as all over the world. Also not the first time they lost in court.[1] Basically the Uber of ticket sales, move fast, break laws, make an exit and walk away millionaires. This crap needs to stop. Viagogo purchases tickets with fake names and addresses to then resells them for a much higher price. This is illegal in Switzerland and probably also in many European countries. [1] https://www.srf.ch/news/panorama/eintrittskarten-zurueckbezahlt-ticketboerse-viagogo-in-die-knie-gezwungen https://www.srf.ch/news/panorama/eintrittskarten-zurueckbeza... (German)
- psytrx 4y ago
  > and has been scaming people in Switzerland Same here. We issued a restraint order against Viagogo years ago, but still receive >30% 'automated traffic' during high demand pre-sales, according to Cloudflare. Even though we put lots and lots of resources into making it as difficult as possible for black markets, it still seems to be a quick and easy way to make some cash.
  - superzamp 4y ago
    You piqued my interest and now would love to know more, are you selling ticket yourself for your own events and acting as a ticket selling platform for others? It's sad to see you have such a big amount of automated traffic, no wonder why it's so hard to get tickets for high demand events as a human when you're competing with this.
    - psytrx 4y ago
      Can't go into much detail, sorry. But yes, we sell our own events as well as events for other organizers. It's ironic that we only found out about the scale of automated traffic after moving to CF. Before, we were just fire fighting the load during peaks, while thinking our infra is the problem.
- mhuffman 4y ago
  >Viagogo is a horrible company and has been scaming people in Switzerland as well as all over the world. I went to a very well-known university (in the US), and they had business courses that literally invited speakers in that had startups that were ticket arbitrage. I was taken aback that they would be bragging about buying out all the tickets for an event and then charging more for them. Their response is something along the lines of "well first we are getting the 'real WTP' price from the consumer and second we sometimes buyout events that turn out bad and lose money, so it's fair!" But the whole time it was discussed by professors as if this was a great idea!
seandoe 4y ago
Good for them! Online ticket scalping has become such a huge problem. Everyone should use services like cashortrade.org
echelon 4y ago
1. Make an app that is 1:1 tied to a physical person's identity. You can only have one account. 2. Only sell tickets to people with these accounts. Only allow 2 tickets to be sold to a single account holder per concert. 3. If someone wishes to sell their ticket (eg. changed plans, etc.), they can do so for 95% of the original purchase price with 5% going back to the band and marketplace. 4. As an added bonus, loyal fans can get first dibs at tickets. 5. Furthermore bad actors at concerts can be tracked and permabanned.
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  Glastonbury already does this.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Ticket swap comes pretty close to what you describe… https://www.ticketswap.com/ https://www.ticketswap.com/
- sschueller 4y ago
  Viagogo buys tickets with fake names and addresses already. Requiring IDs may prevent that but knowing Viagogo gives zero fucks about laws they would probably fake that verification as well.
  - m000 4y ago
    ID verification will be at the event entrance. How will they fake that?
  - rdtwo 4y ago
    Well the problem is the government not enforcing laws at some point
    - sschueller 4y ago
      Switzerland is trying but viagogo only have a mailbox in Switzerland so it is difficult and expensive as it requires cooperation from other nations. Alternative would be to block them on the internet but that isn't something any one wants to do as it is a very slippery slope. The only other solution is to make everyone aware that viagogo is a scam.
eh9 4y ago
They’re not the heroes we deserve, but the heroes need. I’m fascinated by the price discovery problem in concert tickets, but I’m incredibly frustrated by the lack of artist involvement in that system. I usually hate bringing up NFTs and blockchains, but if any industry would benefit from a verified seller market, it could be this one. It’s not like Bad Bunny (the company, not Benito) is hurting from missing out on the 9X multiple on floor seats, but acts are increasingly dependent on performance revenues to make a living, and they’re largely cut out from that resale market.
- wincy 4y ago
  Ticket prices are weird. I saw Roger Waters (Pink Floyd) the other night (an amazing show btw) and was literally right next to the stage. I paid $150 a week before the concert for the pleasure. The lady next to me had bought her ticket two years before and had spent $800. She said she got some memorabilia and stuff but still. Absolutely bonkers the price difference.
  - pkroll 4y ago
    Is that really weird? Or is that "two years previous we made a bet on how popular these tickets will be, and priced them at $800. With a week to go, we still have some tickets: price them down so we make SOMETHING on them."?
- cool_dude85 4y ago
  I think you're taking the wrong approach here. The artists are not interested in "price discovery" above all else. They do not, in general, want their concerts to be attended only by those who were willing to pay the most money, but rather by their fans. The goal of a band is not to provide a return on investment, or to most efficiently extract money from the value of the band's brand or music rights or whatever, it is to entertain and be artists. This is the reason that tickets are generally priced well below what each ticket could earn in a blind auction or whatever, not because the bands are bad at "price discovery."
  - robocat 4y ago
sakisv 4y ago
Viagogo is one of the worst out there. Back in 2015 I bought 2 tickets for AC/DC through them and I paid ~£270. When I got the tickets in my hands I saw that the price was ~£75-£80 each and Viagogo added more than £100, just because they could. Kudos to Rammstein and I hope more bands will follow and help us get rid of these scammers.
- cortesoft 4y ago
