The proposed idea is a technical one that doesn't work for the promoters or artists or venues.
The promoters want to know very early whether the venue is the right one for the number attending and whether to upsize, add dates, or even to go the other way to a smaller venue. The time to book a venue is very long... So they need as complete data as they can about sales as early as possible (they would love if 80% of the tickets that will sell can be sold in the first week - as then they can quickly make a decision about whether this is the right venue and if more dates are needed).
The artists want to enable as many fans to get in as possible, including young and poorer fans... Who tend to be more evangelical about an artist and drive their growth more and ultimately are more loyal and spend more over the lifetime of being a fan. They are poorer but more sticky. The artists also want to play to as full a venue as possible as that is the best atmosphere.
The venues want to have surety in their bookings (see the promoter dilemma as to whether to change venue) and for the capacity to be as close to full as possible as they will make more revenue from bar and food sales than from pure ticket sales.
All of these... All of them... Are not solved by the technical solution proposed except when it doesn't matter... When you're absolutely sure you're going to sell out. In which case you also don't need to change anything or invest in anything new because you're going to sell out anyway.
There are solutions that can threaten the current model... But this blog is not one of them.
In fact, the idea that "I have more money and deserve more to have a ticket over someone that doesn't have as much money" is antithetical to the thinking of every artist I've ever worked with.
There is the old trope that McDonalds is primarily a real estate business.
In the same line of thinking, you could say Ticketmaster is a "scape goat" business so the artists and venues can get max profit while still coming of as innocent angels.
It is now all Ticketmaster's fault. Venues and artists are innocent.
This would explain why you can't fix it: where would the scapegoating go? When you have larger demand than supply, then prices will always be high. And when venues + artists prefer full venues, then demand must be higher than supply.
I guess I see the entertainment industry in two tiers. There are the mega-stars like Taylor Swift, etc. that occupy one tier, and then the majority off smaller artists, up and coming artists that represent the lower, if you like, strata.
Perhaps you are describing, and perhaps the author are tackling the upper strata. For myself, I swore off big venues decades ago. If I am unable to set my beer behind the monitor speaker, I'm not going.
I wonder if the lower strata could use a kind of "artists coop" to manage ticket sales. All smaller venues (bars and the like) could participate, all smaller artists could as well.
I think more artists would handle selling their own tickets if it was easy to do. In that way the artists are served (of course) and presumably they will do what is best for their fanbase.
Connecting artists and venue owners with a web portal, allowing ticket sales to fans via the same site shouldn't be heavy lifting for a lot of the readers on HN.
> Connecting artists and venue owners with a web portal, allowing ticket sales to fans via the same site shouldn't be heavy lifting for a lot of the readers on HN.
The tricky part isn't making the website, it's persuading enough people on both sides of the equation that your business is a better option compared to alternatives.
And despite the situation with Ticketmaster it's not like they're literally the only tool available in a market waiting for a second option - there's already lots of much smaller ticket-selling options that you'd be competing with, ranging from single person PHP websites you can host yourself to companies with significant traction in their niches that are like Ticketmaster just much, much smaller.
That's not to say that an idea like yours couldn't succeed, but the fact that lots of people could do the coding doesn't make it a likely, or easy, business to make successful.
Yeah pretty much any big tech company could spin up a team to launch a ticket purchasing website in a year or so that could handle the traffic.
For example, Amazon always loves adding benefits to prime, if they thought they could break into the ticket market they would do it in a heartbeat. Same with Spotify or Apple. If these massive corps cannot break into the market then why would some startup be able to?
The problem with Ticketmaster is the same as any consolidation play. If you let a middleman control the wholesale and retail side of the transaction, you’re gonna get a bad deal.
The solution is really simple, but the government no longer has the regulatory ability to do anything. You segment the distributor function from the retail, and end up with a bunch of retailers running volume driven low margin sales channels.
Ticketmaster brilliantly positioned itself as distributor, retailer and supplier for resale. So they have an exclusive on a venue, get a fee for the sale, get a seller commission for the resale, and a buyers fee for the resale. They “own” the customer and the venue.
In a transaction of the style of musical performances, I think it’s inevitable that an entity like Ticketmaster would begin to exist. The issue is that we have a many to many to many relationship between fans, artists, and venues.
In database design when you have such a pattern it is common that you’ll have a new table to maintain the complex relationship. It doesn’t make sense for venues to sell tickets because each artist has their own tour through many venues. Selling tickets for a tour becomes a hassle as many venues would have to coordinate. To complicate things, opening acts often switch during the course of a tour. Conversely, it doesn’t make sense for artists to sell tickets because the process of coming up with the ticket price and negotiating with the venue and handling transactions and returns , etc. is not their core competency.
This is why promoters like Live Nation exist—to bridge this gap and take on the capital risk necessary to put on a large tour. They aren’t necessary but their value to venues and artists (the business owners) is palpable. For Taylor Swift to go on a world tour, an amount of centralized coordination makes it much easier and much less likely to end in financial ruin.
They also, iirc, act a bit like a specialized bank for venues, by paying for contracts up front (and I think I read also loaning money directly?) in exchange for the fee upside in sales and resales later. Venues want as much revenue as they gdt to come in as close to on sale date as possible.
So it's "every sufficiently large company sells financial services", too.
But it is all their fault. They’re an obviously illegal monopoly that was allowed to thrive during our multi-decade experiment with not enforcing antitrust laws.
If artists literally ALL wanted to hire a scapegoat that rips off fans then sure. But many don’t. The fact that there’s no other alternative is WHY it works.
Also there’s no such thing as “venues and artists” since they own the venues too. Which is another part of the overall problem.
Seems like it’s not so simple to say that ticketmaster is getting artists/venues max profits. If you look at how much money could be made by scalping (before it became harder), that was money people would have potentially paid to the artist/venue instead.
I agree that the idea may not be the best for promoters, artists or venues, however, in my opinion, it's the worst for buyers, specially those who cannot spend a lot of money.
The process of purchasing a ticket will induce a lot of anxiety in the purchase process. They don't know the lowest price they could buy the ticket on, before it gets sold out. They have to pick a price and hope that it is available when the price reaches that value eventually. Many people may decide to go above their limits just to get tickets of popular concerts, decreasing their disposable income unnecessarily.
In theory this process sounds wonderful and exactly like an economics textbook envisions a free-market purchase, but I don't think buyers will enjoy this process. There are lots of other factors to consider in the purchase process apart from economics and API rate-limiting. I don't have a better solution to add for this though.
> [T]he idea that "I have more money and deserve more to have a ticket over someone that doesn't have as much money" is antithetical to the thinking of every artist I've ever worked with.
The problem is, with a limited supply of tickets you’re going to draw the line somehow whether you want it or not. Price sets the barrier explicitly. Attempts to avoid using that (e.g. in various social welfare programs all over the world, but also throughout the late Soviet consumer economy) have usually ended up instituting a different, implicit barrier that may seem less outrageous on the surface but at the end of the day is not that much better: networking or bribery skills, amount of time to spend standing in queue or refreshing the website (frequently turned back into price by various enterprising people—I wonder if the US Consulate in Moscow realizes the reduction in visa interview capacity a couple of years ago had as its main effect funnelling applicants’ money to a small, untaxed, and technically illegal industry of bot programmers).
If you’re trying to extract as much money from each customer as possible (as airlines and other “discriminating monopolies” do), those additional barriers might be intentional. Otherwise they don’t seem that much better than the original money one—I guess you could claim the most passionate fans will be able to buy cheap tickets that are sold out in hours (one possible barrier) but you’re automatically cutting off people who can’t afford the necessary time off work to monitor the sale as well, for example.
