The bullish*t secondary ticket market...a rant

[clay19]

I wanted to buy tickets for the Hold Steady New Year’s Eve show in Brooklyn. Tickets went on sale at noon. I didn’t get online until 2pm, and all the tickets are sold out. Lame, I guess I wasn’t quick enough.


Then I go on to the secondary market and there are literally over a hundred tickets available. 66 on Stubhub. 40 something on Encore. Another 40 something on Simple Tickets. All for at least double the face value. The ones that included the after party, which I wanted to go to, are averaging $400.00 each. That’s over 5 times the face value. This is total BS!!!!



Fans cannot get tickets because they are all snapped up by brokers, and others in the secondary market. Not weeks after they go on sale…but hours!!! This is not the fan that bought tickets and then had to work or something and needed to unload them. This is the work of professional brokers and scalpers (Yes I said it SCALPERS!) who take advantage of the system to make money.

The artist gets none of this money. The venue gets none of this money. All the profits go to scalpers and the owners of the websites. They did nothing. They don’t support the artists or venues; they just rip off fans because they can.



This system needs to be made illegal. There is so much collusion between the issuers like Ticketmaster (and often the promoter) and the secondary market. How exactly do these sites get access to so many tickets so soon after they go on sale? It is a criminal enterprise.

Fans, venues, and artists need to rise up and reject this exploitive system. Some artists like Pearl Jam and Kid Rock have tried to fight this system, and, for the most part, have failed.

See these links for the full stories.


music.yahoo.com/blogs/yahoo-music/pearl-jam-took-ticketmaster-20-years-ago-171625249.html

www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/06/27/196277836/kid-rock-takes-on-the-scalpers



Money and powerful lobbies have kept this system in place, and it benefits no one except the scalpers themselves. The artists and venues are all leaving money on the table, and the fans can’t see the shows they want to.

Is the Hold Steady out on the road busting their asses so Stubhub can post increased quarterly profits? Is the Music Hall of Williamsburg booking shows to line the pockets of Simple Ticket Solutions? Would fans rather not see a show so that Encore Ticket Store can charge 5 times the face value for a concert two hours after it goes on sale, and share none of that money with the parties that actually make these shows happen? I don’t think so. It’s greed plain and simple.



“Oh this is the free market” some may say. Well that’s B.S. too. It’s not a free market when tickets are bought in large quantities just as they go on sale (or even during exclusive pre-sales like the ones for Amex card holders), and then immediately offered on the secondary market at huge mark ups. That is a restricted market designed to favor second party sellers at the expense of everyone else. Access to the market is controlled, regular fans are not allowed to participate, and it is simply not fair.



Charlie Campbell

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[thurman]

The only solution I can think of is the user of the ticket has to be identified upon purchase and bring ID to use their ticket. Since most times we have to show ID for age verification, this should not be a problem.

The only ones it hurts are those who for some reason cannot go to the show, and are stuck with their tickets. Maybe in those cases, the purchaser could supply a copy of their ID to whoever uses the ticket with a signed statement saying the ticket was not sold above face value.

Just a thought.

[stringer]

I am absolutely in unison with you on this.
It should be illegal. Difficult as it may be to police it online, there don't seem to be any preventative measures set in place for actual 'in the flesh' touting, either.
In the film 'Run, Fatboy, Run', Simon Pegg's character tried to buy tickets for a LOTR stage show outside the theatre and gets arrested for it. I always wonder 'why the fuck doesn't this happen in real life?'. If there were plain-clothed police outside venues, it would decrease the likelihood of at-the-venue ticket touts; perhaps confiscated tickets could then be placed at the door for face value. The fan gets their ticket at cost price, and the tout is apprehended, arrested and out of pocket.

When Fleetwood Mac announced their UK tour last year, there were presales for O2 customers. As you can imagine, Fleetwood being the wonderful (albeit money grabbing) band that they are, tickets were fairly pricey. Not anywhere near as much as they were, though, once all those touts who likely got a cheap PAYG phone on O2 just to get the presales, bought a LOT of the tickets and had them online for hundreds of pounds per ticket. Someone I know bought two, and paid £175. EACH.
Same thing happened with Kate Bush this year; I saw a front row seat for over £1,000.

Glastonbury festival, from about 2007 (I think), put in place a photo ID ticket. Printed by the same folk who print driving licenses, this guarantees that only that person can go. It only adds £1 to the handling fee for the tickets (which, at £5, is a small addition to £220 and a small price to pay for security).