  > Viagogo added more than £100, just because they could. It is not ‘just because’, it’s because there are more people who want to go than there are tickets. The reason you paid an extra 100 pounds is because someone else wanted that ticket, too, but would only pay 90 extra. That is the market allocating a scarce resource. If there are only 10000 tickets and 100000 people would be willing to pay face value for the ticket, how do you suggest the tickets be allocated? A lottery? If the reseller wasn’t selling them for more, you would have instead only a 1 in 10 chance to get a ticket at all. Would you rather have a ticket and pay 100 pounds more, or pay nothing but get zero tickets? That is your choice anyway.
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    > If there are only 10000 tickets and 100000 people would be willing to pay face value for the ticket, how do you suggest the tickets be allocated? A lottery? Why not? If the artist prices their concerts at $100 because they want all of their fans to be able to attend, and if their fans are willing to spend $100 to go see them, why do scalpers get to "ackshually free market dynamics" there? I am quite happy with a ticket lottery as long as there are no sybill attacks possible on the system.
    - cortesoft 4y ago
      > If the artist prices their concerts at $100 because they want all of their fans to be able to attend But that means all the fans won't be able to attend, because there aren't enough tickets. If I have a 1 in 10 chance of going to a concert I want, I would rather save my money and spend more to go to a particular concert I really want to go to rather than just have a 1/10 chance and end up winning the lottery on one I don't really want to go to that much.
kwhitefoot 4y ago
Why not just insist as Glastonbury does that each ticket is personal and that the ticket holder's ID must match the name declared when buying the ticket when they enter the festival grounds. Then a second hand ticket is worthless. "GLASTONBURY TICKET INFO ONLY SEE TICKETS ARE AUTHORISED TO SELL TICKETS FOR GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL No other site or agency will be allocated tickets. All tickets for the Festival are individually personalised to the named ticket holder and are strictly non-transferable. Security checks are carried out on arrival, and only the specified ticket holder will be admitted to the Festival." https://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/information/tickets/ https://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/information/tickets/
- sschueller 4y ago
  Because money, the original ticket sale company like ticketmaster make money by selling out (scalper buying the tickets).
  - m000 4y ago
    Ticketmaster is actually in bed with the scalpers [1]. Not only they make money because of the original sale to the scalpers, it seems they also get a second commission when a consumer buys from the scalper to "verify" the sale. [1] https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/2018/09/19/we-went-undercover-as-ticket-scalpers-and-ticketmaster-offered-to-help-us-do-business.html https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/2018/09/19/we-we...
- izacus 4y ago
  Because preventing people from giving their tickets to someone else is exceedingly shitty.
  - throw_m239339 4y ago
    A small price to pay to get rid of the price gougers and other scammers.
  - jen729w 4y ago
ChildOfChaos 4y ago
Good for them! Love Rammstein. However, the ticket market is changing and these resellers are getting sidelined a little more, but that doesn't mean the market is getting better. Ticketmaster, who are part of live nation who in turn own a lot of the big venues and festivals are horrible and owned a lot of resellers or were responsible for the reseller market, as it started to become more outlawed they simply side stepped it. Now you have tickets that have dynamic pricing, with prices that go well over double the face value, strange extra fees or just out right miss-selling. A concert I tried to book about 2 years ago, was 'sold out' of general admission tickets the minute it went on sale, including several 'presales' but these 'special access' tickets were available for double the general admission price, it was listed with the VIP tickets, but when you read the small print, with confusing language, it said things such as the ticket would ensure you got access to the concert (Shouldn't a standard ticket do that?) it was basically just a general admission ticket at a 'demand driven price'
- reaperducer 4y ago
  A concert I tried to book about 2 years ago, was 'sold out' of general admission tickets the minute it went on sale, including several 'presales' but these 'special access' tickets were available for double the general admission price This used to happen even back in the bad old days when the way to buy concert tickets was to use special phone banks in certain department stores. It was especially awful for suburban kids who would get their parents to drive them two hours to a city that had the right department store, then as soon as the clock struck 10am, they'd pick up the phone only to find out the concert was sold out. Most large concerts have felt like a scam for as long as I've been alive. Maybe that's why I've been to so few of them.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    True even in the early 1980s, when I somehow managed to call in and got two front row seats to Elton John at the Hollywood bowl by calling in right at 10 AM. The system was known to be rigged by then, and I had called straight into Ticketmaster. My victory was so unusual even 40 years ago that I didn’t actually believe it had happened until they let us into the seats.
djitz 4y ago
Somewhat off-topic, but I wanted to buy some tickets for a comedian and the venue uses Ticketmaster. The tickets were $75/ea and the service fees were $65/ea. How in the hell are the service fees basically the same price as the price of admission?
- ChildOfChaos 4y ago
  Because ticketmaster. They used to charge a pretty high delivery fee for e-tickets. When they were first introduced they where the same price as having an actual ticket delivered. They have since stopped that, but will find a bunch of ways to charge you extra fees. Some venues add restoration fees, why should i be paying a fee to help you with the up keep of your building? Surely that is the cost of doing business, I don't pay a fee at the supermarket because they want to refurbish. Other annoying things I have had, is ticketmaster charging £10 each for delivery, on two tickets I ordered. Both where delivered in the same envelope using standard postage, which is less than £1