I don’t like this. But I don’t see a workable economic mechanism that can do substantially better, either.
The model that works is to build relationships with fans and afford them privileged access, and sell everything else at market clearing prices.
Ticketmaster tried too offer that through a "verified fan" route, but it failed under the weight of its own monopolistic ineptitude. Whoever cracks the fan management+ticketing service and offers it to bands will have an incredibly strong moat.
All kind of models are possible: associate your social ID and prove you've distributed band related content early in their career; associate multiple past purchases - for things like merchandising, fan specials, behind the scenes etc. etc.
The main theme is giving band and labels tools to maintain and curate this relationship with the fanbase, and only then add ticketing on top of it. If you have a certain mass and sign multiple names from the same genre, you can leverage that data to "migrate" say Green Day fans to some new alternative/punk band and offer them discounts, under the assumption this could build strong preferences for that band in the future.
Instead of maximizing present ticket revenue and "burning" a band's current fanbase, you maximize career-wide earnings, fan number and impact. That's a kind of moat that's unbeatable.
I love the idea of requiring the purchase of merchandise beforehand, although I'm not sure if this would only compound the problem of scalping. The problem with building moats is
a ) scalpers will write algorithms to predict where the moats are before fans can get there
Everything in the world discriminates against some class of people. Taylor Swift is optimizing for "verified fans" - i.e., people who will actively share how big of fans they are. It's just good business, because she's developing a lifetime customer base. Someone will need to attend the "final tours" she gives when she's 60, 70, 80. Also, Taylor Swift fandom is one of the most mainstream fandoms I can think of - there's little risk of a severe reputational risk for admitting it.
It's better for the fans since they get more content with less money, with the tradeoff of some personal information.
Since the band and ticketing partner are not in the ad business and want to build long term, I expect that limited personal info to be much less likely abused than what the typical social network site does with even more sensitive data (yet, most people seem to agree trading those off to for free news of the Kardashians in their feed, so what do I know).
At the limit, any kind of price discrimination needs some type of information to execute, you can't subsidize completely anonymous fans because market forces will quickly close that loop and we are back to square 1. For example, a confidential association between my name and a record/stream purchase for the purpose of a substantial ticket discount in the future seems like a good compromise to me.
If you are sure to sell out you want to invest in such a system as this is the best way to extract maximum money from your fans. You still have a chance to sell out in the first days for multiple time the usual price.
This system is not used as it will be seen very negatively by fans.
Except extracting as many dollars as possible isn’t the goal. Many bands try to keep their tickets affordable.
The solution is to break up Ticketmaster. The companies they gobbled up handled this fine. Imperfectly, sometimes shoes sold out in minutes, but the prices and the fees were fair, and Will Call can wipe out the scalpers.
There will still be scalpers but now they will be committing fraud. At the end of the day there will still be a large number of real fans who will be pissed will call rejected their ticket.
The fans will need the smarten up and learn the rules. That would take time
My point on artists is that maximising value extraction isn't their priority.
I worked in the industry for almost a decade, had 2 record labels, and signed a number of bands that became famous (for some definition of that) as well as worked with bands that were famous (for any definition of that)... so I have some experience here even though that experience has aged a bit.
Artists are balancing revenue now, with future growth, with record sales, with drawing in new fans, with taking the tour to as wide a representation of their fanbase as possible... and it really truly isn't as simple as "charge the highest price possible".
Far better models can be seen in sales of things like the Glastonbury Music Festival (real identity required, but administered by See Tickets) and Dice ( https://dice.fm/ which allows fan to fan resale ).
Those are better because 1) they limit the ability of scalpers, and 2) the fan-to-fan resale also allows flexibility (less need for thundering herd, as there are always people who cannot attend and now they can safely and respectfully sell to their peers).
Both processes generate a vast amount of data on the sales process, as well as the resale process - which better informs promoters of venue sizing and ticket pricing in the future. Both are good platforms for future evolution of fan-to-fan resale in a way that can enable more of the value to be returned to the artist whilst balancing the other criteria well. What they do is provide promoters with richer data, which allows promoters to make better sizing and venue decisions earlier.
To the separate questions elsewhere in the thread as to how to tackle Ticketmaster, the answer is to not fight them in their space... i.e. to not sell tickets for venues under their exclusive control. Here you see Dice succeeding as they focused on major nightclubs, including Ibiza super clubs... they're selling larger venues than most rock venues, on a daily or weekly basis... outside of Ticketmaster... with more revenue going to the venue, artist and promoters despite the ticket price only having increased a few % points. Ticketmaster control some large venues... but think of festivals, smaller venues, theatres, nightclubs... Ticketmaster really only are present for a small number of super-sized venues, more of the industry exists outside the Ticketmaster venues than in it. Don't go for the red ocean market, go for the blue ocean market ( https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/tools/red-ocean-vs-blue-oc... ).
Data and time create a fairer market... not exclusive venue control or making people pay as high a price as possible.
Dice is fantastic. Another thing they do is allow you to join a waiting list for sold out events. People who have bought tickets and want to return them can return them to the waiting list (and people on the waiting list will get a notification offering them a few hours to purchase the newly returned ticket). If someone on the list buys it they are refunded.
Counterpoint: Dice is terrible. Sure it makes sense for bigger artist that will sold out, but for most it is not necessary and it forces you :
- To have a smartphone
- To give out your phone number
- To create an account
The worst? You can't even resale the ticket if the event is not sold out! Usually if I'm unable to attend a concert, I'll put my ticket up for sale for half the price, but with Dice, you just wasted money on empty seats. Great.
Dice say that if someone wants to be able to purchase your ticket then you can sell it to them via their platform at no cost to you. i.e. you can return your ticket if someone wants it.
I do not know of any ticket that can be returned "just because".
Even a theatre or opera will accept returns only if they have demand for them.
Now compare to the majority of platforms that don't allow returns even when there is demand for them... or that will charge late arriving fans a higher price than face value for the returned tickets.
Ticketmaster is in the news because they had trouble with sales for the upcoming Taylor Swift tour. I have trouble believing that they are worried about changing venues (I expect they chose the largest available in every case) or selling the shows out.
And the number of shows is a decision that is taking into account a lot of factors that aren't reaching as many fans as possible. That's fine, no artist owes their fans anything, but the goal rather obviously isn't to maximize attendance opportunities.
Taylor Swift is huge, a megastar. She has a fanbase in the millions. She doesn't want to tour endlessly as it is exhausting and impedes upon a family life and seeing friends. So... a big tour, but big venues.
Her fanbase is all ages, but probably veers towards teens and those in their twenties as she went mega-big after 1989 was released (in 2014).
The vast majority of the fanbase are younger, and therefore poorer (wealth is accumulated over time, and the cost of living crisis hits the young disproportionately).
Because the fanbase is so large, the minority with wealth could afford to purchase every ticket under a dutch auction and the vast majority of her fanbase wouldn't stand a chance.
Taylor Swift is famed for doing things for her fans, getting them in to gigs, visiting in hospital, sending messages to console... and basically having empathy and caring for them.
Can you even imagine the headlines on every front page as teens and twenty-year olds are priced out by older people who are wealthier... and the immense damage that would cause to a brand curated and sculpted over the past decade or more.
In this specific instance... Taylor Swift would consider the proposal in the article to be the worst possible thing she could do. It would still be flat-out rejected.
