23 ms·

Blink-182 tickets are so expensive because Ticketmaster is a monopoly

327 points by Victerius 4y ago

wkdneidbwf 4y ago
go see local or smaller acts at smaller venues. don’t go see boring stadium shows. problem solved.
- nluken 4y ago
  You've got the right idea. Large stadium bands are almost always a poor value proposition, and that was the case even before dynamic pricing. Some of these shows are definitely cool, but the price relative to smaller touring acts (who are often just as if not more talented) is so astronomical that it never made sense to me
- bsder 4y ago
  Absolutely this. Hand $100 to a local band that isn't having anybody show up and they're going to treat you like a damn VIP. I find this whole kerfuffle especially ironic given that the band in question is Blink 182. Blink 182, a band absolutely known for treating their fans shittily and putting on shitty concerts, are being berated by fans because they treated the fans shittily. I can't wait for the complaints about the shitty concerts to start. Jeeze people. Take the hint and vote with your wallet.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  Our local 6k seater is subject to this too.
adfm 4y ago
Blink-182 is a pop band. I went to a $10 punk show just last week and had a blast. Who’s enslaved by Ticketmaster?
advisedwang 4y ago
I sometimes wonder why venues choose Ticketmaster; large as Ticketmaster is it's not the only option, and how did they come to be the main player? My only conclusion is that the venues (and bands) are benefiting. Here's my theory: Venues and bands know that for PR reasons they can't jack up the price of tickets, but they don't want to miss out on the revenue from people willing to pay scalper prices. So they set tickets at a nominal price but reserve huge blocks of tickets for the band and venues. Nominally these are "family and friends" tickets, but in practice the band and venue put them immediately for resale. This way the bands and venues can get that gigantic revenue. Meanwhile a small number of tickets are sold at face value and immediately sell out. Ticketmaster profits from fees on the ticket sales and resales. A "known evil" company like ticketmaster is now a benefit, as "obviously" the jacked up costs are ticketmaster's fault. Meanwhile ticketmaster is really just a service to take the heat off of bands and venues for what would otherwise be seen as price gauging.
- NickC25 4y ago
  Ticketmaster is "chosen" because most venues are owned and operated by Live Nation, who in turn owns Ticketmaster. Is this a monopoly, and a massive conflict of interest? Yes, and yes. Most acts don't really have the ability to set their own pricing. Those that do either are huge acts, who kind of have to go to Live Nation venues (because an act like Taylor Swift can't really go to tiny venues when she could sell out a stadium) or are tiny, local bands or artists in niche genres that don't really play venues larger than clubs or bars.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    I don't understand - why can't a venue run its own tickets?
    - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
      It's the same people. The venue is not independent. It's not that they can't, they don't want to.
adamgordonbell 4y ago
Isn't TicketMasters service to be the bad guy. Bands and venues get to blame them for the prices and in turn ticketmaster gets a cut. Company to blame as a service.
- bombcar 4y ago
  This isn't only Ticketmaster! A registration tool I've used lets you add a fee that ostensibly is to pay for the registration processing but if you set it above X + 3% you get all the extra. Very sneaky!
  - Firmwarrior 4y ago
    Man, I hope all the electronic food ordering sites are like that Every restaurant here takes online orders, but ordering online tacks on 10% or more in fees. I just call them on the phone to avoid the fees, since it seems insane to me to pay $8 just for 2 seconds of using a web app
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Some are, some aren't - you can sometimes dig around and find out which they use. A few of the local restaurants have ones that add nothing to the order cost at all, so they must be cheap enough that the restaurant doesn't care.
    - skellera 4y ago
      DoorDash takes up to a 30% cut even on pick up orders. Pretty rough deal for restaurants that have to use that service to survive. Just makes the costs go up for the rest of us.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        I refuse to use something like doordash for pickup. I’d rather call or just go and order and wait than give DD such a huge cut for doing nothing useful.
non_sequitur 4y ago
So the real complaint is dynamic pricing, which is essentially raising prices to what the market will bear, instead of having (what was formerly artificially) low prices that get scalped. Now the extra money that used to go to scalpers goes to TM instead, and the downside is that some % of fans that could previously luck out and get cheap tickets no longer can. Isnt this...not a bad thing? There's fundamentally just a supply and demand problem, with more people wanting to see these concerts than there are concerts. The article mentions that Garth brooks solved this by doing more concerts (e.g. 9 in a row in the same city!), but that's obviously not viable for everyone. Is there a better solution? Even if there were 5 different companies selling concert tickets, wouldnt they inevitably move to dynamic pricing for the same reason?
- pbreit 4y ago
  And primary sale concerts tickets for even semi-popular artists are still way under-priced.
- gregdoesit 4y ago
  I was having the same question. Original situation: tickets are priced too low, and sell out almost immediately, with scrapers buying much of the tickets, then reselling them. Fans are furious! Plus: the band+seller is leaving money on the table, scrapers are making a killing. Current situation: tickets are priced at market value thanks to dynamic pricing, so they no longer sell out instantly, and scrapers are discouraged from buying them. Fans are furious! Plus: the band+seller make more money than before, scrapers make close to none.
  - exq 4y ago
    Do you have a source for the last sentence?
    - kolbe 4y ago
      I think he's using logic.
    - lesuorac 4y ago
ianferrel 4y ago
Blink-182 tickets are expensive because a lot of people want to see Blink-182 and there are only so many concert seats.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  This is slightly surprising. They're one of the biggest bands of that era and genre, but I still don't see them as being in that much demand. They're not a Rolling Stones. That said, pop punk is having a moment again, Tom is back, Mark is cancer-free, and Mr. Kourtney Kardashian has been drumming it up all over the place.
  - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    I think its a function of time and demographic change as well. It's not just that they're popular, but the people they're popular with are now older, have better jobs and more disposable income. Look at the ticket prices for any popular bands that are still doing shows from the boomer's generation like grateful dead. Ultimately what I'm saying is their target market can bear higher cost tickets, so now they cost more. I don't get why millennials are still shocked by this.
  - jandrese 4y ago
    The fundamental issue is that entertainment venues are largely undersized for the local population these days. New ones don't open up very often. They have not kept up with population growth. In the US it is hard to build a properly big venue anymore because the parking situation becomes untenable and public transit expansion has slowed to a crawl in the past 60 years. You can't build a massive venue because it would have to be surrounded by acres and acres of parking. So if you want to put it in the city there is no parcel of land big enough, and if you want to put it out in the country the roads can't handle it.
    - anticensor 4y ago
      Underground parking and rapid transit access could reduce the extent of problem.
jrmg 4y ago
Lots of comments here from people who haven’t read the article and don’t know about the scalper-eliminating on-demand pricing it’s actually about. Or that it addresses supply-and-demand near the end with some interesting comments on Garth Brooks: Country superstar Garth Brooks—who has called out dynamic pricing as well as suggested that the secondary market should be “illegal,” has more or less solved the problem for his fans with one simple trick: He adds shows until they no longer sell out. In recent years, on single tours, Brooks has done the following: He played nine concerts in a row in Edmonton, Canada. He played a dozen shows in Chicago. He played six in Kansas, nine in Tulsa, and eight in Denver. Indeed, the headline doesn’t seem particularly supported by the actual article to me.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jbellis 4y ago
  My understanding is that it's absolutely normal for the headline to be written by an editor maximizing for clicks, rather than by the article author.
  - jahsome 4y ago
    Former reporter. Can confirm -- If you only knew...
- cbsmith 4y ago
  Worth mentioning... The platform Garth Brooks uses to sell tickets the way he does: Ticketmaster. So it's available to other artists/promoters, if they want to do it. The nickname for that approach is "Garth mode".
  - vlunkr 4y ago
    There's lots of back-and-forth in these comments about whether Ticketmaster is the villain, or just the scapegoat for venues and artists to take more money. Without any insider information, I lean towards the latter. This is a supply and demand issue where the limit on supply is how much Blink-182 wants to perform. Maybe there's a good logistical reason why they don't do "Garth mode", or maybe this tour is just a quick cash grab.
haunter 4y ago
And that's why festivals are more popular. More tickets available and the price / band is significantly lower.
postalrat 4y ago