  - JadeNB 4y ago
    > Surely that is the cost of doing business, I don't pay a fee at the supermarket because they want to refurbish. You probably do; it's just not itemized as such. (I mean, I don't know how, since supermarket prices at least at the big stores seem to be the same across very different chains—but they do refurbish, and the money for that has to come from somewhere, so they're getting it out of you somehow.)
  - jffry 4y ago
    Because pushing more of their cost of doing business into fees allows them to advertise a lower face price on their tickets.
- KMnO4 4y ago
  Because it’s a monopoly. They charge what people will pay, and it turns out people will still sell out a venue even after $65 fees.
  - 4y ago
Havoc 4y ago
I just want to know who looks at a picture like that and thinks "yeah lets fuck with these guys".
- sigstoat 4y ago
  they’re a bunch of wealthy european musicians who wear silly costumes when performing. (i say that as someone who enjoys most of their music.) what do you think they’re going to do to anyone?
devteambravo 4y ago
NFTs would fix this.
- spyremeown 4y ago
  I would love to hear further explanation. Please, elucidate the topic to us.
ravenstine 4y ago
StubHub was acquired by Viagogo a few years ago. I used StubHub to get "feuerzone" tickets for the second Rammstein show in LA last weekend which, for those of you don't know, are for the GA zone that's right in front of the stage. I really hope this doesn't affect StubHub in the future because the experience was great and it came through when Ticketmaster was entirely sold out for FZ. I get why there's a restraining order for Viagogo; I just hope they don't take StubHub down with them in terms of whether I can use them again. Also, it was an awesome, awesome, awesome... AWESOME show! One of the best things I've ever done. Even if you aren't that into the music normally, it's a performance like no other that's worth seeing in person.
dqpb 4y ago
As a consumer, I hate scalping. But as a seller, I imagine scalpers might provide some value as a kind of risk-free price discovery service?
unclekev 4y ago
In Australia, a lot of the time if you search Google for specific concert tickets, Viagogo will come up before the official ticket reseller results. My mum got stung by this and accidentally bought $800 of tickets from them for a show in December (that should have cost $400. Tickets were still available on Ticketmaster) Tickets were bought 3 months ago, and Viagogo won't give her the tickets or seating Information until 1 week before the show. After some reading this is apparently how they work. Every single aspect of their service is a dark pattern.
jwhite_nc 4y ago
If Rammstein wants to hurt the resellers and help their fans then add more shows at each venue. Quantity will cross a point where the price of resell tickets will be diluted.
- tpmx 4y ago
  They are humans and as such have a limited time on earth.
tonfreed 4y ago
Eventim is a godawful site, if they fixed that as well a lot of people would be grateful
krn 4y ago
I was wondering, if ticket resale is a viable business model only because tickets are not priced properly in the first place. What if tickets were sold using a reverse auction system[1] instead? For instance, tickets could start at $1000 and then go down by $1 every hour until the minimum price set by the promoter is reached – or all the tickets are sold out. This way, even if resellers bought a huge number of tickets, it's possible that they wouldn't be able to resell them for a large enough profit to cover the risk. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Optimal pricing for event tickets is undesirable.
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    (Follow-up) It's kinda exhausting reading here through comment after comment of armchair "entertainment venue economists" imagining how to maximize the profits for a single event, all the while forgetting the circumstances leading to event tickets being underpriced. Circumstances such as the fact events are generally a part of tours, that the artists likely want a diverse audience, that event sales have side effects on future sales and marketing, etc etc. Not specifically targeted at you, krn, but is it really so far-fetched to think that artists did think about the fact they'd still have sold out venues at a higher price point? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence
    - krn 4y ago
      > [...] imagining how to maximize the profits for a single event No, I am not interested in maximizing profits. I am only interested in eliminating resellers. > Circumstances such as the fact events are generally a part of tours, that the artists likely want a diverse audience, that event sales have side effects on future sales and marketing, etc etc. That's exactly my point: if currently tickets are grabbed by automated systems and resold for much higher prices, none of these goals are reached by the artists.
maxgashkov 4y ago
I live in Japan, ticket scalping is almost non-existent here due to the local regulations and all major second-hand sales sites prohibiting resell for profit. What we have now is lotteries, lotteries everywhere. You need be sure to track the upcoming concerts, through all the bullshit ways the band may promote them — via twitter, facebook, their fanclub subscription (each email from it may get to spam) or whatever. If you've missed the lottery submission period, you're screwed. If you've lost the lottery, you're screwed. I do understand that scalpers don't create value, but I'd rather have the bands set market-based prices that avoided the necessity for lotteries.
rspoerri 4y ago
A good decision, because everyone can have an opinion. But it's the decision of the artists/organizers how much a ticket costs. If they want to make money, they can charge it, if they want equal opportunities for their fans, they decided it that way. You have no say in that and neither do scalpers or resellers. edit: fix wording