However this could work really well for sporting events. The Leafs usually sell out all of their tickets and a good number to scalpers, having at least a more legit way to buy tickets for a game would be helpful
Starting at $2000 for a concert where demand outstrips supply to the point where people will pay $4000 to a ticket scalper just means the minimum ticket price will be $2000. All the tickets will still sell out immediately. The audience will be entirely made up of wealthy people, or people who are willing to break the bank to see Taylor sing.
The only "fair" way to sell a good that's in high demand and you want everyone to have the same level of access regardless of their background is a lottery. Tell people what the price is, let them apply for tickets, and sell to people at random. Scalping can be stopped by not allowing people to transfer tickets to other people - people should get a refund in full and their tickets get resold to other people in the lottery if someone changes their mind.
The obvious problem with the lottery approach is that it entirely fails to maximize profit.
Personally, if I was selling tickets, I'd just not sell them "fairly". Accept that tickets are a luxury item, like Ferraris.
This is actually how they do it in Japan. They love the lottery system and as a customer it's honestly a huge pain in the ass but once you see the kind of scalping and sleazy tactics that go on overseas you kinda start to appreciate it.
There's a few ways it is implemented and not all artists/venues do all of these but things I've seen are:
- Priority purchase for "fan club" registered members. Most artists have a LINE group fan club with a yearly subscription (like $50 or whatever), then if you are in this group, you get priority access to that artist's events. This means if you're a "real" fan you get to access tickets before everyone else.
- Lottery system based on price "bands". I've seen a few artists let the fans decide how much they want to pay based on tiers. Months before the event, the artist will send out a survey with price ranges you can choose (only one) like: $10, $15, $30, $50, $90 and then seats will be allocated based on a priority level as a self-chosen value. So if there's 5 people who chose $90, 10 people who chose $50, 30 people who chose $30, 200 people who chose $15, and 1000 people who chose $10, if the venue can only host 250 people then 5 + 10 + 30 + 200 (= 245) people will get in at their price, and only 5 remaining people will get in at $10 price point.
- Totally random lottery based on "waves". X people will apply to wave 1, and out of those X people let's say only 70% will get chosen. Then the artist/venue decides on a more approachable size and might host a second wave, another X people will apply to that second wave (including the previously excluded 30%) and another 70% will get chosen, then repeat until the venue is full or the artist decides they cannot host more events. Those who don't get chosen have to suck it up and try again another time.
It's far from perfect, and as I said it can be extremely frustrating, but it has its good sides too.
> The only "fair" way to sell a good that's in high demand and you want everyone to have the same level of access regardless of their background is a lottery.
After centuries of failing to manipulate natural market forces, I don’t understand why people continue to think it’s possible. All that a lottery does is incentivize everyone to participate, even those who have no interest in going. Then a secondary market will engage in actual price discovery and you’re left with the current system.
There is really no way to beat the system. Prices are what people are willing to pay. I’m not sure how any other system is fairer? Let’s say I’m a middle class Taylor Swift mega fan and save up for years to drop $4k on a ticket. Instead, we move to a lottery system and I don’t get picked. I want to go way more than most people, as evidenced by the amount I’m willing to pay. But now I don’t get to go. How is that fair?
> All that a lottery does is incentivize everyone to participate, even those who have no interest in going. Then a secondary market will engage in actual price discovery and you’re left with the current system.
How would the secondary market work if you have to put peoples names on tickets upon buying the ticket. No renames allowed (bring your name change deed poll and old and new IDs I guess). Can’t make the concert? Tickets can be refunded for the original price (maybe minus a token handling fee), and the ticket goes back into the next lottery sale pool.
Edit: Also Chris Smith is still a very limited sales opportunity compared to everyone. Plus Chris would be going alone assuming their partners name was not listed correctly or partners name didn’t have a ticket matching that too.
The flaw in Hamilton is it’s only the name of the payer, but if multiple seats in one booking, those additional seats could still be on sold so long as the scalper escorts them into the theatre.
Solved by requiring names and dob for all ticket holders. No changes allowed. Mistakes (wrong name or dob) must be refunded and tickets back to lottery.
Not so hilariously for people this applies to, but the combination of name and DOB still isn't actually unique either. I'll skip rewording it and just leave this link
It doesn’t need to be absolutely unique though. It just needs to make the secondary market infeasible. I would argue that only being able to re-sell tickets on the secondary market to “Chris Smith” is going to result in essentially no ticket scalping.
I fear that if there is hundreds of thousands of dollars in demand pressure on getting some rich guys in, the chain will break somewhere. Maybe they'll bribe the entrance staff, or someone sells access to a VIP guest list, but it's bound to happen eventually.
> Personally, if I was selling tickets, I'd just not sell them "fairly". Accept that tickets are a luxury item, like Ferraris.
Agreed. Tickets are a luxury item. The only fix is for the artists to do more shows. Obviously this is hard on the artists, but I wonder if they could do short term residencies in a place like Vegas? If Taylor Swift played every other night for 3-6 mos. in a fixed location, it seems like everyone could eventually see her show if they wanted. Fans would probably spend less than 2-4k each even accounting for any travel.
I also don't find the lottery method 'fair' either. Random yes, but not necessarily fair if a person can only see a show on a certain date and doesn't win the lottery.
If you want your marketing signaling to be "this artist is for rich people, normal people have no chance to see them anyways", sure. Many probably don't want to do that - indeed the strength of the lottery system is that it does signal the opposite.
No, they would also advertise the descending nature of it, so if they book a big enough venue, there won't be that much demand at $4000 to sell it out. So the price will descend down to more affordable levels.
Of course if the biggest venue isn't big enough to do that, then that's more of a problem of the local facilities, or the artist's decision to play in an area with inadequately sized venues.
I don't think "avoid playing in places without mega-venues, because otherwise our self-choosen pricing policy will make us look bad" is a particularly clever approach. (not to mention that doing so will drive up the price for events in places with such mega-venues)
People accept the logic that smaller facilities = more restricted capacity = higher prices in pretty much every other context.
A Ferrari dealership has to turn away the vast majority of folks who want to test drive their cars, a B&B, or boutique hotel has to turn away customers, or price rooms very highly, on a busy weekend, etc.
Just want to support this - and agree that the implication is the people who don't implement this are the artists (or managers) themselves who, y'know, like money.
Yes, a lottery system would require non-transferable tickets, but those tickets could be refundable, and returned tickets could be redistributed in a subsequent lottery round.
This doesn’t sound very true to me. My guess is that there are a much smaller number of people willing to pay $4k to a scalper for tickets and the price reflects the small supply of scalper tickets.
Pearl Jam tried to beat Ticketmaster. At the risk of sounding like the big fan I am, if Eddie Vedder and co. (at their commercial peak) can’t beat Ticketmaster, I’m not convinced that software can.
I’ve been pasting this Rolling Stone link since I was in my teens. I can’t believe how old I am…
Recently I went to see PJ with a friend. I had the tickets but I was going to be late so tried to transfer one ticket. Nope, not allowed. Both of us had to be there with my app. If I wanted to sell it I can but not to a person. I can just release it back at the original price and no fees. So PJ are still fighting the good fight and TM plays along. Unfortunately most artists don’t have PJ’s influence, so probably not an option for everyone to set the rules.
It just replaces one scalper with another. Why the heck do you want to allow TM to double scalp you with fees just to give a ticket to your friend or family?
What about a system where only some fraction of the ticket sale has to present matching ID?
Example 1: Limit of 6 tickets per purchase. I buy 6 tickets, I invite 5 friends. I show ID at the door and it doesn't matter which 5 friends I bring with me.
