7 ms·

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

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.

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.