205 points by nabilhat 4y ago

I hope scalping in general become outlawed. The practice is just pure opportunism - it literally brings no value to anyone, it only extracts value from hotspots of popular demand.

t-writescode 4y ago
Arguably, scalping is capitalism in motion. In situations where the supply and demand curves are unbalanced, especially due to things like MSRP (which tend to be agreements between manufacturer and seller) when supply and demand are wildly out of sync (like the graphics card supply shortage), scalpers may more accurately reflect the "true price" of things. Of course, it can go too far and become a monopoly, just like anything in capitalism without restraint; but they do have a purpose
- mertd 4y ago
  Scalping is unpleasant for everyone involved other than the scalper. Entertainment industry is finally catching up to the real fix, which is increasing the supply. If there is way too big of a demand for a single concert, just hold more concerts at the same spot. It's basically the Vegas residency model. Sure you might visit less cities overall but not rebuilding a stage every other day yields a substantial savings in logistics, too.
  - cortesoft 4y ago
    > Scalping is unpleasant for everyone involved other than the scalper. It is more pleasant than the alternative for the person buying a ticket from the scalper; not going at all. If there weren’t scalpers, you just don’t get a ticket at all because they are already sold out. Scalpers are what let you get a ticket so at all. You can’t just play more shows at a single location. What if every show at every venue is sold out? A band can only play so many total shows.
    - m000 4y ago
  - happyopossum 4y ago
    > Scalping is unpleasant for everyone involved other than the scalper No, it’s also pleasant for the person who wants to go to the event and can afford to buy a ticket on the secondary market.
    - throw_m239339 4y ago
      > No, it’s also pleasant for the person who wants to go to the event and can afford to buy a ticket on the secondary market. This isn't a secondary market, this is scalping at an industrial level and provide strictly no added value whatsoever. This is only pleasant for Viagogo making a quick buck with scalp bots.
- cbozeman 4y ago
  The graphics card shortage is probably one of the worst examples you could have tried to use. The root cause of the graphics card shortage was rampant central bank printing of currency. This is a long ride, so buckle up... TL;DR at bottom. How do we get there? Everyone got scared of a virus that was so lethal half the people who had it didn't even know they had contracted it. Yes, early on, COVID-19 looked like a contender, but six months in, we knew... we knew it killed fat people, old people, immunocompromised people. In other words, people that Nature herself is already stalking. Even with the delta variant, arguably the "worst" of the bunch, as long as you took moderately good care of yourself, weren't old, and didn't have compromised immunity, you very likely were going to be okay. In response to this, politicians, always fucking terrified of being held accountable for any decision they make, decided to lock everything down in the Western world and send out a metric ass-ton of money to everyone. Well the only way to do that is for Jerome Powell to make the money printer go "brrr". Obviously, Europeans will do whatever America does, so all their central banks made money printer go "brrr". What exactly does happen when you pour trillions of dollars into the global worldwide market? People start doing idiotic speculative investment, that's what... hence some of the most hilarious /r/WallStreetBets posts we've seen since the subreddit's creation. Meanwhile, a few people who still have their heads on straight realize that their life savings are being rapidly devalued and they start looking seriously at cryptocurrency for the first time. Even Grandma and Grandpa are buying a few of these "Byte-pieces". Meanwhile my neighbor, a bald, greying man of 53 who was literally a maintenance supervisor for manufacturing plants, ends up with a 18 GPU Ethereum farm running out of a shed on his 4 acre property in rural North Texas. That's how easy it became for the average person to set up a crypto-mining farm. A guy who graduated high school and spend 35 years turning wrenches on conveyor belts, fucking around with PLCs (which I do admit, you can't be a fool and do that...), manages to not only hoover up a shitload of GPUs during the pandemic, but also figures out how to buy mining motherboards, hook the shit all up together, and set it up so it's 24/7 mining Ethereum. He also has three 15,000 BTU air conditioners in the shed windows keeping the temps on the GPUs tolerable. So if a beer-swilling, "God, guns, and country" blue collar laborer-turned-manager can figure out how to set up an Ethereum mining farm, and if Grandpa and Grandma can figure out how to put some money into Coinbase to buy Bitcoins, then you can imagine just how easy it was for more technologically adept people to get their hands on GPUs and start mining. In Dallas, Texas at our MicroCenter, for pretty much the entire pandemic, it turned into a miniature version of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. Tents everywhere, everyone waiting for the daily lottery to see if they would get the chance to buy a GPU, so they could then go repost it on eBay, or sell it directly to a miner buddy, or just go home and install it into their own crypto-mining rig. Moving on to NVIDIA, AMD, and their board partners... they were directly selling to miners. All of them. Thus bypassing the chance for gamers to even get their hands on the cards in some instances. TSMC and Samsung were at maximum capacity every single month of the pandemic. It never slowed down, except for "acts of God". This made sense as a lot of the white collar workers found themselves in need of laptops, webcams, monitors, blah blah blah, all shit that TSMC/Samsung makes chips for. That's another reason GPU demand was so dramatic. TSMC/Samsung couldn't focus every single wafer on GPUs. They had to make all kinds of shit for all kinds of devices. So you have a two-fold hit on demand. Everyone wants a GPU, but we're having to reduce capacity for other stuff we also need. Turns out you don't actually need an RTX 3090. Talk about a "perfect storm". But wait... people are now flush with cash for getting $600 unemployment payments every week for a year or two. So they do what any rational person does... THEY INVEST IT... HAHA, JUST KIDDING! They buy... new fucking cars. Yes, people buy new cars instead of paying off mortgages early or investing their hard-earned dollars into the market. So anyway... that's how you get a GPU shortage. TL;DR: Bad virus scare people. Politicians coward. JPow make money printer go brrr. People use pandemic money to buy Magic Internet Money printers called GPUs. Everyone has to make spreadsheets at home. Everyone has to buy electronics. No more capacity to make extra GPUs. Gamers have no GPUs, go play NES on an emulator.