Example 2: Same deal, but instead we're allowed 1 "flex" ticket in case someone backs out. Or some proportion allowed as flex.
Obviously this still allows scalping, but it seems less attractive for a scalper to have to attend with the people they're scalping to. Especially if you make 50% of the group show ID.
This is how it works, only the primary purchaser has to show id. You can bring anyone in but you have to show up together, so if you do pay a scalper/reseller then they're at least also a PJ fan and you'll be walking in together.
> Example 2
With the PJ tickets, you actually can sell them, but you just get a refund and they're released back into the ticket pool on ticketmaster.
Ticketmaster is a logo that represents decades of deal making with venues to achieve the status quo.
The only way to defeat it is a RICO case brought by the Federal government, as venues, artists (not all, but many), are collaborating behind closed doors to enable it.
I gave up on big acts long ago because of TM and stick to local bars and local bands. Relativity and all that; I’m in a major metro with many cover bands that nail the vibe of the original and novel acts; not lacking options here. YMMV
I too feel that cover bands nail the vibe of the original. I live in a metro, but I've had a hard time figuring out when and where cover bands play. Some bands don't even have a website.
How do you find out when a cover band of your favorite artist is playing in your city?
ask around in the relevant communities (underground clubs, other relevant venues, zines, pubs)
usually you end up with a few Facebook links
not ideal, but eventually you will know which cover bands are even worth looking out for, and where they would play, so you can monitor sites of the venues
Fugazi is a great example, although not as popular they refused to charge more than $5 for their shows. I saw one in a small venue and it was raw and in your face and just awesome. They also didn't want anything to do with merchandising, insisting that if you wanted a Fugazi shirt then go make your own!
"beating" ticketmaster is pretty easy: play at venues that are not locked up by TM.
But TM really isn't that bad. There's always going to be a problem when demand far exceeds supply. If you went with pure supply/demand sales rich people would buy all.
TicketMaster has used their market dominance to be display incompetence in customer service with no consequences. Emailed me a "make sure to have your tickets at the show, we mailed them" the day of, sending me into a panic because I hadn't received them. Support was something like an hour-long queue to maybe chat with someone in the Philippines with no info, so I said fuck it and bought another ticket will-call in a nicer section--the show in question wasn't something I'd likely have the opportunity to see again for at least a decade.
Got to the venue to discover that I now had two will-call tickets, since that's how I'd originally purchased the first one, but TicketMaster somehow broke that record on their end.
Never encountered that level of bullshit from any of the smaller providers. TicketWeb was great when I lived in a market where they were the majority and Eventbrite is fine AFAIK. But now I live in a major market and TicketMaster is the only option for all but the smallest venues. What are you gonna do if you don't like them, anyway? Buy out the venue yourself?
Why can't they beat them? Advertise your website, people go to your website and click the buy button, a form shows up to fill their card data. What does Ticketmaster do that is better? Don't they have the same workflow?
Most major and minor venues have exclusive ticketing contracts. You can sell tickets to a high school gym but if you want to play anywhere that can handle a real crowd you’re stuck with the monopoly.
more like monopoly on the venue service. (a place where you have the permit to organize large group events, so proper exits, toilets, accessibility (if required); bag/clothes storage, waiting area, permit to sell alcohol, staff for all this, sufficient electricity connection, HVAC, ability to assemble a stage and the frame for lights and the soundsystem)
for example rave organizers in LA can do it in a lot of potential warehouses, because they have the staff & process to get the permits, setup the tech, cleanup, etc.
but as the gig grows fewer and fewer venues can host it, and that's how LiveNation managed to consolidate most of the high-capacity venue market
and there is efficiency in vertical integration, for everyone involved. what people find atrocious is the lack of cost breakdown transparency.
bands and ticketmaster/LiveNation could simply hide everything, display just the actual final price and then distribute the cash according to their actual contracts (which they do anyway)
why they anger the masses with this is completely beyond me, but ... after spending a few years on the outskirts of this industry, I think they just have bigger problems, never really understood UX anyways, nothing forces them to do so, aaand it absolutely keeps the conversation on them and not on bands/venues, etc.
So why don't some enterprising well known artists/VCs/record labels/ pool together some money to build a new large venue, and control the ticketing themselves?
Big record labels are absolutely uninterested in this. They get their cut and that's it. Small labels don't matter.
Festival headliners, and other big big big artists in general have managers, make a shitton of money, have a lot of other problems on tours besides ticketing anyway, plus they have guest lists, so in the end they don't care.
Those few artists that are big and care, well, they care to solve the problem for their own situation, for their fans, and don't really want to solve the general problem.
Because in general it's not their problem. :/
Oh and LiveNation is a public company, it has a nice business moat, so it's like a successful unicorn.
Most artists don’t want to charge $20, they want to charge $200 and blame it on someone else. That is a big part of the value proposition for ticket master. And they can allow ticket resale so the artist/promoter gets another cut, so shows sell out faster.
I think this is great if your goal is to clear the market at a competitive price. But a lot of artists want to sell tickets below market price. That makes the problem a lot harder. The obvious thing to do is have a lottery, but it's hard to stop people from using multiple identities (especially scalpers).
It’s really easy in many European countries to prevent identity abuse. In Finland there is a system called “strong authentication” where you log in with your bank. It’s directly tied to your social security number and banks do a very strict job of identifying you in person before you open your accounts. It works and I’ve not heard of anyone gaming this system. It’s used by the banks themselves, the government, tax office etc.
This is the solution. Strong authentication into a lottery.
> This is the solution. Strong authentication into a lottery.
I really don't like using a lottery, because it assumes that everyone who wants to go to a particular concert has the same level of desire to go.
A lot of people might just kind of want to go, while for others going is the most important thing in the world. With a lottery system, each of those people have an equal chance of getting to go. It seems unfair to me.
I want a system that allocates tickets to the people who want to go the most. I know an auction type system isn't completely fair, since some people have more money than others, but it least it has some semblance of trying to distribute tickets to people who want to go the most.
> I want a system that allocates tickets to the people who want to go the most.
I can't think of a better way to measure desire than willingness to spend a long time waiting in line. So perhaps sell the more expensive lottery tickets online (with some proof of unique identity), and cheaper lottery tickets at the venue itself (still tied to identity) on a single day a few months in advance.
And then there is the difference in means. I barely want to go to tswift, but it's no skin off my budget. My friends 15yo daughter is dying to go but its like 100% of her income for the next 3 months.
> I can't think of a better way to measure desire than willingness to spend a long time waiting in line.
Doesn't this have the same problem as using money? Some people have a lot less time to wait in line, just like some people have a lot less money to spend on tickets
I don't understands how that system would help, can't you have multiple bank accounts? Except if all the banks transfer some strong common identifier like the social security number (and that sound pretty dangerous to share). Open 5 accounts in 5 different banks (I'm pretty sure you could even do it all at the same bank), and there you go... you will exist, but Ticketmaster would have no idea whether you are 5 different deanc or all the same one.
Your identity is tied to your account at the bank, not your bank accounts. It's simply a way to identify you are an individual. It is tied to your SSN, and there are very very strict requirements to gain access to this provider (it is run by a branch of government).
Sell a fraction of tickets at higher prices (perhaps via auction) ahead of time, and sell the rest at the door. Scalpers cannot pretend to be multiple people if they have to enter the venue and pay.
The known-price door tickets set a bound on the value of advance tickets, with the latter having a premium for certainty of getting in. Younger people with less money will place less value on certainty (they can wait in line at another concert).