Non-transferable tickets seem to me to be a simple solution. But people want be able to sell their tickets. So now we are stuck with high ticket prices.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  Cash at the door? Or physical tickets sold around town the day of? People have a love/hate relationship with the frenzy I guess.
  - raldi 4y ago
    Cash at the door would just mean endless lines — people paying with their time instead of their money, and the value of that time is just wasted rather than captured by the seller.
    - Scoundreller 4y ago
      $40 exact change in $20 bills will be faster than scanning barcodes.
  - michaelt 4y ago
    Concert tickets sold like flight tickets - provide a full name for every ticket booked, at booking time. Queue up at the venue to have your ticket checked against your passport.
    - matwood 4y ago
      They would also need to be market priced, like airline tickets.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - dagw 4y ago
    That's great for locals, but doesn't really work for people who have to travel several hours and book a hotel to get to somewhere where many of the bands I want to see play. For people like us having a guaranteed ticket far in advance is important.
tommek4077 4y ago
Make it like Rammstein. Scalpers and resellers are out, prices are low. Of course it is still hard to get Tickets.
- gaws 4y ago
  > Scalpers and resellers are out How do you even track that?
  - wombat-man 4y ago
    It's possible to make tickets non-transferrable. I think MCR did that for a show near me, for the floor section anyway. Never saw any for sale on resellers. People on reddit were saying they were digital only and non transferrable, so you'd have to give someone your ticketmaster login to use it. that plus 2fa could be effective. Can't confirm. It's possible the tickets were just plain sold out.
    - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
      Unlike Germany, tickets have to be transferable in America. Legally, you can't link a tickets validity to an individual person's identity.
      - wombat-man 4y ago
        I don't think that's true https://stubhub.community/t5/Selling-Tickets/Non-transferable-ticketmaster-tickets/td-p/165101 https://stubhub.community/t5/Selling-Tickets/Non-transferabl...
        rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
        I was wrong. It seems like it's state laws, not federal laws, that regulate this issue: https://www.ticketnews.com/ticket-regulations-and-legislation-compendium/non-transferable-tickets/ https://www.ticketnews.com/ticket-regulations-and-legislatio...
LatteLazy 4y ago
Ticketmaster exists as a blame absorber. Their business model is to charge huge fees, pass 80% plus of the cash back to bands and managers, but absorb 100% of the blame for tickets being expensive. This is why bands and their managers keep using them despite them being universally hated. You are being tricked, and not (just) by ticketmaster...
- jandrese 4y ago
  Yeah, if the bands didn't like the situation they would just switch to one of the competitors like...um...
  - LatteLazy 4y ago
    Or they could just sell their own tickets? eBay lets you sell things, they could start there. There is nothing magic about Ticketmaster. Or they could insist on set prices. Bruce Springsteen did this decades ago. He even insisted on beers at the venue costing no more than a certain amount.
    - jandrese 4y ago
      You can't sell your own tickets if you want to play in a large venue. Those venues all have exclusive Ticketmaster agreements.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
garamgatha 4y ago
nice information
sn0w_crash 4y ago
As long as people are willing to pay these prices, this will continue. If a ticket is priced at $200 and someone is willing to pay as much as $500, you can be certain that it will be priced that way. Stop buying overpriced tickets.
- roflyear 4y ago
  The issue is there are a lot of rich people. Shows like this used to be <$100 not that long ago.
  - trident5000 4y ago
    More like people slowly finding out their quality of life is going down in the US. You get to do less fun things now and going forward.
    - smc12 4y ago
      Only if your definition of fun involves things that are highly in-demand and therefore costly.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
olivermarks 4y ago
If you want to see a band locally and are appalled by the ticket costs it's often better just to show up on site. The dynamics change a lot once a show starts if it's not sold out. Separately last century I had a plastic wallet containing a photo booth picture of me with the word 'press' Letrasetted over it. I was able to hang around by the stage taking photos with a camera that had no film in it sometimes, saw some pretty big name acts doing that but it wouldn't work these days. I also used to sneak in back stage a couple of songs into sets. More seriously the touts need to sell tickets once the music has started...and will negotiate down a lot...
MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
Slightly tangential but I just recently went to my first concert since COVID hit and ticket master is using digital tickets now? Before you could print a paper copy and get it scanned at the door but now the barcode in the app/webpage is changing every 60 seconds, like the code on an RSA fob. Seems like that on its own is enough to block scalpers.
- skellera 4y ago
  You can usually transfer or resell those tickets on TM. It just requires you to stay in their system instead of selling (taking a screenshot of the code) elsewhere. If they locked the ticket to your name, that would actually block the scalpers but they don’t.
  - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    By forcing you to stay in their system it makes it easy to identify scalpers by account behaviour. No need to pin tickets to your name, just bring down the banhammer on accounts with suspicious activity.
  - scrumbledober 4y ago
    there's also a feature in the ticket master app to just send the tickets to someone digitally so you can still sell them other ways. /i just got rid of a spare ticket i had on cash or trade. edit to add: my friend couldn't make the concert, I'm not a scalper!
- soverance 4y ago
  Yeah I hated Ticketmaster for many years, but this is the primary reason I didn't care too much, because I could just print the ticket and not deal with any of their tech gimmicks. Printing concert tickets was basically the only thing I still used a printer for, because a printed ticket was still the most reliable means of getting into the show. Ever got down to a venue and had shitty mobile service? Ever had your phone die or crash at an inconvenient time? Ever lost data? Even worse, turns out if you don't have Chrome set as the default browser app on your mobile device then the app is completely worthless and loads no pages (tested on Surface Duo 2). The same problem exists with their website when viewed from Edge on Android: you can't load your account page or tickets at all. Chrome only. Don't worry, there's zero mention of this anywhere on the app store so if you're trying to figure this out while in line at a venue, well fuck you. So now we have to deal with all this bullshit simply because we can no longer print my tickets.
jacamera 4y ago
Really terrible headline for a totally decent article. The Garth Brooks solution is super interesting. > He adds shows until they no longer sell out. In recent years, on single tours, Brooks has done the following: He played nine concerts in a row in Edmonton, Canada. He played a dozen shows in Chicago. He played six in Kansas, nine in Tulsa, and eight in Denver. I'm wondering how many shows he does in total per tour compared to other artists. It seems likely to me that he wouldn't be able to visit as many locations which still results in some fans not being able to see him.
luplex 4y ago
The problem with dynamic pricing and scalping is that it further divides people by income. Music and culture should be something that brings people together. I'd like to see a progressive pricing system that somehow forces richer people to subsidize cheaper tickets for poor people.
- hemloc_io 4y ago
  Does that already exist with shitty vs better seats/areas in concert venues? Really the place where this happens, much to the hatred of everyone is things like VIP tables at Clubs/Music festivals. The ppl leaving a 50k tab for 1000$ worth of stuff eg.
- ascagnel_ 4y ago
  There will always be some level of division. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band used to reserve the space front & center as standing-room-only, and sold it cheaply ($30, I think) on a first-come, first-served basis on the day of the show. But even if you do that, you're self-selecting the people who have the financial ability to take a day (or even multiple days) off from work to maybe get a ticket.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  As opposed to dividing people by income and ability to build a scalping bot. Some people get lucky spam refreshing but that's still dividing by ability to drop everything for 15 minutes at the exact right time which usually means rich-ish.
TYPE_FASTER 4y ago
My wife has been a member of the Pearl Jam Ten Club for years. Pearl Jam reserves seats for club members. Members put in requests for tickets to shows, including credit card information. These requests are filled following the process detailed here: https://pearljam.com/news/ten-club-ticket-presale-info https://pearljam.com/news/ten-club-ticket-presale-info. If your ticket request was filled, your credit card is charged, and you now have a valid ticket (or multiple tickets, depending on the request). You can sell tickets for face value, but not above or they'll be invalid and you might be kicked out of the club. I'm going to guess that not all artists have the ability to make this happen, but it's helped us avoid the Ticketmaster and scalping craziness.
- MengerSponge 4y ago
  Every artist has the moral ability to do that, but not every artist has the financial ability to do that. Ticketmaster draws a lot of (well-earned) hate for their scuzzy practices, but those same practices make artists a lot of money.