cortesoft 4y ago
I disagree. Why is it bad to let the free market determine the price for an item with limited supply? With scalping, I know that I can get a ticket at at least some price. If I want to go to an event bad enough, I can pay more and get a ticket. Without scalping, it doesn’t matter how badly I want to go to an event, if I am not lucky enough or fast enough, or able to wait in line, I can’t get a ticket. Scalping does provide a value… it creates liquidity in the market.
- ChildOfChaos 4y ago
  But one of the reasons why you can't get a ticket in the first place, is because scalpers are buying tickets for the simple reason of reselling the ticket for a higher price. Scalpers increase market demand just as much as people that actually want to go and the only person profiting here is the scalper, who is not really deserving to do so here. If you are going to increase price with demand, at least let it go to the people behind the event/artist in a fair way.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    > But one of the reasons why you can't get a ticket in the first place, is because scalpers are buying tickets for the simple reason of reselling the ticket for a higher price. But the only reason that scalping is profitable is that more people want to go to these events at the original ticket price than there are seats available. > If you are going to increase price with demand, at least let it go to the people behind the event/artist in a fair way. I agree with this. When a show sells out in 5 minutes, the organizers should take note and charge more the next show.
    - ChildOfChaos 4y ago
      > But the only reason that scalping is profitable is that more people want to go to these events at the original ticket price than there are seats available. In general yes, however I have seen plenty of events that didn't sell out and scalpers where left still selling tickets and perhaps some people only knew about sites like ViaGoGo so bought of there. I'm sure times when demand closely matches supply, it's still going to the scalpers because they get in there first.
dangero 4y ago
It definitely brings value to people who have money to buy marked up tickets and exposes the inefficiency of ticket pricing algorithms.
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  Do you really want to live in a society where every single thing is priced as high as it's possible to extract from the people who have a lot of money? Should only rich people be allowed to afford anything?
  - pkroll 4y ago
    You do live in that society. Everyone selling something IS trying to get the highest price they can for it.
    - Thiez 4y ago
      The article is literally about a band not trying to charge the highest price they can.
      - pkroll 4y ago
        That's one. And, I'll even grant that many bands would like to see their poorer fans get tickets, vs. rich fans (I mean they are still fans, right? Nobody rich is buying a ticket so they can see a band they hate... unless it's a gift. To a fan.). Anyhow that's a really tiny segment of the economy.
  - dangero 4y ago
    > Should only rich people be allowed to afford anything? How else do you recommend dispersing items of extreme scarcity where everybody can't have it?
dec0dedab0de 4y ago
Well you could say that the scalper takes risk away from the promoter, and allows the lazy consumer with money to see an event that they might have missed out on. They also usually provide cheap tickets the day of an event that has not sold out.
benburton 4y ago
This issue isn't as cut and dry as simply banning scalping. I spend most of my discretionary income on music... merchandise, vinyl, concert tickets. At any given point in time I have tickets to about 7-8 performances in the future. Sometimes life gets in the way, and I simply cannot attend an event. In those situations, I have a very legitimate reason to want to sell concert tickets, and I do. Sometimes I will end up selling for under what I paid, other times I will make a small profit, more rarely I will say fuck it and just give the tickets away on social media to friends or coworkers. In the long term, this generally nets me out at zero in terms of gaining/losing money on ticket purchases. My point, I guess, is that there's a legitimate, healthy reason for a resale market. Throwing the ticketing resale market out with the scalper bathwater is a myopic solution.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  You wrote an entire paragraph that has literally nothing to do with ticket scalping. Reselling your ticket your purchased for yourself at face value because you can't go isn't scalping.
  - benburton 4y ago
    You wrote an entire sentence that has literally nothing to do with the ticket resale market and how scalping is related. A secondary ticketing market enables scalping. There are legitimate reasons for the resale market to exist. If you think that the existence and dynamics of a resale market are unrelated to scalping... I would encourage you to look into critical reasoning courses which are perhaps available at your local community college at a low cost. How do you propose we eliminate scalping, while preserving the secondary market? Go ahead, I'm waiting. Literally all ticketing companies are waiting for your profound insight.
    - xboxnolifes 4y ago
      > How do you propose we eliminate scalping, while preserving the secondary market? Go ahead, I'm waiting. Literally all ticketing companies are waiting for your profound insight. Mark the ticket (physical or digital) with the price paid for it, and make it illegal to resell over this price. You may still have smaller scalping rings, but you would be enabled to go after the bigger scalpers.
noxvilleza 4y ago
Pre-COVID there was actually an EU Parliament vote in favour of adding extra laws against scalping: https://www.kerrang.com/eu-parliament-votes-in-favour-of-new-legislation-against-ticket-scalping https://www.kerrang.com/eu-parliament-votes-in-favour-of-new... - although I haven't heard much since.