There is, of course, the case of what to do if you can't make a gig and wish to sell the ticket at face value. This is something of a grey area; personally I think that it should be as simple as this:
So imagine there's a computer system which logs all expected tickets for the shows. Most tickets have barcodes already, right? So the ticket holder may call the venue with their ticket barcode number and arrange for a new ticket to be assigned on the door for the new 'participant'. The new ticket holder's details are logged, they take their ID and pick it up on the door. The original ticket holder is refunded and the new ticket holder buys theirs OTD at face value.
They could even do this right up until an hour or so before the doors open - even shorter with a proficient system.

I would guess that the original purchase was issued a booking fee; the venue could also charge this fee and make £1.50 per transaction. Everyone's a winner!

[orzelc]

I actually have been in a group that was stopped from buying tickets outside a venue. It was a minor-league baseball game, and another group had extra tickets they were trying to unload. A cop came up to us as we were about to pay for the tickets, and said "Jesus, don't hand over the cash right here where I can see you. Go around the corner, or something."

[stringer]

Nov 1, 2014 6:40:45 GMT -5 orzelc said:

I actually have been in a group that was stopped from buying tickets outside a venue. It was a minor-league baseball game, and another group had extra tickets they were trying to unload. A cop came up to us as we were about to pay for the tickets, and said "Jesus, don't hand over the cash right here where I can see you. Go around the corner, or something."

That's insane! But unsurprising.

[dabook]

The problem lies in the people who pay the prices. When you have people like the Stones or Eagles charging 500 bucks a ticket on the regular market 300 to party with the Steady doesnt seem like a lot of money. What you really have is a problem with too much disposable income and too many hip kids.

[clay19]

It's not so much the individual ticket holder reselling that I think is the problem. It's the companies that provide a reselling platform. I think this situation could really be helped by having strict ticket limits when buying, say 4 or 6 at the max, and then making it illegal to resell a ticket for more than a certain amount over face value, say 10-15%. It would be impossible to police the few individuals who will try to resell with a face to face deal, there are still going to be dudes scalping outside of shows, but I think it will remove the incentive to hord tickets with the sole intention of reselling. If you actually have to meet a person and make a deal to resell above face value, then less people will do it. Craigslist and such can be monitored for any tix priced above face value, and the regular guy who just can't make the show still is able to get rid of his ticket without losing money, or excessive hassle. No new technology needed, just new rules.

[orzelc]

It's hard to do the number-of-tickets cap, because for just about any cap size you pick, there will be groups larger than that who want to go together. And then you end up in the lottery situation where several members of a large group have to each try to buy tickets for half the group at the same time, leaving you with the scenario where only half of the big group has tickets. (I've seen that happen with tickets to NCAA basketball tournament games...)

And, of course, it's really easy for resellers to hire large numbers of people to buy small groups of tickets over the Internet, and pay them a pittance compared to what the commercial resellers will clear on the transaction.

Capping the maximum resale price would attack the problem from that side, but it's probably not feasible politically, especially now that the big ticket services have made their peace with StubHub and the like. The people who are making money on selling tickets, on either the primary or secondary markets, are making money, and have no incentive to change.

[clay19]

Orzelc
It does suck to have to cap the number of tickets one person can buy, for just the reasons orzelc mentioned above. However there are already ticket limits set on some events. The loophole is also exactly what orzelc mentioned; you can hire a bunch of goons to all buy the max and resell those. That's why limiting how much can be charged in the secondary market is the key.

Of course orzelc is right again in that this is politically impossible. This is frickin America after all! Limit how much the consumer can be can be screwed by corporations? That's commie talk! Whatever the market can bear, no matter how unfair, now that's the American way.

[mtruslow]

Friend, I couldn't agree with you more. The only way I've ever dealt with the secondary ticket market is to wait until the last possible minute to buy a ticket off of Stub Hub. I managed to get first row for Jeff Tweedy in Baltimore only by waiting until one hour before Showtime and it was only face value. I got lucky.

[bobfrombob]

Nov 1, 2014 12:35:33 GMT -5 dabook said:

The problem lies in the people who pay the prices.

As far as I'm concerned, this is the whole issue. If people stopped buying, that market would soon disappear.

I know this is easy to say until there's a show you really have to see but just remember - every time you deal with Stubhub and that ilk that you are perpetuating the problem.

[mtruslow]

Friend, I agree with you but that simply isn't going to happen. As long as people want to see a show or game and have money to burn and want the tickets, at inflated prices, the market will continue to thrive. It's frustrating I know but that's the way it is.