  - AndrewUnmuted 4y ago
  - TYPE_FASTER 4y ago
    > not every artist has the financial ability to do that Yes. I went to see a band maybe six to eight years ago. The lead singer asked the crowd to buy some merchandise a few times, and went on to explain that since the shift to streaming happened, they don't make nearly as much from radio play and album sales, so depend on touring income much more than they used to. At least dynamic pricing gets money to the artist that would have just gone to the scalper before. Ticketmaster also has a "Verified Fan" feature where you can request tickets (https://blog.ticketmaster.com/verifiedfan-faq/ https://blog.ticketmaster.com/verifiedfan-faq/), with the goal of preventing bots from buying them in the first few seconds when they are made available. While tickets can be sold/transferred for Verified Fan events, I'm not sure if there's an option to prevent sales over face value.
- 4y ago
ramesh31 4y ago
Moreso it’s because Blink 182 is essentially classic rock at this point. And classic rock tours have always been absurdly expensive. Nobody is going to see them because they just really love what Blink 182 is doing. They are paying a premium for a shot of nostalgia that can’t be had anywhere else, and they can charge these prices because the entire fanbase is over the age of 30.
- racl101 4y ago
  Pretty much. Late '90s / early 2000s rock is now thee Dad Rock and its demo, presumably has more disposable income, than they did 20 years ago.
toastercat 4y ago
Ahh paying $600 for a ticket. Now that's PUNK ROCK.
- gaws 4y ago
  > Ahh paying $600 for a ticket. lol really? snagged a bunch of decent seats for <$100.
- TrackerFF 4y ago
  Must be some VIP tickets. I paid $300 in festival tickets this summer to see Metallica, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Kiss, and 60 other bands. Now, festivals can either suck or be fun as far as sound, weather, etc. goes - but anything over 100 bucks to see a headliner + warmup gig better be top shelf stuff.
  - jahsome 4y ago
    I was looking at GA floor tickets for this blink show, and the price was $800 at the time. edit: just checked again. They're much more affordable now at $692 each.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
    Standard GA floor, standing-only, were $950 in San Diego (their hometown), BEFORE taxes and fees. [1] We've started calling them Blink $1082 here. [1] https://i.imgur.com/KtXnJbe.png https://i.imgur.com/KtXnJbe.png
    - colinmhayes 4y ago
      floor seats are generally the most expensive at arena shows.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  blink-182 isn't punk rock for what it's worth. $600 tickets seem pretty normal for a pop artist.
theGnuMe 4y ago
I thought the whole deal with ticketmaster was that they can charge hidden fees on behalf of the band and take the blame?
rjmunro 4y ago
Surely if the prices are dynamic and too expensive, just wait until nearer the date of the show and the prices will come down. An artist can make prices cheaper by just adding more dates until everyone who wants to see them can see them. When the prices are dynamic, the game is no longer about getting to the site the moment the tickets go on sale and buying them as soon as possible, as it used to be, the game is wait as long as you dare while the price decreases until just before it sells out. I think once fans get used to this new game, everyone will be happier (except scalpers). If Live Nation-TicketMaster are screwing over bands by not paying them their fair share of ticket revenue, they can go to AXS or other venue owners instead and the Live Nation venues will lie empty. They might have to go to smaller venues, so it's a case of balancing the loss of revenue from that with the increase from getting a fairer share.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  The prices are high because there aren't any tickets available right before the show starts. They sell every ticket for the most they think they can get. Blink-182 doesn't play enough shows, so they have to filter some of the fans out.
hemloc_io 4y ago
I think dynamic pricing systems are going to come across a lot of scrutiny (even if they don't deserve it.) Between this and the rental pricing thing, lots of bad press about them.
scohesc 4y ago
More and more our culture and arts become exclusively for the upper classes. Less and less people will be able to see their favorite bands perform live. Less and less people will be able to travel to see pieces of art/culture/history. Less and less people will be able to afford tickets to sports games - Hockey, Football, Soccer, etc. - all reserved for the wealthy who can afford $200 a ticket, $15 a beer, and $12 for a slice of pizza. Society is breaking down and nobody seems to notice or care. Only the rich and the lucky will be able to experience real in-person concerts, events, shows, history. Leaving the poor and downtrodden left to experience their favorite band through a 7" phone screen and a tinny speaker.
- fakethenews2022 4y ago
  Create your own culture.
  - racl101 4y ago
    Then sell out.
scrame 4y ago
Im surprised no one has mentioned Pearl Jam going to court with Ticketmaster almost 30 years ago. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taking-on-ticketmaster-67440/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taki... It's been a lousy monopoly for decades and has only gotten worse.
- b0ner_t0ner 4y ago
  Also surprised only a single mention of Clear Channel in this thread.
r2sk5t 4y ago
In many cases TM pays venues to be their exclusive ticketing company. Before TM, venues purchased hardware and software. One of the most genius business moves of all time was this business model innovation. TM does not keep all the fees they collect, but since the market views them as predatory they are providing "hated company" as a service for their customers. With respect to dynamic pricing or pricing in general, TM is going to charge a percentage of the transaction as a fee and thus make more when demand is high along with their customer (the venue) and the producer/talent (the venue's customer). It's a complex supply chain.
- jandrese 4y ago
  Ticketmaster often puts out that "we're just pretending to be the bad guys so people can still love their bands" story and I don't buy it. They are unregulated monopolists so one must never give them the benefit of the doubt. It's pretty clear that the bands themselves are under strict NDAs about the relationship so the only word we only ever get Ticketmaster's side the story.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hnburnsy 4y ago
Rest assured that Ticketmaster is doing all this pricing, fees, and ticket availability at the discretion of the artists and artist's management. Ticketmaster is happy to play the bad guy. Many tickets are never sold at the original face price but go directly to the 'verified resale' market with TM sharing the profits with the teams\artists. Example, The Black Keys were scalping their own tickets for 20x and ordered Ticketmaster to revoke tickets resold on the secondary market. https://www.ticketnews.com/2019/09/black-keys-wiltern-premium-tickets/ https://www.ticketnews.com/2019/09/black-keys-wiltern-premiu...
mawise 4y ago
Cory Doctorow wrote about this a little while ago[1], he's been using the term "Chokepoint Capitalism" [1]: https://doctorow.medium.com/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism-b885c4cb2719 https://doctorow.medium.com/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism-b8...
tinalumfoil 4y ago
Recently, I accidentally spent $100 on tickets that should've cost $40 because I didn't realize ticketmaster was only reselling tickets, they weren't selling originals. No indication cheaper original tickets were available directly from the venue. Ticketmaster made it look sold out. Really makes me not trust ticketmaster.
NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
How does "selling at the market price" constitute abuse of monopoly power?
tablarasa 4y ago
You can usually still go down to the venue during business hours and buy tickets without TM fees, right? What's hilarious is when I get mad at ticketmaster for charging me convenience fees when I am actively choosing not to walk, bike, or drive down to the venue and circumvent those fees since doing so would be inconvenient. I still make that choice while shaking my fist, and bask in my irony.
- jandrese 4y ago
  Nope. If the venue even has a box office any more, the person working is just filling out the Ticketmaster webpage for you and getting all of the fees added on.
  - tablarasa 4y ago
    Ooof yeah that's brutal. My friends and I held onto that for a long time though because we liked avoiding the fees but also having the hard copy classic tickets to put in scrap books and what not. I know you can still do it some places but I believe you that their numbers are dwindling.
    - mixmastamyk 4y ago
      Not really true. You can still avoid convenience fees at our local box office. But TM won’t allow anonymous or paper tickets any longer.
francisofascii 4y ago
Concerts are in huge demand now, post-Covid. I paid way more than I should have this past year. Fans are desperate to be back. I am part of the problem. The number of top tier, establish bands still touring is very small. And they don't want to kill themselves touring every night. Some less than ideal unorthodox solutions. 1) Go to 2nd and 3rd tier bands. Maybe not at enjoyable as Blink-182, but still good. 2) Go see cover bands. They don't need to. Support the lower tier bands, who are also very talented, enjoy the show, and pay a lot less. You will also find new music. 3) Wait a few years for the post-Covid boom to end and the recession to kick in.
bombcar 4y ago
Live Nation's market cap is only 19 billion, so it's not even half a twitter.
gojomo 4y ago
Ticketmaster has monopolistic dominance here, yes. However, the strongest monopoly involved is Blink-182 themselves, with absolute control over how they sell "Blink-182" live performances. They may be quite happy with some other big, bad corporation taking the hit for policies which manage to capture more of the full willingness-to-pay for the band and official partners, rather than secondary sellers (scalpers).
