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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. Sec

by 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.

by wiseleo 12y ago

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.