4 ms·

Who will solve ticketing?

• whapworth 12y ago
  Solution: Build a better mousetrap than ticketmaster/livenation tyrants that rewards true fans and diehards...and also put stubhub and other secondary markets out of business. Credit card companies are figuring it out and buying up huge quantities of tickets to sell to their card holders as a "reward"...they make money and act like they’re doing card holders a favor..SMRT. Need to consider: penalties for bad actors, rewards for super users, and some control on how tickets go on sale that at a base level favors the fans. Also need to consider 4 key stake holders: artists, venues, labels, and fans. issue is that the interests of the artists, venues and labels are all aligned, ie. sell fast and price high, but not aligned with the fans, who are the VERY ones that make the artists famous and should be the most cared for. User: Concert/show ticket buyer Benefit: solve a HUGE current pain point for concert/event goers. this is a big market, and RIPE for disruption, ask anyone about how unpleasant/cumbersome the experience is. Make it easier, faster, and maybe even cheaper for loyal fans to go to the shows of the artists they make famous. any thoughts?
  • oxalo 12y ago
    Is there really money in this? As someone who has suffered the pain of insta-sellout-tickets, I understand. But from a business perspective, you need a way into the market, and 'supporting the loyal fans' I don't think will cut it.
    • teovall 12y ago
      Use the artists as a back door around the label and the venue. Happy fans and a good purchasing experience make for more sold tickets and more loyal fans. Concerts are artists' bread and butter. That's where they make most of their money.
• teovall 12y ago
  Seems like you could just model it on the way airlines do ticketing. * Your ticket has your name on it. * ID is checked at the door and must match your ticket. * When buying a ticket, you can choose a refundable ticket for a higher price than a non-refundable ticket. * Tickets can be sold through resellers who get a cut. * Resellers are all selling from the same pool of open seats so they have to have competitive prices. * Ticket prices rise as the concert date gets closer. * "Frequent fliers" can get rewards and other preferential treatment.
  • wiseleo 12y ago
    This creates a problem with tickets where the attendee is not the person paying for the ticket and could be one of several potential companions of the person who is paying for the tickets. I can no longer just give a pair of tickets to someone as a surprise and tell them to go have fun. I could, in theory, give them a gift token that corresponds to reserved seats and then it would be up to them to register their names. Then the scalper can sell such tokens and we are back to where we started.
    • teovall 12y ago
      You can buy a plane ticket for someone else. You just can't fly using someone else's ticket. Why would that not work for concert tickets? The only issue I can think of is giving two (or more) tickets to someone as a gift so they, and the friend(s) of their choice, can go to a concert together. This could be handled by selling "friend" tickets that are only valid if the person named on the primary ticket is accompanying them. There would probably need to be a limit on the number of "friend" tickets that could be purchased along with each primary ticket. For a scalper to sell these tickets, they would need to accompany their buyers through the doors. Scalpers wouldn't be able to resell their primary ticket, which would increase the costs for scalpers but not anyone else. Each scalper would only be able to sell a small number of tickets due to the friend limit.
      • whapworth 12y ago
        or maybe you need to attend a certain percentage of the concerts for which you buy tickets....just to prevent the person who buys tickets for eight different shows in a night and goes to none.
• wiseleo 12y ago
  The current situation is more like this: Venue sells tickets, where the face value can be considered as the wholesale value as far as the fan is concerned. Secondary markets buy up the wholesale inventory, accept the risk of spoilage, and sell to the highest bidder. So what is the solution? Making tickets non-transferable except by entering transaction details on the venue site could be one approach. Transferring the ticket voids the original ticket and generates a new ticket. Limit number of transfers per user. Provide a validation site where a potential transferee can validate the ticket by uploading its QR code or entering its ID number. This would be difficult to enforce as anonymous debit cards purchasable with cash exist. Limiting numbers of purchases is ineffective as scalpers have ways to bypass the current ticket number restrictions already allegedly in effect. This is who you are up against in addition to Livenation: http://aegworldwide.com/about/companyoverview/companyoverview http://aegworldwide.com/about/companyoverview/companyovervie... Disrupting venue owners would be difficult as exclusive contracts with Ticketmaster (aka Livenation) are long-term and in place. Building a solution that they want to acquire and implement is probably how you would succeed.
  • kbenson 12y ago
    TicketMaster/LiveNation have gone a long way towards increasing the legitimacy of secondary marker buying and selling. Their TM+ product allows buying secondary tickets directly from the event page on TicketMaster/LiveNation, selecting seats from the seat map, and as you suggested, reissues the tickets with new barcodes while invalidating the old ones. It's a mistake for anyone to assume that there are scalpers (brokers), and there are fans, and they are always separate. Many, many fans buy more tickets than they plan on using and sell on the secondary market. There are also those who buy tickets and find later they can't attend, so need to offload the tickets to recoup from investment. Assuming only brokers resell tickets completely ignores the reality of the situation. Brokers play an important role in secondary markets by spreading risk (as you mentioned), while also adding a level of professionalism to the entire secondary market. There's numerous metrics tracked by the exchanges they sell on that greatly penalize problems and bad behavior. It's in everyone's best interest if they plan to continue to use the system in the future to by a god actor. The venues and distributors know what to do to really hurt the vendors, which is to accurately price the inventory from the start. This is a hard problem though, so it's not fully implemented. Some distributors undoubtedly retain inventory to sell on the secondary markets for higher profit. That said, even if the tickets were priced perfectly on the primary market (TM/LN/AXS, etc), there would still be a secondary market, because the prices are not static over time. Values would fluctuate over time, which still allows for speculation purchasing.
• helen842000 12y ago
  I thought this had already been solved somewhat. There are many events in the UK that use tickets with your photo on them. One example is Glastonbury where you have to pre-register your photo before the tickets go on sale and you get a registration number. Then the person buying the tickets on the day enters the registration numbers of the people they are purchasing for, similar to passport number when buying plane tickets. No page refreshes required on ticket day because tickets are only sold through the 1 vendor site so they have the full pool of tickets. Scalpers don't bother to get in the online queue because they are non-transferrable. If you decide not to go to to the event you can return your ticket for a refund, those returned tickets then get offered up at a later date for anyone that previously registered but missed out. There are no person to person trades. All tickets sales are vendor to person.