sschueller 4y ago

Good, Viagogo is a horrible company and has been scaming people in Switzerland as well as all over the world. Also not the first time they lost in court.[1] Basically the Uber of ticket sales, move fast, break laws, make an exit and walk away millionaires. This crap needs to stop. Viagogo purchases tickets with fake names and addresses to then resells them for a much higher price. This is illegal in Switzerland and probably also in many European countries. [1] https://www.srf.ch/news/panorama/eintrittskarten-zurueckbezahlt-ticketboerse-viagogo-in-die-knie-gezwungen https://www.srf.ch/news/panorama/eintrittskarten-zurueckbeza... (German)

psytrx 4y ago
> and has been scaming people in Switzerland Same here. We issued a restraint order against Viagogo years ago, but still receive >30% 'automated traffic' during high demand pre-sales, according to Cloudflare. Even though we put lots and lots of resources into making it as difficult as possible for black markets, it still seems to be a quick and easy way to make some cash.
- superzamp 4y ago
  You piqued my interest and now would love to know more, are you selling ticket yourself for your own events and acting as a ticket selling platform for others? It's sad to see you have such a big amount of automated traffic, no wonder why it's so hard to get tickets for high demand events as a human when you're competing with this.
  - psytrx 4y ago
    Can't go into much detail, sorry. But yes, we sell our own events as well as events for other organizers. It's ironic that we only found out about the scale of automated traffic after moving to CF. Before, we were just fire fighting the load during peaks, while thinking our infra is the problem.
mhuffman 4y ago
>Viagogo is a horrible company and has been scaming people in Switzerland as well as all over the world. I went to a very well-known university (in the US), and they had business courses that literally invited speakers in that had startups that were ticket arbitrage. I was taken aback that they would be bragging about buying out all the tickets for an event and then charging more for them. Their response is something along the lines of "well first we are getting the 'real WTP' price from the consumer and second we sometimes buyout events that turn out bad and lose money, so it's fair!" But the whole time it was discussed by professors as if this was a great idea!

seandoe 4y ago

Good for them! Online ticket scalping has become such a huge problem. Everyone should use services like cashortrade.org

echelon 4y ago

1. Make an app that is 1:1 tied to a physical person's identity. You can only have one account. 2. Only sell tickets to people with these accounts. Only allow 2 tickets to be sold to a single account holder per concert. 3. If someone wishes to sell their ticket (eg. changed plans, etc.), they can do so for 95% of the original purchase price with 5% going back to the band and marketplace. 4. As an added bonus, loyal fans can get first dibs at tickets. 5. Furthermore bad actors at concerts can be tracked and permabanned.

kwhitefoot 4y ago
Glastonbury already does this.
scrollaway 4y ago
Ticket swap comes pretty close to what you describe… https://www.ticketswap.com/ https://www.ticketswap.com/
sschueller 4y ago
Viagogo buys tickets with fake names and addresses already. Requiring IDs may prevent that but knowing Viagogo gives zero fucks about laws they would probably fake that verification as well.
- m000 4y ago
  ID verification will be at the event entrance. How will they fake that?
- rdtwo 4y ago
  Well the problem is the government not enforcing laws at some point
  - sschueller 4y ago
    Switzerland is trying but viagogo only have a mailbox in Switzerland so it is difficult and expensive as it requires cooperation from other nations. Alternative would be to block them on the internet but that isn't something any one wants to do as it is a very slippery slope. The only other solution is to make everyone aware that viagogo is a scam.

eh9 4y ago

They’re not the heroes we deserve, but the heroes need. I’m fascinated by the price discovery problem in concert tickets, but I’m incredibly frustrated by the lack of artist involvement in that system. I usually hate bringing up NFTs and blockchains, but if any industry would benefit from a verified seller market, it could be this one. It’s not like Bad Bunny (the company, not Benito) is hurting from missing out on the 9X multiple on floor seats, but acts are increasingly dependent on performance revenues to make a living, and they’re largely cut out from that resale market.

wincy 4y ago
Ticket prices are weird. I saw Roger Waters (Pink Floyd) the other night (an amazing show btw) and was literally right next to the stage. I paid $150 a week before the concert for the pleasure. The lady next to me had bought her ticket two years before and had spent $800. She said she got some memorabilia and stuff but still. Absolutely bonkers the price difference.
- pkroll 4y ago
  Is that really weird? Or is that "two years previous we made a bet on how popular these tickets will be, and priced them at $800. With a week to go, we still have some tickets: price them down so we make SOMETHING on them."?
cool_dude85 4y ago
I think you're taking the wrong approach here. The artists are not interested in "price discovery" above all else. They do not, in general, want their concerts to be attended only by those who were willing to pay the most money, but rather by their fans. The goal of a band is not to provide a return on investment, or to most efficiently extract money from the value of the band's brand or music rights or whatever, it is to entertain and be artists. This is the reason that tickets are generally priced well below what each ticket could earn in a blind auction or whatever, not because the bands are bad at "price discovery."
- robocat 4y ago

sakisv 4y ago

Viagogo is one of the worst out there. Back in 2015 I bought 2 tickets for AC/DC through them and I paid ~£270. When I got the tickets in my hands I saw that the price was ~£75-£80 each and Viagogo added more than £100, just because they could. Kudos to Rammstein and I hope more bands will follow and help us get rid of these scammers.