Scalpers can still buy advance tickets and scalp them, but they have reduced pricing power because buyers might rather take a chance at $50 door tickets than pay $500 to a scalper. And there may be less bad press about tickets costing $500 if most of them are sold at the door for $50.
sell low price vouchers, require ID for them, make them refundable in 90+ days or in person with ID only
set up a membership/trust/reputation system for fans and/or frequent venue goers (eg. locals), and if they actually show up to gigs, then you can reduce the refund wait time for them, etc.
> But a lot of artists want to sell tickets below market price
And I want to experience being a dragon, unicorn, billionaire, etc. We can want impossible things, but ignore reality at our own peril.
You can't "beat" the market, you just force the market underground (black market, scalpers). The market ALWAYS pays what it can afford. If demand is greater than supply, and someone is willing to pay more for it, refer to Economics 101.
The market! The market! The market! This invisible beast which controls everything for all eternity!
There are always ways of influencing the market. Taxes, subsidies, regulations, advertising. It requires imagination, but let's not feel ourselves enslaved completely to the invisible hand of the new leviathan.
"Influencing the market" is just a way of introducing unenforcable or ineffective rules, or unintended consequences. You want to tax resale of tickets at above face value at 100%? Sure. Now enforce it. I mean, it's been illegal in many states for a while now anyway.
Back in the day, before the web, anyone who wanted a ticket at face value could get one. You just had to wait in line. For a long time. And back then, people said that system was unfair, because wealthy people could afford to take the day off of work, while poor people couldn't. Or wealthy people could simply pay other people to wait in line for them. And the wealthy people realized, hey, the limit is 8 tickets but I'm going with just a group of 4... I can buy all 8 and sell 4 to people at the end of the line for a profit. And they did! And so waiting in line became fruitless, unless you were really, really, really early, because all the wealthy people (scalpers) would buy the max number of tickets and the show would sell out fast. Now we have the internet and nobody has to wait on a line, everyone can log in at the exact moment, but people once again say this is unfair.
The idea that you can somehow ignore, heavily influence, or override the free market in concert tickets is nonsensical.
So we can influence the market for travel, healthcare, education, military, environment, food, children’s toys, etc. But not for tickets to watch Taylor Swift?
The market for concert tickets currently starts out "influenced" by the fact that the face value (for popular acts) is well below the market-clearing price. And people hate this system, because it attracts resellers who naturally see an easy profit opportunity, these resellers aggressively obtain the majority of all tickets through a variety of back channels, leaving very few actually available to be purchased at the face value. And, because keeping face value below market-clearing price means there is more demand than supply, this system, for various reasons, led to a single company monopolizing the sale of tickets and charging massive, unavoidable fees, which people hate even more.
If we actually were letting tickets be un-influenced, they would be sold via some kind of auction or like an IPO.
The point is not that you can't influence the market, it's that the market is simply a natural phenomenon that will strongly resist every attempt at diminishing it with counter-effects that may be unpopular, unwanted, unfair and unintended.
There are three categories of criticism being mixed up here.
1. You cannot influence the market, it will always revert to form.
2. You can influence the market, but in doing so, you will cause too many damaging side-effects.
3. You should not influence the market, because it’s morally wrong to do so.
The first comment was very much in category 1, but now it sounds like category 2.
The problem with category 2 arguments is that they pretend any solution must be perfect with no side-effects or we shouldn’t do it. Clearly, it’s a trade-off - even if there are negatives, if they are outweighed by the positives, it’s worth doing.
Thus, if it’s possible some mixture of regulation, tax and subsidy can prevent monopolistic behaviour, it’s worth at least discussing.
Well 2. is only a subset of 1., on a long enough time scale, as all human 'influences' will vanish too.
Animals, even plants, experience market forces to some extent. So I would say 'You cannot influence the market over millions of years, it will always revert to form.'
If we can improve things during that timeframe, great (perhaps phrased better as “In the long run, we’re all dead anyway”). And by the time we reach the end of that timeframe, the context will be different.
"Improve" how? And for whom? You have 400,000 people wanting to see a Taylor Swift concert each night in a venue that seats 80,000 (or whatever the actual numbers are). Lots of fans are going to be disappointed, shut out, denied access under any plan you implement or any laws you pass. Further, denying market forces to dictate prices results in an economic loss to Ms. Swift. You can twist "the market" all you want but you can't make everyone happy.
You sound like a pagan worshipper in Ancient Greece, commenting on the sacrifices we must make for the gods on Mount Olympus.
I’ll try to respond in the rigid language of the mythical Homo Economicus. If Taylor Swift could control the ticket booking process herself, she could choose which of those 400,000 fans got tickets, instead of being forced to accept those who make TicketMaster the most profits. She can go for maximum short-term financial gain for herself, or perhaps long-run profits, or even some kind of artistic consideration. This is why TicketMaster having control both over supply of venues (by virtue of its exclusivity contracts) and distribution is a problem that needs to be solved, to introduce elasticity into the market that can respond to demand.
It's not about worship, it's acceptance of the natural order, which you seem to want to deny.
As far as your points, she did try to choose which fans got tickets -- the sale was a "pre-sale" to fan club members who has pre-registered, not the general public.
You are asking to have it both ways. TicketMaster is not the problem, it is the result of decades of influencing the market, the way you'd want it, such that it appears that tickets are available and affordable while in reality, it helps artists and venue owners maximize their revenue. It functions so well, it won out over all other competitors and consolidated its grip on the industry.
You want to eliminate TicketMaster? Simply be willing to sell tickets purely by supply and demand, the way the stock market works. I can buy 1000 shares of AMZN for less commission than a single concert ticket (and AMZN will never be sold out, the market will always "respond to demand" -- your words), because there's no artificial "influence."
Not particularly hard... you give a name at time of lottery entry that must match photo identification presented at the door. Making the tickets refundable would probably help too (they could be sold in a subsequent lottery round, or at the door).
> But a lot of artists want to sell tickets below market price.
IMO artists should stop trying to sell below market and instead move the market by increasing supply. TSwift tickets wouldnt sell for $1000 a ticket if she played 3 nights... It's also a contradictory goal to what basically everyone else in the industry cares about (eg vendors, venues, crews etc).
Perhaps for super super stars like tswift she'd literally end up playing 24/7/365 ... But for a lot of artists additional nights would really change the curve.
I'm curious how alternatives might effect elasticity, something like simulcast at theaters for less than live in person?
I think one reason why artists don't take the Dutch Auction approach is that they want to recruit new fans, including kids who might not have much money. They also probably don't want to be seen as greedy.
In the absence of some system that prevents resale, scalpers will likely still buy up all of the Taylor Swift tickets before they drop to a price that is affordable for these less-affluent fans.
The bots will likely still win if they can determine how many tickets are left and how fast they are selling.
The scalper can only make profit if he can buy the ticket at one price, and later sell it not just at a higher price, but a price sufficiently higher to cover the costs of the process (advertising, bot development, customer support, transaction fees, ...), and the profit needs to be worth both the effort and the risk.
In this model, anyone willing to pay more than the scalper paid already had the opportunity to buy at the higher price, so the only people the scalper could sell to would be people who really want to go, are willing to pay a high price, but weren't organized enough to actually buy when the ticket was being sold at that price.
That will almost certainly limit the profit so much that it isn't worth it at all, and even if it doesn't, anyone who plans ahead will be able to get the ticket directly from the system.
