It’s SO GOOD. I was skeptical. I’d seen his 2009 White House performance and, to quote Monty Python “No, no it’s too silly.” I thought the first few songs were better, but still kind of silly.
Two and a half hours later, I was sobbing and had started it over from the beginning. It’s so so so good.
Dude. I live here and I can’t afford to see it. The plane ticket isn’t the real cost by far.
Those are ticket lotteries, which every Broadway show has. But it requires you to go to the theatre around 10 in the morning and wait to see if you get lucky and you have to go that night.
Not good for anyone who needs a sitter, but for tourists and college students the lotteries are great. Haimilton has actually moved theirs online, thus saving the camping in the streets thing.
But, my question is who checks the names against the tickets? Do you do it at the door? So ushers now have a lot more work to do? What if you couldn’t go that afternoon and gave your pair to Frank in the office? Now he gets pinched at the door and you’re both out, you the cash and him the show. The sale to a name isn’t the issue, it’s the enforcement thereof. Scalpers can get you names, that’s not a problem for them.
They can also confiscate those d**n coughdrop wrappers while they’re at it.
I’m a few hours away, and when I priced out tickets for me and my friends, it was about $6000. For five tickets. I’m okay with the soundtrack.
You could have bought 6 and sold the sixth one for $7200…
Only under certain pricing models: You could certainly use a lottery model; with lottery tickets priced lower than actual tickets but most of them being losers. You could also charge ticket price for each ‘lottery ticket’; but refund all the non-winners. You could also make the ‘lottery tickets’ free or nominal cost’; with the winners getting the option to pay full ticket price to receive a ticket.
That’s why my question was about how much credit card processing and similar transaction costs would be expected to eat. The ‘lottery’ model, unless run according to the lottery business model, would incur greater transaction costs; but I don’t really have a sense of what the magnitude would be.
Who checks the names? The ushers I guess. Yeah it’s more work, but any
solution to this is going to be more work. If you wanna make new laws and
step-up enforcement, every taxpayer has to pay for that, even people who
don’t care about musicals. Why not put the cost on the people who have the
problem with it? If you don’t want bots, you’re gonna have to spend some
money. It’s a solvable problem, they just want gov’t to solve it for them.
Enforcement actually won’t even have to be that thorough, as merely the
threat of spending money but not getting into the show will tamp the price
down on what a resold ticket is worth since it would carry with it a
probability that it’s actually worthless.
If the cost is too high, consider how much you care that bots are buying
your tickets. If you don’t care, then don’t do it. (Hint: The people
selling the tickets don’t care, only the artists. If they did, they would
have figured this out already.)
If you suddenly can’t go, well, I guess you’re out of luck. The same thing
happens with airline tickets and everyone is fine with that. Potential
solutions I just made up:
*You could also just make an app for tickets, where one phone can only hold
say, two tickets, and they can be transferred to another people, but the
transfer requires the physical presence of both phones. This might be
hackable, but as long as it’s not something the average Joe can implement,
the bot salesman won’t be able to use it effectively. Your phone at the
door is thus your ticket. I’d recommend having some charging stations by
the door, because waiting in line for a show with a low battery and an
eticket is a stressful experience.
*You could say that you can transfer the ticket, just go online and do so.
This might allow you to spam-filter the bots as large patterns of ticket
transfers would be detectable. You could also say, restrict the number of
times a particular card-holder is allowed to do this to say once a year.
I am not a conservative or a small gov’t person, but I think sometimes
people want laws to be made so that the hard work of life and business is
something other people have to pay to figure out and solve, rather than
themselves. It’s the 21st century, the idea of a paper ticket to a show is
obsolete. Thus the modern tech (bots) is outperforming the obsolete
concept. You don’t have this problem with modern tech. I can’t buy an app
and then resell it to you, that’s not how they work. Everyone is fine with
this and it works pretty well. Hackers get around it, but most people
aren’t hackers.
The idea that this cannot be solved without the intervention of the state
is absurd, they’re just being lazy and uncreative.
It absolutely can, but what LMM is advocating right now is the passage of laws that are already going through the process and just need to be passed; as the story states, it’s already illegal to bot-sell tickets, but the penalties are so minor that they do it anyway. The first step is strengthening those existing laws/penalties. The second thing he’s advocating, which doesn’t exist yet, are ways to make the selling of brokered tickets much more transparent to the consumer. So instead of people shelling out $1500/ticket because “that’s what Hamilton costs now,” they’d be very aware that the seller is a scalper and they’d know exactly how much they’re being scammed for, rather than all of that being obscured as it is now.
Can I assume you don’t go to a lot of Broadway? Because when they open the doors at 7:40 and people are only holding paper tickets to get scanned it still pushes the 8:00 curtain time. This is without checking IDs, this is just a factor of trying to get 1,000 people through doors that were designed a hundred years ago to get 500 people in.
Additionally, given the work schedule, ushers are typically in their 60’s. So you’re also asking the elderly to read fine print on an ID and compare it to a ticket that might have been running out of toner.
And if you have Kevin, who purchased ten seats, does he need to put in names for everyone there? Or are they all under his name? And then Kevin has diphtheria and everyone’s sitting at home now. And we haven’t even gotten into the aspect of showing your ID just to see a goddamned play. Is that really how you think we should proceed through life, showing ID for everything?
This isn’t an airline, there’s no safety at stake. There’s no real reason to show ID to go to a show. It will delay curtain times and it will assuredly drive costs up when you make your ushers into gatekeepers.
How about we just don’t allow Ticketmaster to run a second sale website? Because they take $20 off the sale the first time and are pleased as punch to take 5% off the sale the second time. Get rid of ticket resale sites and we start to see solutions. Like things were before they existed, where you bought from TM or the door and that was that. There aren’t scalpers getting rich off Hamilton tickets in the streets, they’re bigger companies who ran the scalpers out of business getting rich now.
This is definitely the first step. My partner used to work for a valet service agency that handled ticket sales for Broadway shows, and even for them, it was completely obscured by Ticketmaster whether the tickets were coming from an “official” source or from a scalper until the sale was done. It should damn well be illegal for a legit ticket agency to also run a brokerage agency.
Those are good points, it might cost some money to implement this system. I
didn’t say it would be easy or cheap.
I actually go to a lot of shows. A lot of the shows I go to do check IDs.
Your drivers license probably already has your name on a magnetic stripe.
Scan ticket, swipe card, name match? Good to go. Don’t even need to look at
the photo.
It’s the risk that you won’t get in which is the incentive. Who’s going to
pay $1500 for a ticket if there is a 5% chance they won’t get in?
No safety at stake? I know some French concert-goers who might disagree.
Theaters are more than able to tell ticketmaster that if they don’t stop
with the second sale, they will no longer sell through them.
I would like to know how these bots work. Hundreds of tickets in seconds?
Are they using humans to do this? Are there no CAPTCHAs?
Free raffle by phone, two tix per call. Keep it open for several weeks. If you get picked, you pay however you want, but you pick up the tickets at will call, with id. Teller snaps a photo of you and it prints on the ticket. The face on the tickets must accompany the other ticket-holder at the door. Jack up the price of rows 2-10 to make up any increase in costs.
The only thing a scalper can sell you is a free raffle ticket, or a blind date…
…and so the robot uprising began
Capcha wouldn’t weed out resellers entirely. If they have to, they’ll just delegate the task to Mechanical Turk.
But it would slow them down enough for flesh & blood types to stand a chance. Combine it with other anti reseller methods for greater effectiveness.
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