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  Right. If they want lower prices the solution is obvious. Play more shows or larger venues if available.
sunjester 4y ago
You know it's funny, pricing, if everyone refuses to buy something at a certain price the owner simply abandons the items or makes them cheaper in cost, true? Stop paying these people outrageous prices and the prices will fall.
julienb_sea 4y ago
It's a fair argument that Ticketmaster's monopoly position could lead to extortionary fees with small artists. This is unlikely to be a factor with larger artists, and its wholly unrelated to the practice of dynamic pricing. A monopoly is not required to do dynamic pricing. Airlines have no problem using dynamic pricing on all of their tickets, regardless how competitive the route is. Every major ticket seller is going to dynamic price. If anything, Ticketmaster is consistently undercutting resellers like Gametime in my experience.
mixmastamyk 4y ago
TM finally cornered the aftermarket, probably been dreaming of it for decades. More evil in my opinion, they have enforced a KYC policy around tickets, where attending without a smartphone and app installed is increasingly impossible. Thanks to Covid making it acceptable. TM has dynamic barcodes now, a printout is no longer sufficient. I loved live music for a long time and we have a concert location locally but this looks like the end of the line for me. I want to attend anonymously, pay cash, and have a paper ticket as a souvenir.
jmacd 4y ago
This is not dynamic pricing. This is a price ratchet based on diminishing inventory. There may be an algorithm at work here, but it would be superfluous. All they need to do is set thresholds that increase the price over a known quantity of tickets. Dynamic pricing works as a mechanism to bring more supply to bear. You can't do that with concert tickets. The only way it would work with concert tickets would be that as an individual concert's seats started to sell at a certain velocity, then another concert would be added for the following night. That would bring new capacity online, which would bring the market back in to "balance". This would go until there was no more demand. Their result would be the maximum number of total tickets would be sold at the maximum price possible. That is different from "15,000 tickets sold at the highest price possible". This is nothing more than a way to disguise a significant price increase.
rib3ye 4y ago
Did the tickets ever get cheaper as excess inventory showed up? THAT would be dynamic pricing.
comprev 4y ago
There was a UK comedian (can't remember their name) who was so outraged at the markup the ticket sales middleman took he refunded all of those who paid and refused to do any more gigs at venues who only sold through that platform.
rowls66 4y ago
Not sure if it has been mentioned, but the increase in ticket prices is probably directly related to the collapse of record and CD sales over that past 20 year. Back in the day when live concerts were "cheap" it was partially because live concerts were used as a way to promote the sale of vinyl and CD's where artists made most of their money. Today with streaming and considerably less revenue coming from record sales, artists have turned to live concerts as their primary revenue source, and to make a "living", they need to maximize revenue from that source. As a result, in exchange for a nearly unlimited supply of recorded music at low prices, we need to pay significantly higher prices for live performances. It's a tradeoff. Not sure if it was worth it, but there is not going back.
- seneca 4y ago
  > Back in the day when live concerts were "cheap" it was partially because live concerts were used as a way to promote the sale of vinyl and CD's where artists made most of their money. This is backward. Albums were where the record company made their money. Only mega-stars made their money on albums. Modern musicians have always made their money from live performances, and especially from merchandise. Albums were essentially marketing to bring fans in to concerts. This is why so many artists live on the road. Artists, and record labels, are certainly making less on albums now though, and I wouldn't be surprised if the labels are now nosing in more on concert profits to make up for it.
  - rowls66 4y ago
    Isn't this article talking about "mega-stars"? Only mega-stars can charge $600 for a concert ticket.
- nimih 4y ago
  While this is an interesting theory, my personal anecdotal experience doesn't really seem to support it. Some particular bands seem to have gotten more expensive over time (e.g., if I want to see Modest Mouse in Oakland this December, it'll run about 3.5x what I paid to see them in 2007, not including fees), but I'm still able to go see local and smaller touring bands play at smaller venues for similar prices to when I was a teenager in the mid 00s (maybe $5 more on the face value of the ticket, and probably a lot more in terms of service fees). Merch, on the other hand, is definitely much more expensive than it used to be, and I imagine that probably is reflecting the dynamic you're hypothesizing, at least to some extent.
anecdotal1 4y ago
I wanted tickets to see Adam Sandler in the near future. Tickets are like $5000 because of this.
- duderific 4y ago
  It might come down though. If it's in the near future, maybe the tickets are priced "aspirationally" at the moment. I have a very hard time believing a large number of people would pay $5000 to see Adam Sandler.
VikingCoder 4y ago
I'd like a mix, please... 20% of the tickets are sold in an auction or some ridiculous market like that. And 80% of the tickets are sold on a non-transferable basis, in a lottery. (Where maybe you can buy a +1 ticket, but the first one is non-transferable.) If a band wants a different mix of money vs luck, or the number of +1s you can bring, they can set it differently.
- theragra 4y ago
  Finally, i scrolled to exact my thoughts. Don't understand why people above discuss obvious things, and not this approach.
- lukew3 4y ago
  How do you make a non-transferable ticket?
  - lukew3 4y ago
    Answering my own question here, but maybe release tickets the day of the concert. That way, scalpers will be taking a bigger risk since people want to be sure they can get tickets before the day of.
  - VikingCoder 4y ago
    You show your driver's license or state issued ID, and your ticket is tied to that. I've done that before. It was a bit more inconvenient, honestly, but it got me tickets to something I was happy to see, and it cut out scalpers. I could also sell my tickets back to the venue, if I needed to cancel.
screye 4y ago
Sounds harsh..... but stop seeing the same big artists ? Most small artists have concerts that cost under 100$ while you can stand within touching distance from them and even meet them later for autographs. I wonder how much all of these tickets would sell on a truly free market, with real bidding ? I am guessing that Blink-182, with 100x as many fans as my local $100/ticket artist, would at least warrant that sort of linear increase in price.
miki123211 4y ago
There's a simple way to solve this. Companies could just require everybody to enter a name and surname of the person the ticket is bought for. There's the issue of people who later discover that they can't go to a show they have a ticket for, but that can be solved by allowing them to return their tickets to the general pool and giving them (some of) their money back.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  TM already does KYC on every customer now, as if you’re boarding an international flight.
bogomipz 4y ago
>"“I understand that the ticketing can be frustrating. I bought tickets for two of our shows myself just to see what the experience was like,” Hoppus said. “I had tickets yoinked from my cart and the whole thing crash out. Dynamic pricing. I’m not in charge of it. It’s meant to discourage scalpers. We’re trying to bring you the best possible show for the best price. This is a tour celebrating new music and the band getting back together. Thank you for your enthusiasm and I hope to see all of you at the shows.” This is the kind of vapid "non-statement" statement usually reserved for politicians. The "best price" for who? Certainly not the fans. Then further down in the article: >"Country superstar Garth Brooks—who has called out dynamic pricing as well as suggested that the secondary market should be “illegal,” has more or less solved the problem for his fans with one simple trick: He adds shows until they no longer sell out" It's worth noting that the artist doing the most "punk rock" thing here is actually the Country singer.
Gasp0de 4y ago
There is a solution here, and Rammstein is one Band that uses it: Don't sell via Ticketmaster and sell personalized tickets only that are not allowed to be resold.
mike503 4y ago
https://mashable.com/video/john-oliver-ticketmaster https://mashable.com/video/john-oliver-ticketmaster
qeternity 4y ago
TFA mentions the word "monopoly" 4 times but doesn't actually provide any evidence or even make an argument. Blink 182 tickets are so expensive because people are willing to pay a lot for them. This is the only reason.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
foogazi 4y ago
Haha the author: > I know it is different now, because, in 2009, while I was in college, I bought and sold tickets for the Bruce Springsteen tour that pissed everyone off Fuck off
hrbf 4y ago
I’ve observed this for quite some time now. I’m not exactly affluent. The maximum amount I’m willing and able to spend on any ticket is $50 – and that would have to be an artist I really want to see. The market price is closer to $500. As those two extremes are unlikely to meet any time soon, I’m simply not going and will spend my time (and whatever money there is) on more affordable, more reasonable diversions. This is another area that will eventually have its bubble popped because it's unsustainable.