cortesoft 4y ago
> Viagogo added more than £100, just because they could. It is not ‘just because’, it’s because there are more people who want to go than there are tickets. The reason you paid an extra 100 pounds is because someone else wanted that ticket, too, but would only pay 90 extra. That is the market allocating a scarce resource. If there are only 10000 tickets and 100000 people would be willing to pay face value for the ticket, how do you suggest the tickets be allocated? A lottery? If the reseller wasn’t selling them for more, you would have instead only a 1 in 10 chance to get a ticket at all. Would you rather have a ticket and pay 100 pounds more, or pay nothing but get zero tickets? That is your choice anyway.
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  > If there are only 10000 tickets and 100000 people would be willing to pay face value for the ticket, how do you suggest the tickets be allocated? A lottery? Why not? If the artist prices their concerts at $100 because they want all of their fans to be able to attend, and if their fans are willing to spend $100 to go see them, why do scalpers get to "ackshually free market dynamics" there? I am quite happy with a ticket lottery as long as there are no sybill attacks possible on the system.
  - cortesoft 4y ago
    > If the artist prices their concerts at $100 because they want all of their fans to be able to attend But that means all the fans won't be able to attend, because there aren't enough tickets. If I have a 1 in 10 chance of going to a concert I want, I would rather save my money and spend more to go to a particular concert I really want to go to rather than just have a 1/10 chance and end up winning the lottery on one I don't really want to go to that much.

kwhitefoot 4y ago

Why not just insist as Glastonbury does that each ticket is personal and that the ticket holder's ID must match the name declared when buying the ticket when they enter the festival grounds. Then a second hand ticket is worthless. "GLASTONBURY TICKET INFO ONLY SEE TICKETS ARE AUTHORISED TO SELL TICKETS FOR GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL No other site or agency will be allocated tickets. All tickets for the Festival are individually personalised to the named ticket holder and are strictly non-transferable. Security checks are carried out on arrival, and only the specified ticket holder will be admitted to the Festival." https://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/information/tickets/ https://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/information/tickets/

sschueller 4y ago
Because money, the original ticket sale company like ticketmaster make money by selling out (scalper buying the tickets).
- m000 4y ago
  Ticketmaster is actually in bed with the scalpers [1]. Not only they make money because of the original sale to the scalpers, it seems they also get a second commission when a consumer buys from the scalper to "verify" the sale. [1] https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/2018/09/19/we-went-undercover-as-ticket-scalpers-and-ticketmaster-offered-to-help-us-do-business.html https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/2018/09/19/we-we...
izacus 4y ago
Because preventing people from giving their tickets to someone else is exceedingly shitty.
- throw_m239339 4y ago
  A small price to pay to get rid of the price gougers and other scammers.
- jen729w 4y ago

ChildOfChaos 4y ago

Good for them! Love Rammstein. However, the ticket market is changing and these resellers are getting sidelined a little more, but that doesn't mean the market is getting better. Ticketmaster, who are part of live nation who in turn own a lot of the big venues and festivals are horrible and owned a lot of resellers or were responsible for the reseller market, as it started to become more outlawed they simply side stepped it. Now you have tickets that have dynamic pricing, with prices that go well over double the face value, strange extra fees or just out right miss-selling. A concert I tried to book about 2 years ago, was 'sold out' of general admission tickets the minute it went on sale, including several 'presales' but these 'special access' tickets were available for double the general admission price, it was listed with the VIP tickets, but when you read the small print, with confusing language, it said things such as the ticket would ensure you got access to the concert (Shouldn't a standard ticket do that?) it was basically just a general admission ticket at a 'demand driven price'

reaperducer 4y ago
A concert I tried to book about 2 years ago, was 'sold out' of general admission tickets the minute it went on sale, including several 'presales' but these 'special access' tickets were available for double the general admission price This used to happen even back in the bad old days when the way to buy concert tickets was to use special phone banks in certain department stores. It was especially awful for suburban kids who would get their parents to drive them two hours to a city that had the right department store, then as soon as the clock struck 10am, they'd pick up the phone only to find out the concert was sold out. Most large concerts have felt like a scam for as long as I've been alive. Maybe that's why I've been to so few of them.
- tomcam 4y ago
  True even in the early 1980s, when I somehow managed to call in and got two front row seats to Elton John at the Hollywood bowl by calling in right at 10 AM. The system was known to be rigged by then, and I had called straight into Ticketmaster. My victory was so unusual even 40 years ago that I didn’t actually believe it had happened until they let us into the seats.

djitz 4y ago

Somewhat off-topic, but I wanted to buy some tickets for a comedian and the venue uses Ticketmaster. The tickets were $75/ea and the service fees were $65/ea. How in the hell are the service fees basically the same price as the price of admission?