In the end, it's an auction system. Which auction system is chosen doesn't matter much economically. You could get similar results by having people bid on the available tickets. But psychologically, that will alienate fans more than a system like this. This only works for shows that will definitely sell out though, because otherwise it creates an incentive to wait for a lower price, deterring people from buying.
Yeah, people forget scalpers also have downside. When I lived in a big city my partner and I would routinely go to sporting events by paying under face value on the tickets simply by waiting for the event to start. Of course, we had to be ok if it didn't work out, but most of the time it did. Worst case, we walk back across the street and watch the game from the bar.
I don't see why the Dutch auction doesn't address your concerns. The starting price can be higher, the price drop can be non-linear and third party software using the concert's API can serve customers by providing them with the same information scalpers would have.
If the kids didn't buy at the time, that means they didn't buy them before when the tickets were more expensive. Which means that also wouldn't be interested in buying the more expensive scalped tickets either.
Put into context:
Tickets are $30 - kid doesn't buy them
next day Tickets are $29 - scaler buys them before the kid
The kid has already decided that $30 is too much. For the resale to be worth it, it would need to be more than $1 gains, but that is more than the kid has already associated the value to be
What if the kid passes at $30 because money is tight, they’d prefer to pay $20 and want to try for that, but scalpers snatch up all the cheapest tickets before the kid is able to. The kid still really wants to go, however, and is willing to actually pay the scalper up to $40 when push comes to shove, even if it hurts a bit?
Or if they weren’t organized enough or able to commit to going early on, but still have the purchasing power to pay a higher price?
I was mostly asking because the explanation in the parent comment seemed overly simplistic, and to indicate that this approach would destroy the scalpers’ business model entirely. I’m totally open to the idea that this is a good solution that would improve on the status quo.
It’s a trivially solvable problem to engineers because it’s not an engineering problem. They want all the hype and rush. It’s become a piece of culture to “wait in line.”
I once had a company put me in an async queue for months to wait for my brand new gadget. I wish Sony had done the same with the PS5.
The psychology of people waiting and wanting to give relatively large sums of money away is absolutely what's being optimized. The proposal from author is quite the opposite as it encourages waiting or leaves you wondering if you overpaid as a consumer. Probably not the psychology that's best for business.
There was initially a queue to get in the queue. I personally entered the PS Direct queue around October 2021 and was able to purchase one in January 2022.
Or how about a lottery system. You get an email if you win the privilege of buying a tickets. Tickets are named and require ID check, to prevent scalpers. If you are unable to go, your ticket just goes back to the lottery pool.
They had a Verified Fan system to limit how many could purchase during a presale, but all that really required was being signed up for Taylor's email list and having purchased a Midnights CD from her online store.
I think they messed up here by only running one fan presale, since it made them predict how many tickets each person with a code would actually purchase. They probably underestimated this number (eg. from people tagging along with their friend who got into the presale), so they ended up selling way more than they thought they would. I suspect this because, at one point, I had 16k people in front of me for 1 night at Mercedes-Benz[0], which is a lot given concert capacity is probably around 50k.
With a two-wave presale (or even "verified fan presale only"), you can put out tickets in even smaller waves and continuously evaluate how many you're giving out based on demand and order ticket quantities.
0: while the queue-it frontend was set up to hide any number above 2,000, the API faithfully showed the actual amount of clients ahead of you in line.
Oh yea I meant they go back to the pool and a refund is issued. This is of course utopic. Just a dreaming about what the most customer friendly and fair system might look like. Will probably never be aligned with what maximizes the profit of TicketMaster.
I could imagine the Dutch auction would only change the strategy of scalpers, besides being a massive money grab for artists, venues and ticket master.
The strategy for scalpers now appears to be get in as fast as possible and buy as many tickets as they can. But if we can assume the event will sellout completely and there is sufficient demand (e.g. Taylor Swift which I think I read would need to do 900 concerts to meet the initial demand) then scalpers could still win. Scalpers would just need to set a desired amount of tickets to buy and attempt to buy them at the last possible moment. They will get the tickets for the cheapest price for the event and could then sell them for a markup.
I think people would buy the scalpers tickets since they may have been waiting to see how low the prices can get, or they are able to obsess over remaining ticket numbers like a bot could and just missed out.
The only benefit I could see to the Dutch auction is it increases risk to scalpers by making them pay larger prices and get the last pick of seats, but only for events with allocated seats. So maybe instead of half the tickets for an event being scalped, they may only have the risk appetite for 10% of the tickets.
Some artists and promoters are already doing a money grab and hiding behind scalpers to do it. For big shows, a portion of the tickets may be removed from retail sales entirely and go straight to websites that are used for scalping tickets [0]. This let's artists be seen as offering tickets at reasonable rates while getting closer to market rates.
Here's an even simpler method, that's actually more fair because it doesn't bias toward those with big pockets or much time or technical skill:
Open up for registration. Keep registration open until the date of the show. Registration costs the price of the ticket. As the show comes close, for as long as there are tickets not sold, randomly select some people every day who receive a ticket. On the day of the show, refund -- with interest -- the money of the people who were never offered a ticket.
I've never understood this obsession with first come, first served for extremely limited resources. Due to technical limitations it pretty much always turns out to be a lottery anyway, and we would save both customers and sysadmins trouble by explicitly turning it into one instead.
(Back in the days when it required camping outside the ticket office, it instead unfairly favoured those with lots of time on their hands, and/or lots of money.)
(I'm assuming "fair" here means that everyone has an equal chance, uncorrelated with any other aspect of their life. A random selection is the only method that can guarantee this property.)
I need to buy non-refundable hotels, train tickets, childcare, plus book time off work. Finding out whether all that's necessary with a few hours notice doesn't work.
If you could do something like this for some large proportion of the tickets, and give a month's notice, it might work.
Prepayment isn't required. You'd could give folks a few days after winning tickets to make good on their payment. Many people would put down a credit card, and it would only be an issue for them if it was declined, etc.). Tickets that aren't paid for would be added back to the next batch of tickets to be distributed (or if close to the date of the show, sold at the door).
Why not have a big closed auction? Everyone has a week or so to submit how much they are willing to pay for a ticket. Once the auction closes, sort by price and take the number of seats available. Everyone pays the minimum price that still fits in the seats available.
I'm imagining a large scale Vickery auction, sorry if I'm not explaining super well. Everyone pays the same, but people get a price they think is fair.
The system proposed in this post has the advantage of correctly pricing every seat individually without anyone having to put in multiple bids. The people buying earlier are paying the highest price and get to choose the best seats. Those buying later would pay less but the good seats would already be taken.
A Vickery auction would not, I think, lend itself to that kind of price discovery.
Good point, but you could address that by splitting up the seats into multiple auctions depending on the quality of the seats.
People could even bid "conditionally" for multiple sections, and once bidding closes you resolve the separate auctions in order from best to worst. If a person with multiple bids gets a good seat, their bids in the other sections get cancelled.
Seems to me that this could have very similar results as the dutch auction method, but each ticket is more fairly priced. Your ticket costs the same as the next guy, assuming they have a seat in the same section as you.
Edit: also, as mentioned somewhere else here, you're likely to have a threshold where everyone wants to buy once they see available seats start to disappear, causing a kind of "bank runoff" where everyone rushes to buy tickets all at once, putting us back where we started.
People don't want to do complex bidding schemes. Even Vickery auctions confuse people - look at how eBay has to call their Vickery auction "automatic bidding" to alleviate that confusion.
A threshold effect could certainly exist, that would be one issue with that scheme.
Yeah, you're right about that. I'll admit this topic sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole on how this could be accomplished.