327 points by Victerius 4y ago

wkdneidbwf 4y ago

go see local or smaller acts at smaller venues. don’t go see boring stadium shows. problem solved.

nluken 4y ago
You've got the right idea. Large stadium bands are almost always a poor value proposition, and that was the case even before dynamic pricing. Some of these shows are definitely cool, but the price relative to smaller touring acts (who are often just as if not more talented) is so astronomical that it never made sense to me
bsder 4y ago
Absolutely this. Hand $100 to a local band that isn't having anybody show up and they're going to treat you like a damn VIP. I find this whole kerfuffle especially ironic given that the band in question is Blink 182. Blink 182, a band absolutely known for treating their fans shittily and putting on shitty concerts, are being berated by fans because they treated the fans shittily. I can't wait for the complaints about the shitty concerts to start. Jeeze people. Take the hint and vote with your wallet.
mixmastamyk 4y ago
Our local 6k seater is subject to this too.

adfm 4y ago

Blink-182 is a pop band. I went to a $10 punk show just last week and had a blast. Who’s enslaved by Ticketmaster?

advisedwang 4y ago

I sometimes wonder why venues choose Ticketmaster; large as Ticketmaster is it's not the only option, and how did they come to be the main player? My only conclusion is that the venues (and bands) are benefiting. Here's my theory: Venues and bands know that for PR reasons they can't jack up the price of tickets, but they don't want to miss out on the revenue from people willing to pay scalper prices. So they set tickets at a nominal price but reserve huge blocks of tickets for the band and venues. Nominally these are "family and friends" tickets, but in practice the band and venue put them immediately for resale. This way the bands and venues can get that gigantic revenue. Meanwhile a small number of tickets are sold at face value and immediately sell out. Ticketmaster profits from fees on the ticket sales and resales. A "known evil" company like ticketmaster is now a benefit, as "obviously" the jacked up costs are ticketmaster's fault. Meanwhile ticketmaster is really just a service to take the heat off of bands and venues for what would otherwise be seen as price gauging.

NickC25 4y ago
Ticketmaster is "chosen" because most venues are owned and operated by Live Nation, who in turn owns Ticketmaster. Is this a monopoly, and a massive conflict of interest? Yes, and yes. Most acts don't really have the ability to set their own pricing. Those that do either are huge acts, who kind of have to go to Live Nation venues (because an act like Taylor Swift can't really go to tiny venues when she could sell out a stadium) or are tiny, local bands or artists in niche genres that don't really play venues larger than clubs or bars.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  I don't understand - why can't a venue run its own tickets?
  - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    It's the same people. The venue is not independent. It's not that they can't, they don't want to.

adamgordonbell 4y ago

Isn't TicketMasters service to be the bad guy. Bands and venues get to blame them for the prices and in turn ticketmaster gets a cut. Company to blame as a service.

bombcar 4y ago
This isn't only Ticketmaster! A registration tool I've used lets you add a fee that ostensibly is to pay for the registration processing but if you set it above X + 3% you get all the extra. Very sneaky!
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  Man, I hope all the electronic food ordering sites are like that Every restaurant here takes online orders, but ordering online tacks on 10% or more in fees. I just call them on the phone to avoid the fees, since it seems insane to me to pay $8 just for 2 seconds of using a web app
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Some are, some aren't - you can sometimes dig around and find out which they use. A few of the local restaurants have ones that add nothing to the order cost at all, so they must be cheap enough that the restaurant doesn't care.
  - skellera 4y ago
    DoorDash takes up to a 30% cut even on pick up orders. Pretty rough deal for restaurants that have to use that service to survive. Just makes the costs go up for the rest of us.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      I refuse to use something like doordash for pickup. I’d rather call or just go and order and wait than give DD such a huge cut for doing nothing useful.

non_sequitur 4y ago

So the real complaint is dynamic pricing, which is essentially raising prices to what the market will bear, instead of having (what was formerly artificially) low prices that get scalped. Now the extra money that used to go to scalpers goes to TM instead, and the downside is that some % of fans that could previously luck out and get cheap tickets no longer can. Isnt this...not a bad thing? There's fundamentally just a supply and demand problem, with more people wanting to see these concerts than there are concerts. The article mentions that Garth brooks solved this by doing more concerts (e.g. 9 in a row in the same city!), but that's obviously not viable for everyone. Is there a better solution? Even if there were 5 different companies selling concert tickets, wouldnt they inevitably move to dynamic pricing for the same reason?

pbreit 4y ago
And primary sale concerts tickets for even semi-popular artists are still way under-priced.
gregdoesit 4y ago
I was having the same question. Original situation: tickets are priced too low, and sell out almost immediately, with scrapers buying much of the tickets, then reselling them. Fans are furious! Plus: the band+seller is leaving money on the table, scrapers are making a killing. Current situation: tickets are priced at market value thanks to dynamic pricing, so they no longer sell out instantly, and scrapers are discouraged from buying them. Fans are furious! Plus: the band+seller make more money than before, scrapers make close to none.
- exq 4y ago
  Do you have a source for the last sentence?
  - kolbe 4y ago
    I think he's using logic.
  - lesuorac 4y ago

ianferrel 4y ago

Blink-182 tickets are expensive because a lot of people want to see Blink-182 and there are only so many concert seats.

dehrmann 4y ago
This is slightly surprising. They're one of the biggest bands of that era and genre, but I still don't see them as being in that much demand. They're not a Rolling Stones. That said, pop punk is having a moment again, Tom is back, Mark is cancer-free, and Mr. Kourtney Kardashian has been drumming it up all over the place.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  I think its a function of time and demographic change as well. It's not just that they're popular, but the people they're popular with are now older, have better jobs and more disposable income. Look at the ticket prices for any popular bands that are still doing shows from the boomer's generation like grateful dead. Ultimately what I'm saying is their target market can bear higher cost tickets, so now they cost more. I don't get why millennials are still shocked by this.
- jandrese 4y ago
  The fundamental issue is that entertainment venues are largely undersized for the local population these days. New ones don't open up very often. They have not kept up with population growth. In the US it is hard to build a properly big venue anymore because the parking situation becomes untenable and public transit expansion has slowed to a crawl in the past 60 years. You can't build a massive venue because it would have to be surrounded by acres and acres of parking. So if you want to put it in the city there is no parcel of land big enough, and if you want to put it out in the country the roads can't handle it.
  - anticensor 4y ago
    Underground parking and rapid transit access could reduce the extent of problem.

jrmg 4y ago

Lots of comments here from people who haven’t read the article and don’t know about the scalper-eliminating on-demand pricing it’s actually about. Or that it addresses supply-and-demand near the end with some interesting comments on Garth Brooks: Country superstar Garth Brooks—who has called out dynamic pricing as well as suggested that the secondary market should be “illegal,” has more or less solved the problem for his fans with one simple trick: He adds shows until they no longer sell out. In recent years, on single tours, Brooks has done the following: He played nine concerts in a row in Edmonton, Canada. He played a dozen shows in Chicago. He played six in Kansas, nine in Tulsa, and eight in Denver. Indeed, the headline doesn’t seem particularly supported by the actual article to me.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jbellis 4y ago
My understanding is that it's absolutely normal for the headline to be written by an editor maximizing for clicks, rather than by the article author.
- jahsome 4y ago
  Former reporter. Can confirm -- If you only knew...
cbsmith 4y ago
Worth mentioning... The platform Garth Brooks uses to sell tickets the way he does: Ticketmaster. So it's available to other artists/promoters, if they want to do it. The nickname for that approach is "Garth mode".
- vlunkr 4y ago
  There's lots of back-and-forth in these comments about whether Ticketmaster is the villain, or just the scapegoat for venues and artists to take more money. Without any insider information, I lean towards the latter. This is a supply and demand issue where the limit on supply is how much Blink-182 wants to perform. Maybe there's a good logistical reason why they don't do "Garth mode", or maybe this tour is just a quick cash grab.

haunter 4y ago

And that's why festivals are more popular. More tickets available and the price / band is significantly lower.

postalrat 4y ago

Non-transferable tickets seem to me to be a simple solution. But people want be able to sell their tickets. So now we are stuck with high ticket prices.

