4 ms·
I would agree with you that as of late it has been bordering on excess, but comparing to the other large touring acts they're still cheaper. The most egregious
by switz 2y ago
I would agree with you that as of late it has been bordering on excess, but comparing to the other large touring acts they're still cheaper. The most egregious thing has been leaning into platinum tickets, which Ticketmaster purports as a way to avoid scalping, but all it does is create an artificial scarcity that drives up false demand. For the last few years, there's rarely been a Phish concert where you couldn't find a face value ticket (or much cheaper) the day of the show despite every show selling out instantly. So it's all a facade designed to rent-seek the more wealthy fans, while keeping the less motivated fans away from the concert and encouraging people to buy up as many tickets as possible to use for trades, even if they have no intention of attending that concert.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bongodongobob 2y agoI don't understand why world famous acts are expected to have cheap tickets. No one is saying the price of any other scarce/limited non-essential products or resources should have price controls.
- devin 2y agoParent isn't suggesting price controls in any way.
- tristor 2y agoI don't have an issue with high prices, in the general sense, I have an issue with artificially inflated prices via dark patterns and other unethical means, which Ticketmaster has built their entire business around. As a customer who earns a tech salary, mostly I want to be able to go on the site, find the "best available" seats, and buy them. Done. What Ticketmaster instead forces you to do is go through an artificial queuing system, lies to you about what's best available, has widely ranging dynamic pricing, doesn't allow you to purchase all seat classes available at any given moment and releases them randomly, and does all sorts of other horrid fuckery and at the end as an extra middle finger charges you a "convenience fee" for having you print your tickets yourself or scanning them from your phone after you went through the least convenient, pleasant, and reasonable process every to get overcharged for the tickets. And let's be clear, we're talking about overcharging. The face value of a ticket can be high for a world-famous act. So let's say the face value of a typical seat is $250 for a concert. Ticketmaster will absolutely charge you $700 for that same ticket.
- sbierwagen 2y agoYou're contradicting yourself here. You want tickets to be both cheaper and easier to buy. They can't be both. The value of the ticket is just high. Either you pay in time, or money. Your enemy isn't ticketmaster, it's the 100,000 people who want to go to a 1,000 person venue.
- tristor 2y agoI don't mind paying $700 if $700 is the face value of the ticket. You're acting like I'm against first-come, first-serve. I am not. I am fine with it. I'm fine waking up at 3AM to buy a ticket. What I'm not okay with are bots and bullshit.
- bongodongobob 2y agoFace value is arbitrary and has nothing to do with the real value of the ticket.
- pcthrowaway 2y agoYes, but it has everything to do with the value not being extracted by middle-men who provide questionable value in the whole process.
- bongodongobob 2y agoIt's not artificially inflated if people are willing to buy them. If people are scalping them, Ticketmaster isn't charging enough.
- tristor 2y agoScalping is an after-the-fact action, which by the way Ticketmaster directly enables (they own Stubhub and have built-in scalping tools in their app). While I find scalping distasteful, that is not the reason why Ticketmaster's pricing and practices suck.