ChildOfChaos 4y ago
Because ticketmaster. They used to charge a pretty high delivery fee for e-tickets. When they were first introduced they where the same price as having an actual ticket delivered. They have since stopped that, but will find a bunch of ways to charge you extra fees. Some venues add restoration fees, why should i be paying a fee to help you with the up keep of your building? Surely that is the cost of doing business, I don't pay a fee at the supermarket because they want to refurbish. Other annoying things I have had, is ticketmaster charging £10 each for delivery, on two tickets I ordered. Both where delivered in the same envelope using standard postage, which is less than £1
- JadeNB 4y ago
  > Surely that is the cost of doing business, I don't pay a fee at the supermarket because they want to refurbish. You probably do; it's just not itemized as such. (I mean, I don't know how, since supermarket prices at least at the big stores seem to be the same across very different chains—but they do refurbish, and the money for that has to come from somewhere, so they're getting it out of you somehow.)
- jffry 4y ago
  Because pushing more of their cost of doing business into fees allows them to advertise a lower face price on their tickets.
KMnO4 4y ago
Because it’s a monopoly. They charge what people will pay, and it turns out people will still sell out a venue even after $65 fees.
- 4y ago

Havoc 4y ago

I just want to know who looks at a picture like that and thinks "yeah lets fuck with these guys".

sigstoat 4y ago
they’re a bunch of wealthy european musicians who wear silly costumes when performing. (i say that as someone who enjoys most of their music.) what do you think they’re going to do to anyone?

devteambravo 4y ago

NFTs would fix this.

spyremeown 4y ago
I would love to hear further explanation. Please, elucidate the topic to us.

ravenstine 4y ago

StubHub was acquired by Viagogo a few years ago. I used StubHub to get "feuerzone" tickets for the second Rammstein show in LA last weekend which, for those of you don't know, are for the GA zone that's right in front of the stage. I really hope this doesn't affect StubHub in the future because the experience was great and it came through when Ticketmaster was entirely sold out for FZ. I get why there's a restraining order for Viagogo; I just hope they don't take StubHub down with them in terms of whether I can use them again. Also, it was an awesome, awesome, awesome... AWESOME show! One of the best things I've ever done. Even if you aren't that into the music normally, it's a performance like no other that's worth seeing in person.

dqpb 4y ago

As a consumer, I hate scalping. But as a seller, I imagine scalpers might provide some value as a kind of risk-free price discovery service?

unclekev 4y ago

In Australia, a lot of the time if you search Google for specific concert tickets, Viagogo will come up before the official ticket reseller results. My mum got stung by this and accidentally bought $800 of tickets from them for a show in December (that should have cost $400. Tickets were still available on Ticketmaster) Tickets were bought 3 months ago, and Viagogo won't give her the tickets or seating Information until 1 week before the show. After some reading this is apparently how they work. Every single aspect of their service is a dark pattern.

jwhite_nc 4y ago

If Rammstein wants to hurt the resellers and help their fans then add more shows at each venue. Quantity will cross a point where the price of resell tickets will be diluted.

tpmx 4y ago
They are humans and as such have a limited time on earth.

tonfreed 4y ago

Eventim is a godawful site, if they fixed that as well a lot of people would be grateful

krn 4y ago

I was wondering, if ticket resale is a viable business model only because tickets are not priced properly in the first place. What if tickets were sold using a reverse auction system[1] instead? For instance, tickets could start at $1000 and then go down by $1 every hour until the minimum price set by the promoter is reached – or all the tickets are sold out. This way, even if resellers bought a huge number of tickets, it's possible that they wouldn't be able to resell them for a large enough profit to cover the risk. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction

scrollaway 4y ago
Optimal pricing for event tickets is undesirable.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  (Follow-up) It's kinda exhausting reading here through comment after comment of armchair "entertainment venue economists" imagining how to maximize the profits for a single event, all the while forgetting the circumstances leading to event tickets being underpriced. Circumstances such as the fact events are generally a part of tours, that the artists likely want a diverse audience, that event sales have side effects on future sales and marketing, etc etc. Not specifically targeted at you, krn, but is it really so far-fetched to think that artists did think about the fact they'd still have sold out venues at a higher price point? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence
  - krn 4y ago
    > [...] imagining how to maximize the profits for a single event No, I am not interested in maximizing profits. I am only interested in eliminating resellers. > Circumstances such as the fact events are generally a part of tours, that the artists likely want a diverse audience, that event sales have side effects on future sales and marketing, etc etc. That's exactly my point: if currently tickets are grabbed by automated systems and resold for much higher prices, none of these goals are reached by the artists.

maxgashkov 4y ago

I live in Japan, ticket scalping is almost non-existent here due to the local regulations and all major second-hand sales sites prohibiting resell for profit. What we have now is lotteries, lotteries everywhere. You need be sure to track the upcoming concerts, through all the bullshit ways the band may promote them — via twitter, facebook, their fanclub subscription (each email from it may get to spam) or whatever. If you've missed the lottery submission period, you're screwed. If you've lost the lottery, you're screwed. I do understand that scalpers don't create value, but I'd rather have the bands set market-based prices that avoided the necessity for lotteries.

rspoerri 4y ago

A good decision, because everyone can have an opinion. But it's the decision of the artists/organizers how much a ticket costs. If they want to make money, they can charge it, if they want equal opportunities for their fans, they decided it that way. You have no say in that and neither do scalpers or resellers. edit: fix wording