Scoundreller 4y ago
Cash at the door? Or physical tickets sold around town the day of? People have a love/hate relationship with the frenzy I guess.
- raldi 4y ago
  Cash at the door would just mean endless lines — people paying with their time instead of their money, and the value of that time is just wasted rather than captured by the seller.
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    $40 exact change in $20 bills will be faster than scanning barcodes.
- michaelt 4y ago
  Concert tickets sold like flight tickets - provide a full name for every ticket booked, at booking time. Queue up at the venue to have your ticket checked against your passport.
  - matwood 4y ago
    They would also need to be market priced, like airline tickets.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- dagw 4y ago
  That's great for locals, but doesn't really work for people who have to travel several hours and book a hotel to get to somewhere where many of the bands I want to see play. For people like us having a guaranteed ticket far in advance is important.

tommek4077 4y ago

Make it like Rammstein. Scalpers and resellers are out, prices are low. Of course it is still hard to get Tickets.

gaws 4y ago
> Scalpers and resellers are out How do you even track that?
- wombat-man 4y ago
  It's possible to make tickets non-transferrable. I think MCR did that for a show near me, for the floor section anyway. Never saw any for sale on resellers. People on reddit were saying they were digital only and non transferrable, so you'd have to give someone your ticketmaster login to use it. that plus 2fa could be effective. Can't confirm. It's possible the tickets were just plain sold out.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
    Unlike Germany, tickets have to be transferable in America. Legally, you can't link a tickets validity to an individual person's identity.
    - wombat-man 4y ago
      I don't think that's true https://stubhub.community/t5/Selling-Tickets/Non-transferable-ticketmaster-tickets/td-p/165101 https://stubhub.community/t5/Selling-Tickets/Non-transferabl...
      - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
        I was wrong. It seems like it's state laws, not federal laws, that regulate this issue: https://www.ticketnews.com/ticket-regulations-and-legislation-compendium/non-transferable-tickets/ https://www.ticketnews.com/ticket-regulations-and-legislatio...

LatteLazy 4y ago

Ticketmaster exists as a blame absorber. Their business model is to charge huge fees, pass 80% plus of the cash back to bands and managers, but absorb 100% of the blame for tickets being expensive. This is why bands and their managers keep using them despite them being universally hated. You are being tricked, and not (just) by ticketmaster...

jandrese 4y ago
Yeah, if the bands didn't like the situation they would just switch to one of the competitors like...um...
- LatteLazy 4y ago
  Or they could just sell their own tickets? eBay lets you sell things, they could start there. There is nothing magic about Ticketmaster. Or they could insist on set prices. Bruce Springsteen did this decades ago. He even insisted on beers at the venue costing no more than a certain amount.
  - jandrese 4y ago
    You can't sell your own tickets if you want to play in a large venue. Those venues all have exclusive Ticketmaster agreements.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]

garamgatha 4y ago

nice information

sn0w_crash 4y ago

As long as people are willing to pay these prices, this will continue. If a ticket is priced at $200 and someone is willing to pay as much as $500, you can be certain that it will be priced that way. Stop buying overpriced tickets.

roflyear 4y ago
The issue is there are a lot of rich people. Shows like this used to be <$100 not that long ago.
- trident5000 4y ago
  More like people slowly finding out their quality of life is going down in the US. You get to do less fun things now and going forward.
  - smc12 4y ago
    Only if your definition of fun involves things that are highly in-demand and therefore costly.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

olivermarks 4y ago

If you want to see a band locally and are appalled by the ticket costs it's often better just to show up on site. The dynamics change a lot once a show starts if it's not sold out. Separately last century I had a plastic wallet containing a photo booth picture of me with the word 'press' Letrasetted over it. I was able to hang around by the stage taking photos with a camera that had no film in it sometimes, saw some pretty big name acts doing that but it wouldn't work these days. I also used to sneak in back stage a couple of songs into sets. More seriously the touts need to sell tickets once the music has started...and will negotiate down a lot...

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago

Slightly tangential but I just recently went to my first concert since COVID hit and ticket master is using digital tickets now? Before you could print a paper copy and get it scanned at the door but now the barcode in the app/webpage is changing every 60 seconds, like the code on an RSA fob. Seems like that on its own is enough to block scalpers.

skellera 4y ago
You can usually transfer or resell those tickets on TM. It just requires you to stay in their system instead of selling (taking a screenshot of the code) elsewhere. If they locked the ticket to your name, that would actually block the scalpers but they don’t.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  By forcing you to stay in their system it makes it easy to identify scalpers by account behaviour. No need to pin tickets to your name, just bring down the banhammer on accounts with suspicious activity.
- scrumbledober 4y ago
  there's also a feature in the ticket master app to just send the tickets to someone digitally so you can still sell them other ways. /i just got rid of a spare ticket i had on cash or trade. edit to add: my friend couldn't make the concert, I'm not a scalper!
soverance 4y ago
Yeah I hated Ticketmaster for many years, but this is the primary reason I didn't care too much, because I could just print the ticket and not deal with any of their tech gimmicks. Printing concert tickets was basically the only thing I still used a printer for, because a printed ticket was still the most reliable means of getting into the show. Ever got down to a venue and had shitty mobile service? Ever had your phone die or crash at an inconvenient time? Ever lost data? Even worse, turns out if you don't have Chrome set as the default browser app on your mobile device then the app is completely worthless and loads no pages (tested on Surface Duo 2). The same problem exists with their website when viewed from Edge on Android: you can't load your account page or tickets at all. Chrome only. Don't worry, there's zero mention of this anywhere on the app store so if you're trying to figure this out while in line at a venue, well fuck you. So now we have to deal with all this bullshit simply because we can no longer print my tickets.

jacamera 4y ago

Really terrible headline for a totally decent article. The Garth Brooks solution is super interesting. > He adds shows until they no longer sell out. In recent years, on single tours, Brooks has done the following: He played nine concerts in a row in Edmonton, Canada. He played a dozen shows in Chicago. He played six in Kansas, nine in Tulsa, and eight in Denver. I'm wondering how many shows he does in total per tour compared to other artists. It seems likely to me that he wouldn't be able to visit as many locations which still results in some fans not being able to see him.

luplex 4y ago

The problem with dynamic pricing and scalping is that it further divides people by income. Music and culture should be something that brings people together. I'd like to see a progressive pricing system that somehow forces richer people to subsidize cheaper tickets for poor people.

hemloc_io 4y ago
Does that already exist with shitty vs better seats/areas in concert venues? Really the place where this happens, much to the hatred of everyone is things like VIP tables at Clubs/Music festivals. The ppl leaving a 50k tab for 1000$ worth of stuff eg.
ascagnel_ 4y ago
There will always be some level of division. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band used to reserve the space front & center as standing-room-only, and sold it cheaply ($30, I think) on a first-come, first-served basis on the day of the show. But even if you do that, you're self-selecting the people who have the financial ability to take a day (or even multiple days) off from work to maybe get a ticket.
colinmhayes 4y ago
As opposed to dividing people by income and ability to build a scalping bot. Some people get lucky spam refreshing but that's still dividing by ability to drop everything for 15 minutes at the exact right time which usually means rich-ish.

TYPE_FASTER 4y ago

My wife has been a member of the Pearl Jam Ten Club for years. Pearl Jam reserves seats for club members. Members put in requests for tickets to shows, including credit card information. These requests are filled following the process detailed here: https://pearljam.com/news/ten-club-ticket-presale-info https://pearljam.com/news/ten-club-ticket-presale-info. If your ticket request was filled, your credit card is charged, and you now have a valid ticket (or multiple tickets, depending on the request). You can sell tickets for face value, but not above or they'll be invalid and you might be kicked out of the club. I'm going to guess that not all artists have the ability to make this happen, but it's helped us avoid the Ticketmaster and scalping craziness.

