Yeah… kind of my point. They BENEFIT from scalpers, hence they are not victims of scalpers… 
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Even Mike Damone wouldn’t have worked with them.
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Competition. Just because people are willing to pay more, doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t like to pay less. Say one show has huge fees and another has moderate fees. Maybe you choose the second one.
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You’ve heard about the automated bots which get the lion’s share of those instantly sold-out tickets, I assume?
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I’m not pretending they’re victims. I agree with you and @gracchus and @anothernewbbaccount. They’re also obviously very much benefitting from having monopoly power, which I don’t want them to have. The fact that they’re also in on the scalping is part of the reason I said what I said: they unilaterally set the sale price, but then they’re also one of the main buyers. Then they turn around and sell the same ticket at a higher price. That makes the nominal price a lot less important to their actual revenue. It is also a way to scam artists, since they won’t get a percentage of the higher scalped price, or a percentage of the fees (two rounds of fees for scalped tickets, which I could also imagine helping them avoid paying taxes by pretending their costs of selling are higher).
In a world of more competition, this wouldn’t happen. Instead, each venue or market selling tickets would only get to sell them once, and they’d be competing with each other on both list price and fees. But, they’d also be trying to maximize revenue, so they’d want to sell at a market-clearing price. For them, unlike for Ticketmaster, whenever a scalper resells a ticket for more than they sold it at, that looks like lost revenue. So even though this situation would be better for artists, venues, and fans compared to what we have now, it might not look like the list prices of tickets going down for the most popular bands/artists.
It’s in this sense that, yes, I’m saying Taylor Swift is being underpaid, and Eras tour tickets are underpriced, and if we fixed that situation it would be better for everyone but Ticketmaster, including fans who would end up paying less on average.
So, middlemen suck?
I went to a tiny concert last Friday, maybe 80 people, the system had a pretty simple way of ticketing, you bought entry, it was in the app, you could refund it, but not sell it (you could gift or transfer to another account it I guess this is where grift might ensue), and the QR code for entry would unlock X amount of minutes (60 in our case) before doors opened, leaving scalpers very little time to unload tickets.
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Agreed, and I think that kind of app is a much better system. Technically the ability to transfer opens the door to scalping in advance, but with more risk (no simultaneous payment + transfer), and enough friction to make it unlikely.
I think this gets a lot more murky for the big-name events I specified I was talking about. In those cases, the difference between what fans would consider a fair price, and what the tickets would sell for at auction, is measured in hundreds or thousands of dollars. For that much money someone, somewhere would find a way to become middlemen again.
I go to a lot of concerts and as a result have given Ticketmaster a lot of money over the years so I’m pretty passionate about this topic.
People pay for them because they can. Ticketmaster can charge exorbitant prices becasue they know people will pay them. And in many cases, they are the only game in town. There’s very limited supply and often very high demand. It’s basic economics.
As much as I love to hate on Ticketmaster, I don’t know that it will. But that’s not really the point. Live Nation is massively vertically integrated. Live Nation itself handles artist promotion and advertising and owns or operates many venues, Artist Nation handles artist management, and Ticketmaster handles the D2C sales (often poorly). For those venues it doesn’t own or operate, it is still able to leverage its significant buying power over those venues by having exclusive contracts. Ticketmaster even has its own resale marketplace where they can double dip on fees by taking a cut of any tickets resold through the platform (which is incredibly frustrating because you can’t sell at below face value, and it’s not disclosed to you as the seller that there’s additional fees being tacked on top of the price you set).
In the Seattle area, every medium/large venue is Ticketmaster only. There’s some smaller venues that use AXS or some other ticketing platform but those are the exception.
Ticketmaster has no incentive to improve its platform because they have no reason to. A show for a popular artist will sell out no matter how shitty of an experience it is. Ticketmaster can also do scummy things like dynamic airline-style pricing (the disingenuously named “Platinum pricing”) because they know it’ll make more money for them.
The funny/sad thing is Ticketmaster actually has tools in place that artists can use to make ticket sales more democratic and prevent scalping but very few artists actually do this. When The Cure had their most recent tour, they used every tool they could to try to make ticket sales fan-friendly: no platinum pricing, ticket lottery to give those selected first-choice, reduced fees, face value fan-to-fan no-fee resale only (unless prohibited by law), and set very reasonable ticket prices for the events.
Of course Ticketmaster being Ticketmaster the whole thing was a shit show because the platform blew up but on the upside I was able to use the face value resale to buy row 2 tickets on the day of the show for a very reasonable $250/ticket and then resell my $65/each row 15 tickets in less than 2 minutes. It was actually a pretty great experience and I wish more artists would do this kind of thing. (Also worth noting merch at The Cure was all very reasonably priced – $25 t-shirts, $40 hoodies, all with high quality screen printing on high quality grey goods, and city-specific merch as well.) The ironic thing is I have always been a pretty casual fan of The Cure, but the whole experience of getting great seats for a great price, reasonably priced merch, and then The Cure putting on a nearly 3 hour show with Robert Smith looking genuinely thrilled to be there (versus those acts who are clearly just going through the motions) really gave me a massive amount of respect for them and made it all the more likely I’d jump at the chance to see another of their shows.
On the flip side, Pearl Jam did the same thing The Cure did with ticket sales (lottery, face value resale only), but good seats being nearly $1000/ea was a huge “fuck that shit” from me. Sometimes expensive seats like that come with perks like an artist meet-and-greet or other “experience” to make it worth it. This was just a somewhat shitty seat behind the pit area. I’m sure someone will spend that kind of money and be thrilled to see Pearl Jam, but it won’t be me.
It’s clearly nonsense and as I’ve mentioned below doing things like ticket lotteries and requiring face value resale can put a significant dent in scalpers. Face value resale in particular is a wonderful thing. It’s zero friction and fast but it also doesn’t incur fees which is probably why Ticketmaster hates it (unlike their normal resale system which double dips on fees). Sometimes shit happens and I need to resell my tickets and I’d rather do it through TM’s platform than go to a scummy secondary market resale site.
You can still game face value resale but the bar is much higher because you can’t just sell a ticket, you have to sell your whole account. Ticketmaster is more likely to throttle unestablished accounts making it harder for those accounts to get those tickets.
I have only bought tickets for a couple shows that used either of these things so it seems clear to me that TM doesn’t encourage this or I’d imagine more artists would use it (unless they are so cynical that they only care about maximizing profits over giving fans a great experience).
I can’t say I’ve observed large swaths of premium empty seats on the floor but that’s just me. Those skybox-style rooms are typically owned and operated by the venue, and (assuming it’s not a Live Nation-owned venue) are managed separately. They are usually rented out by corporations, but in some cases the venue can sell tickets to those areas as well. They are usually exorbitantly expensive because they are meant to offer an “experience”. Skyboxes at Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle go for $10-20k and require groups of 4 or more. I personally don’t see the appeal of spending so much money to see the concert from the rafters but that’s just me.
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Yes, and I did not mean to come off as being cynical of the DOJ/Biden move. A righteous ethical decision can bring on a solemn nodding of the head… then, with the nod, a slowly developing smile when pleasant leverage is ‘discovered’.
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This is my only reply:
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