An alternative scheme could be a Vickery Clarke Groves or generalized second price auction. These bidding schemes are used to price online adverts. Once the auction closes, let people choose their seats in order of who paid the most. This let's you place one bid, and individually prices each seat, but the downside is you don't know how good a seat your bid will get you. Still, would probably be easier to understand. If you bid more, you get first pick.
As far as I know all the auction mechanisms are equal[1], in the sense that:
1. the items are assigned to the same bidders (paying the same)
2. the revenue of the auctioneer is the same
In that sense you could chose the system that fits you the most. I personally think that selling tickets via auction is indesirable for other reasons.
Because sports teams and singers need broad audience interest to maintain their brand’s popularity, which can drive things like merchandise sales, future concerts, music streaming, etc.
If they simply sold to the highest bidders, the populace at large will stop being fans and they will move onto the next entertainer. In the short term, you might make a little extra from richer people, but longer term you will fall out of popular culture, and the rich will move on or not be sufficient in quantity to maintain as profitable of a following.
The largest NFL stadium seats about 85,000 people. So you can't sell more than that for the single game. Two years ago they actually set the record lowest attendance due to Covid restrictions - only about 21k were allowed in the building. I believe it's the first SB to ever sell below capacity, and you'd have to go back to the second world war to find an NFL championship that did the same.
Also, music is fundamentally better live. Football is not. I say this as an avid fan of both who attends both live.
There is always the option to change the odds for fans. E.g. offer cheap tickets for members of the fan club and last minute tickets to fans who post the most convincing appeals on social media.
But for many big artists the tickets are sold out immediately and it is just scalpers trying to get what they can for them. I'd like to know how many people attending a big concert got their tix directly vs got resold ones not at face value.
Because their product is essentially unpriceable. If the concerts were priced by demand their demand would dry up considering that instead of forty people wanting to hear jazz on a saturday night you've got 30 million people screaming their lungs out - the only reasonable market response to this is for the pricing to adjust so that only the most wealthy can attend but then you'll get an issue where the performer will lose mass appeal since they so infrequently perform for "regular people" and it will cheapen their brand. It's a weird catch-22 and the real honest solution is that recordings are the solution to this problem but people still obsess over live performances.
Sometimes promoters hold tickets and put them on the secondary market themselves. But they sell tickets to scalpers as a way to gaurantee a certain level of profit. Which lowers their risk of losing money, especially when spread over a large amount of events. The scalper business model is to buy risk from the promoter, and then selling the convenience of not planning ahead to consumers. Said differently, If promoters try to capture maximum value for every ticket, they will risk making less money at a slower rate.
That said, I think it might work if they start every sale of tickets with an initial high price that reduces on a defined schedule. So people with more money to spend can gaurantee a spot for themselves, while everyone else waits for the tickets to get cheaper.
Edit: ha! I obviously didn't rtfa before my comment.
Yes, or could simply be a live market for the tickets where people can put in limit orders etc. Then would converge to fair market value quickly and people would still have the option to bite the bullet and pay the higher prices.
Though volume/liquidity would be at question, but bots/arbitrage would hopefully help there.
If they really want to set artificially low prices and prioritize fans over scalpers then they need a queue and a process by which they verify the queued person is human. Lots of labor involved. Though maybe using SSN (in the US) to limit tickets per buyer?
Scalpers provide them the service of absorbing demand risk and having someone to blame for the gap between perceived and market value. (It doesn't have to be scalpers; see also Ticketmaster. The point is that it's valuable to farm this out to third parties that everyone can agree to hate on.)
They are. Ticketmaster does dynamic pricing now for big shows. Accurate pricing is basically inaccessible beforehand; there’s no chart like in the past with various sections costing specific $s. For the Taylor Swift show in Seattle they published a range of ticket prices from $49-$199… we paid ~$600 for seats in section 131 that were VIP seats by default (that also added to the price; but the pricing was totally opaque).
So I got tickets to the Sunday 7/23 show in Seattle and the 5/27 show in New Jersey (and would have had seats for the 4/29 in Atlanta but my dad’s phone was on silent and he missed the 2FA code for his capital one card — I’ll have to get those from scalpers) and what’s interesting is that I got floor seats for a VIP package in New Jersey and “regular” non-VIP floor seats for Seattle. It was $190 difference after fees between shows.
For New Jersey, it was $749 list for floor VIP and then $866 per with fees. For Seattle, it was $539 list and $650 with fees. Getting the LED laminate thing and the other collectible stuff isn’t worthless but it’s not a $200 upcharge.
But as you said, the whole thing was so opaque, I just bought what I could buy. I would’ve paid more if I’d needed to. A friend who is going on 7/22 in Seattle (we were on Zoom doing it together) wound up paying $900 after fees for her floor seats that were in a differently named (but identically featured, perk wise) VIP package, meaning some of them went even higher.
So the whole thing was just totally opaque but there wasn’t even choice for people who were indiscriminate on pricing (buying from scalpers aside). It was madness just trying to get tickets at all. I needed six seats for 5/27 and I’m still not sure how I was able to get six floor seats together, VIP or otherwise. After doing the whole thing in three cities across two days, every ticket they had available sold, regardless of price. If they’d raised prices 50%, I don’t think it would have changed anything. Some of it is demand but some of it is absolutely people buying on speculation to try to flip.
Unless an industry connection comes through, I’ll wind up paying well above list for the Atlanta show I want to take my mom to, I know that. My only issue is that StubHub/Vivid/others charge at least 50% on top of the resale price in fees. So even if I was willing to spend $1500 a ticket for 100 section seats (and to take my mom, I would), I’d wind up paying another $600 or $700 per ticket just in fees. And that’s when I get pissed off and start to try to wait out the people who bought tickets just to speculate until they lower their prices to be more aligned with market forces.
What a lot of the comments in here are bumping up against with regards to “fairness” is the fact that willingness to pay is a function of both preference intensity and ability to pay.
The way to make sure TS tickets go to the biggest TS fans is to remove the influence of ability to pay and sort only by preference intensity.
Solving wealth inequality fixes this problem entirely - among others!
Edit: like all good economists, I leave solving that particular bit of the problem as an exercise to the reader.
I like the idea of demand pricing as a way of increasing access but I don’t think it would work in practice.
Too many people would be thrown off by the falling price, and want to wait. Friends who bought earlier than other friends feel like suckers for spending more money on the same thing.
Lastly, what we call scalping _is_ a service to the ticket-buyer. The scalper is providing a market for the ticket at a price which is agreeable to the buyer. Dads love to complain about the “high” price of a ticket while they stand in line for $15 popcorn. Meanwhile, scalpers effectively do the work described in the article by adjusting prices very quickly based on actual demand. As an event gets close to starting, unsold inventory drops precipitously in price until it’s sold.
The reason scalping has a bad reputation is that most entertainment pricing is set well below the actual value of the event.
- Digital only tickets
- By default, the tickets are not transferrable. Use your app on your phone to get in.
- You can pay a fee to make tickets transferrable/scalpable.
- The fee increases as more tickets are sold with this option (set ceiling on max number of tickets with this option sold)
So okay, you want to scalp tickets, you have to pay more and people who don't want to transfer pay less.
I don't like that idea. First, personally, I'll rather pass than install that app.
Second, it would need to heavily rely on device fingerprinting and obfuscation to give scalpers hard time trying to modify the app. Software protection will likely fail anyway when both scalpers and people buying from them have aligned interests. Even if the software protection holds, the price of second-hand phones may be too low compared to price of the tickets, so the "transferability fee" has a practical ceiling, especially since the phone can be sold again afterwards.
really? I already use axs and ticketmaster apps for tickets. Are you using pdfs or something? The app is nice because it rotates the barcode every minute, and idk how else you'd achieve that. I guess a webapp could work.