MengerSponge 4y ago
Every artist has the moral ability to do that, but not every artist has the financial ability to do that. Ticketmaster draws a lot of (well-earned) hate for their scuzzy practices, but those same practices make artists a lot of money.
- AndrewUnmuted 4y ago
- TYPE_FASTER 4y ago
  > not every artist has the financial ability to do that Yes. I went to see a band maybe six to eight years ago. The lead singer asked the crowd to buy some merchandise a few times, and went on to explain that since the shift to streaming happened, they don't make nearly as much from radio play and album sales, so depend on touring income much more than they used to. At least dynamic pricing gets money to the artist that would have just gone to the scalper before. Ticketmaster also has a "Verified Fan" feature where you can request tickets (https://blog.ticketmaster.com/verifiedfan-faq/ https://blog.ticketmaster.com/verifiedfan-faq/), with the goal of preventing bots from buying them in the first few seconds when they are made available. While tickets can be sold/transferred for Verified Fan events, I'm not sure if there's an option to prevent sales over face value.
4y ago

ramesh31 4y ago

Moreso it’s because Blink 182 is essentially classic rock at this point. And classic rock tours have always been absurdly expensive. Nobody is going to see them because they just really love what Blink 182 is doing. They are paying a premium for a shot of nostalgia that can’t be had anywhere else, and they can charge these prices because the entire fanbase is over the age of 30.

racl101 4y ago
Pretty much. Late '90s / early 2000s rock is now thee Dad Rock and its demo, presumably has more disposable income, than they did 20 years ago.

toastercat 4y ago

Ahh paying $600 for a ticket. Now that's PUNK ROCK.

gaws 4y ago
> Ahh paying $600 for a ticket. lol really? snagged a bunch of decent seats for <$100.
TrackerFF 4y ago
Must be some VIP tickets. I paid $300 in festival tickets this summer to see Metallica, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Kiss, and 60 other bands. Now, festivals can either suck or be fun as far as sound, weather, etc. goes - but anything over 100 bucks to see a headliner + warmup gig better be top shelf stuff.
- jahsome 4y ago
  I was looking at GA floor tickets for this blink show, and the price was $800 at the time. edit: just checked again. They're much more affordable now at $692 each.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
  Standard GA floor, standing-only, were $950 in San Diego (their hometown), BEFORE taxes and fees. [1] We've started calling them Blink $1082 here. [1] https://i.imgur.com/KtXnJbe.png https://i.imgur.com/KtXnJbe.png
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    floor seats are generally the most expensive at arena shows.
colinmhayes 4y ago
blink-182 isn't punk rock for what it's worth. $600 tickets seem pretty normal for a pop artist.

theGnuMe 4y ago

I thought the whole deal with ticketmaster was that they can charge hidden fees on behalf of the band and take the blame?

rjmunro 4y ago

Surely if the prices are dynamic and too expensive, just wait until nearer the date of the show and the prices will come down. An artist can make prices cheaper by just adding more dates until everyone who wants to see them can see them. When the prices are dynamic, the game is no longer about getting to the site the moment the tickets go on sale and buying them as soon as possible, as it used to be, the game is wait as long as you dare while the price decreases until just before it sells out. I think once fans get used to this new game, everyone will be happier (except scalpers). If Live Nation-TicketMaster are screwing over bands by not paying them their fair share of ticket revenue, they can go to AXS or other venue owners instead and the Live Nation venues will lie empty. They might have to go to smaller venues, so it's a case of balancing the loss of revenue from that with the increase from getting a fairer share.

colinmhayes 4y ago
The prices are high because there aren't any tickets available right before the show starts. They sell every ticket for the most they think they can get. Blink-182 doesn't play enough shows, so they have to filter some of the fans out.

hemloc_io 4y ago

I think dynamic pricing systems are going to come across a lot of scrutiny (even if they don't deserve it.) Between this and the rental pricing thing, lots of bad press about them.

scohesc 4y ago

More and more our culture and arts become exclusively for the upper classes. Less and less people will be able to see their favorite bands perform live. Less and less people will be able to travel to see pieces of art/culture/history. Less and less people will be able to afford tickets to sports games - Hockey, Football, Soccer, etc. - all reserved for the wealthy who can afford $200 a ticket, $15 a beer, and $12 for a slice of pizza. Society is breaking down and nobody seems to notice or care. Only the rich and the lucky will be able to experience real in-person concerts, events, shows, history. Leaving the poor and downtrodden left to experience their favorite band through a 7" phone screen and a tinny speaker.

fakethenews2022 4y ago
Create your own culture.
- racl101 4y ago
  Then sell out.

scrame 4y ago

Im surprised no one has mentioned Pearl Jam going to court with Ticketmaster almost 30 years ago. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taking-on-ticketmaster-67440/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taki... It's been a lousy monopoly for decades and has only gotten worse.

b0ner_t0ner 4y ago
Also surprised only a single mention of Clear Channel in this thread.

r2sk5t 4y ago

In many cases TM pays venues to be their exclusive ticketing company. Before TM, venues purchased hardware and software. One of the most genius business moves of all time was this business model innovation. TM does not keep all the fees they collect, but since the market views them as predatory they are providing "hated company" as a service for their customers. With respect to dynamic pricing or pricing in general, TM is going to charge a percentage of the transaction as a fee and thus make more when demand is high along with their customer (the venue) and the producer/talent (the venue's customer). It's a complex supply chain.

jandrese 4y ago
Ticketmaster often puts out that "we're just pretending to be the bad guys so people can still love their bands" story and I don't buy it. They are unregulated monopolists so one must never give them the benefit of the doubt. It's pretty clear that the bands themselves are under strict NDAs about the relationship so the only word we only ever get Ticketmaster's side the story.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hnburnsy 4y ago

Rest assured that Ticketmaster is doing all this pricing, fees, and ticket availability at the discretion of the artists and artist's management. Ticketmaster is happy to play the bad guy. Many tickets are never sold at the original face price but go directly to the 'verified resale' market with TM sharing the profits with the teams\artists. Example, The Black Keys were scalping their own tickets for 20x and ordered Ticketmaster to revoke tickets resold on the secondary market. https://www.ticketnews.com/2019/09/black-keys-wiltern-premium-tickets/ https://www.ticketnews.com/2019/09/black-keys-wiltern-premiu...

mawise 4y ago

Cory Doctorow wrote about this a little while ago[1], he's been using the term "Chokepoint Capitalism" [1]: https://doctorow.medium.com/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism-b885c4cb2719 https://doctorow.medium.com/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism-b8...

tinalumfoil 4y ago

Recently, I accidentally spent $100 on tickets that should've cost $40 because I didn't realize ticketmaster was only reselling tickets, they weren't selling originals. No indication cheaper original tickets were available directly from the venue. Ticketmaster made it look sold out. Really makes me not trust ticketmaster.

NovemberWhiskey 4y ago

How does "selling at the market price" constitute abuse of monopoly power?

tablarasa 4y ago

You can usually still go down to the venue during business hours and buy tickets without TM fees, right? What's hilarious is when I get mad at ticketmaster for charging me convenience fees when I am actively choosing not to walk, bike, or drive down to the venue and circumvent those fees since doing so would be inconvenient. I still make that choice while shaking my fist, and bask in my irony.

jandrese 4y ago
Nope. If the venue even has a box office any more, the person working is just filling out the Ticketmaster webpage for you and getting all of the fees added on.
- tablarasa 4y ago
  Ooof yeah that's brutal. My friends and I held onto that for a long time though because we liked avoiding the fees but also having the hard copy classic tickets to put in scrap books and what not. I know you can still do it some places but I believe you that their numbers are dwindling.
  - mixmastamyk 4y ago
    Not really true. You can still avoid convenience fees at our local box office. But TM won’t allow anonymous or paper tickets any longer.

francisofascii 4y ago

Concerts are in huge demand now, post-Covid. I paid way more than I should have this past year. Fans are desperate to be back. I am part of the problem. The number of top tier, establish bands still touring is very small. And they don't want to kill themselves touring every night. Some less than ideal unorthodox solutions. 1) Go to 2nd and 3rd tier bands. Maybe not at enjoyable as Blink-182, but still good. 2) Go see cover bands. They don't need to. Support the lower tier bands, who are also very talented, enjoy the show, and pay a lot less. You will also find new music. 3) Wait a few years for the post-Covid boom to end and the recession to kick in.

bombcar 4y ago

Live Nation's market cap is only 19 billion, so it's not even half a twitter.

gojomo 4y ago

Ticketmaster has monopolistic dominance here, yes. However, the strongest monopoly involved is Blink-182 themselves, with absolute control over how they sell "Blink-182" live performances. They may be quite happy with some other big, bad corporation taking the hit for policies which manage to capture more of the full willingness-to-pay for the band and official partners, rather than secondary sellers (scalpers).

colinmhayes 4y ago
Right. If they want lower prices the solution is obvious. Play more shows or larger venues if available.

sunjester 4y ago

You know it's funny, pricing, if everyone refuses to buy something at a certain price the owner simply abandons the items or makes them cheaper in cost, true? Stop paying these people outrageous prices and the prices will fall.

julienb_sea 4y ago

It's a fair argument that Ticketmaster's monopoly position could lead to extortionary fees with small artists. This is unlikely to be a factor with larger artists, and its wholly unrelated to the practice of dynamic pricing. A monopoly is not required to do dynamic pricing. Airlines have no problem using dynamic pricing on all of their tickets, regardless how competitive the route is. Every major ticket seller is going to dynamic price. If anything, Ticketmaster is consistently undercutting resellers like Gametime in my experience.

mixmastamyk 4y ago

TM finally cornered the aftermarket, probably been dreaming of it for decades. More evil in my opinion, they have enforced a KYC policy around tickets, where attending without a smartphone and app installed is increasingly impossible. Thanks to Covid making it acceptable. TM has dynamic barcodes now, a printout is no longer sufficient. I loved live music for a long time and we have a concert location locally but this looks like the end of the line for me. I want to attend anonymously, pay cash, and have a paper ticket as a souvenir.

jmacd 4y ago

This is not dynamic pricing. This is a price ratchet based on diminishing inventory. There may be an algorithm at work here, but it would be superfluous. All they need to do is set thresholds that increase the price over a known quantity of tickets. Dynamic pricing works as a mechanism to bring more supply to bear. You can't do that with concert tickets. The only way it would work with concert tickets would be that as an individual concert's seats started to sell at a certain velocity, then another concert would be added for the following night. That would bring new capacity online, which would bring the market back in to "balance". This would go until there was no more demand. Their result would be the maximum number of total tickets would be sold at the maximum price possible. That is different from "15,000 tickets sold at the highest price possible". This is nothing more than a way to disguise a significant price increase.

rib3ye 4y ago

Did the tickets ever get cheaper as excess inventory showed up? THAT would be dynamic pricing.

comprev 4y ago

There was a UK comedian (can't remember their name) who was so outraged at the markup the ticket sales middleman took he refunded all of those who paid and refused to do any more gigs at venues who only sold through that platform.

rowls66 4y ago

Not sure if it has been mentioned, but the increase in ticket prices is probably directly related to the collapse of record and CD sales over that past 20 year. Back in the day when live concerts were "cheap" it was partially because live concerts were used as a way to promote the sale of vinyl and CD's where artists made most of their money. Today with streaming and considerably less revenue coming from record sales, artists have turned to live concerts as their primary revenue source, and to make a "living", they need to maximize revenue from that source. As a result, in exchange for a nearly unlimited supply of recorded music at low prices, we need to pay significantly higher prices for live performances. It's a tradeoff. Not sure if it was worth it, but there is not going back.

seneca 4y ago
> Back in the day when live concerts were "cheap" it was partially because live concerts were used as a way to promote the sale of vinyl and CD's where artists made most of their money. This is backward. Albums were where the record company made their money. Only mega-stars made their money on albums. Modern musicians have always made their money from live performances, and especially from merchandise. Albums were essentially marketing to bring fans in to concerts. This is why so many artists live on the road. Artists, and record labels, are certainly making less on albums now though, and I wouldn't be surprised if the labels are now nosing in more on concert profits to make up for it.
- rowls66 4y ago
  Isn't this article talking about "mega-stars"? Only mega-stars can charge $600 for a concert ticket.
nimih 4y ago
While this is an interesting theory, my personal anecdotal experience doesn't really seem to support it. Some particular bands seem to have gotten more expensive over time (e.g., if I want to see Modest Mouse in Oakland this December, it'll run about 3.5x what I paid to see them in 2007, not including fees), but I'm still able to go see local and smaller touring bands play at smaller venues for similar prices to when I was a teenager in the mid 00s (maybe $5 more on the face value of the ticket, and probably a lot more in terms of service fees). Merch, on the other hand, is definitely much more expensive than it used to be, and I imagine that probably is reflecting the dynamic you're hypothesizing, at least to some extent.

anecdotal1 4y ago

I wanted tickets to see Adam Sandler in the near future. Tickets are like $5000 because of this.

duderific 4y ago
It might come down though. If it's in the near future, maybe the tickets are priced "aspirationally" at the moment. I have a very hard time believing a large number of people would pay $5000 to see Adam Sandler.

VikingCoder 4y ago

I'd like a mix, please... 20% of the tickets are sold in an auction or some ridiculous market like that. And 80% of the tickets are sold on a non-transferable basis, in a lottery. (Where maybe you can buy a +1 ticket, but the first one is non-transferable.) If a band wants a different mix of money vs luck, or the number of +1s you can bring, they can set it differently.

theragra 4y ago
Finally, i scrolled to exact my thoughts. Don't understand why people above discuss obvious things, and not this approach.
lukew3 4y ago
How do you make a non-transferable ticket?
- lukew3 4y ago
  Answering my own question here, but maybe release tickets the day of the concert. That way, scalpers will be taking a bigger risk since people want to be sure they can get tickets before the day of.
- VikingCoder 4y ago
  You show your driver's license or state issued ID, and your ticket is tied to that. I've done that before. It was a bit more inconvenient, honestly, but it got me tickets to something I was happy to see, and it cut out scalpers. I could also sell my tickets back to the venue, if I needed to cancel.

screye 4y ago

Sounds harsh..... but stop seeing the same big artists ? Most small artists have concerts that cost under 100$ while you can stand within touching distance from them and even meet them later for autographs. I wonder how much all of these tickets would sell on a truly free market, with real bidding ? I am guessing that Blink-182, with 100x as many fans as my local $100/ticket artist, would at least warrant that sort of linear increase in price.

miki123211 4y ago

There's a simple way to solve this. Companies could just require everybody to enter a name and surname of the person the ticket is bought for. There's the issue of people who later discover that they can't go to a show they have a ticket for, but that can be solved by allowing them to return their tickets to the general pool and giving them (some of) their money back.

mixmastamyk 4y ago
TM already does KYC on every customer now, as if you’re boarding an international flight.

bogomipz 4y ago

>"“I understand that the ticketing can be frustrating. I bought tickets for two of our shows myself just to see what the experience was like,” Hoppus said. “I had tickets yoinked from my cart and the whole thing crash out. Dynamic pricing. I’m not in charge of it. It’s meant to discourage scalpers. We’re trying to bring you the best possible show for the best price. This is a tour celebrating new music and the band getting back together. Thank you for your enthusiasm and I hope to see all of you at the shows.” This is the kind of vapid "non-statement" statement usually reserved for politicians. The "best price" for who? Certainly not the fans. Then further down in the article: >"Country superstar Garth Brooks—who has called out dynamic pricing as well as suggested that the secondary market should be “illegal,” has more or less solved the problem for his fans with one simple trick: He adds shows until they no longer sell out" It's worth noting that the artist doing the most "punk rock" thing here is actually the Country singer.

Gasp0de 4y ago

There is a solution here, and Rammstein is one Band that uses it: Don't sell via Ticketmaster and sell personalized tickets only that are not allowed to be resold.

mike503 4y ago

https://mashable.com/video/john-oliver-ticketmaster https://mashable.com/video/john-oliver-ticketmaster

qeternity 4y ago

TFA mentions the word "monopoly" 4 times but doesn't actually provide any evidence or even make an argument. Blink 182 tickets are so expensive because people are willing to pay a lot for them. This is the only reason.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

foogazi 4y ago

Haha the author: > I know it is different now, because, in 2009, while I was in college, I bought and sold tickets for the Bruce Springsteen tour that pissed everyone off Fuck off

hrbf 4y ago

I’ve observed this for quite some time now. I’m not exactly affluent. The maximum amount I’m willing and able to spend on any ticket is $50 – and that would have to be an artist I really want to see. The market price is closer to $500. As those two extremes are unlikely to meet any time soon, I’m simply not going and will spend my time (and whatever money there is) on more affordable, more reasonable diversions. This is another area that will eventually have its bubble popped because it's unsustainable.