I don't think you need to rely on device fingerprinting, just make sure they're logged into their ticketing account. You might see people start to sell accounts with single/pair tickets but that just sounds like a pain, and we could mitigate it if it becomes a problem.
That works in one sense, in that it reduces demand overall.
I used to go to lots of shows; any time there was a show I was interested in, I’d check the online used goods marketplace 2-72 hours in advance and see if I could get tickets below face value. Often I could. Sometimes I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t go to those shows.
As the result of the move of big shows to digital-only tickets, I’ve just stopped going to big shows. I just go to local venues where I can pay in cash on entry.
Interesting, thanks for the link. Similar outcomes perhaps. I guess the difference is that the auction clock is public so it may feel a little less arbitrary than an opaque algorithm.
Make it a lottery. A toy example, instead of selling 10,000 tickets that sell for $1000 sell 500k “lottery” tickets for $20 each. A lucky 10,000 get to the concert. The artist/venue makes the same amount. Everyone gets a chance at seeing the artist for a reasonable price. Would work for very popular artists with young fans like T Swift. Lottery tickets would need to be non-transferable as well.
Burning Man-style ticket sale systems require a lot of extra workflow features, like a waiting room, ticket claim, raffle selection, identity confirmation. They have multiple phases of sales where the price increases. They have hardship tickets, if you can prove you simply can't afford the normal price.
Resale for above original value is not allowed, and if you're reported the ticket may be forfeit and original seller banned. You can transfer a ticket to another person using their ticket management system, and I imagine you could also "sell back" your ticket to be given away at the box office as hardship tickets.
Most people do buy as many as they can and sell or give away the extras to their friends or people on forums looking for tickets. While controversial, it is nice to go to an event with your friends, and it does feel like you're helping strangers who are interested enough that they hunt around on forums for a ticket.
Right, this is a values problem, not a technical problem.
Who should get to see Taylor Swift? How much should they pay? How should profits be distributed?
These are philosophical questions. If you assume a particular set of answers to these questions, designing the correct sales process is not difficult. But everyone has a different set of answers.
Setting aside the issues that revenue maximization is not typically the only (or even the main) concern for those selling tickets, I still think this system isn't very good. One key issue is that it assumes that the underlying value of the tickets themselves does not change over time (in the article's specific case, 6 months). But an artist's popularity can be extremely unpredictable, and over the course of 6 months could change drastically. This would likely mean leaving money on the table, especially if that rise in popularity comes close to the actual event date.
I think a better approach that could deal with this would be to avoid trying to come up with the 'max' and 'min' amounts and instead simply let people submit bids for how much they are willing to pay for tickets. You would pre-authorize that amount at order time, but it wouldn't yet be deducted. At the end of every day, the top n bids would 'win' and actually actually purchase the ticket.
In the simple case where the artist's popularity stays the same over time, this would probably result in a similar outcome to OP's suggestion. But if the artist undergoes a big increase in popularity, the ticket price would rise again to a much higher value later.
Yeah this doesn't feel "Fair" to me. It would likely reduce the scalping problem, sure, but it also introduces a whole lot of "Well this is the price I want to pay, but what if it sells out? Should I stretch and pay more?" type feelings.
Maybe scalpers get in around this "stretch" point and then when there are no tickets left at all, people realise they really want to go and stretch a bit further to buy from the scalper.
As others have pointed out too - this really selects for wealth. As someone with a decent income, I might get to go and see all my favourite bands, but lower income folks might be priced out of the market entirely (which they already are by scalpers to a greater or lesser extent).
The process needs to be modified slightly. Everyone should end up paying the same amount for the ticket in the end. Those who bought early should not be penalized. When the the last ticket is sold, everyone should pay the same price as the last ticket. So when you buy early, you are just indicating the Maximum price you are willing to pay.
There should also be an option to automatically place a bid once the price reaches a certain level.
That’s the most fair way to auction off a bunch of identical things.
Another modification I would add to this is that let’s say 20% of the tickets should be sold for very cheap using a lottery system. So that not only the richest people could go to the concert.
The mechanism should also include the possibility of figuring out the optimal venue size in advance. I’m not sure what’s the right way to modify it in order to accomplish this goal.
I believe the problem they cited with this approach is it provides a poor UX where someone would have to keep checking the site to see if the ticket price has hit their desired target.
It would also still leave room for bots front running although still a better solution since the effects are dampened. Still, it's a lot easier for a bot to watch for a 'good price' to come up than a 'true fan'.
Perhaps to get around that there could also be an ability to make automatic purchases for a user once the ticket price reaches desired target? Something like a batch auction that randomizes winners in a cohort might work.
There are also people working in this area that would like to simply prevent resales. The problem there is it also might discourage purchases since people might be more reluctant to make such a big purchase if there is no way to recoup their money in case something happens that prevents them from going.
Perhaps another alternative to discourage scalping is if there was an identity system that requires each ticket holder to prove their identity. That, however, would also decrease the UX dramatically and would be a tough sell. But maybe the time is right to make such a hard sell?
I don't get what this has to do with combating scalping. This is just a new auction game to play. It levels the playing field for a time, as all new games do, but the scalpers will eventually win it.
In this case the game is to find X where X is the percent of concert goers willing to pay scalpers. Then you buy the bottom X% of tickets for the current price and list them for more money. This is easy to do because the auction site tells you the number of remaining tickets.
Since there's no supply of auction tickets left, scalpers can now set the price. And since they paid the lowest price out of any of the ticket holders, they hold all the power.
X isn't the price in my solution it's the percent of concert hopefuls who will hold their nose and pay a scalper. Once there's exactly that many tickets left, there's no point running the auction anymore. Scalpers should use their bots to completely buy up all remaining tickets, as they do now, and then set them for a higher price on the secondary market.
Buying the first 1-X% tickets nearly guarantees you will pay more than the scalp price except for a thin band right before X where the prices are within the scalper's margin.
Basically this system only beats scalpers if everyone is richer than scalpers, which most concertgoers are not. If you're rich you might like the sound of this new system on paper but it's actually cheaper for you to stay with the current system and buy all your tickets on the secondary market.
Wait, they didn't choose to buy a ticket at the price the scalpers got (plus epsilon), so why would they pay more when the scalpers come around with a ticket?
Cuz the auction ran out of tickets so the price starts to climb as scalpers monetize FOMO. Regular purchasers don't know what the scalpers think X is for this particular concert. Even if you knew X, all you could do is try to buy a ticket right before the remaining quantity reaches X which guarantees you paid more than the scalper, but maybe not more than the scalper's resell price.
X is the moment scalpers buy up the remaining market and set their own prices now that they control the supply. They know many other ticket holders can't compete with them since they paid more money for their ticket.
Regular purchasers would learn to not try to game the auction like that any more. In the scenario you described, they are only losing out on tickets because they are getting greedy and trying to buy them for less than they think those tickets are worth.
The point of auctions is that the right strategy is to bid to your price, not to try to guess what other people think the price should be. That's why they work.
Even if people weren't actively under-bidding in the hope of getting cheaper tickets that way, human psychology might still mean that when faced with the acute and very real scenario of not getting any tickets (as opposed to the more abstract threat beforehand, when they're making their original bid), some people would subsequently then be willing to actually pay somewhat more than their initial bid.
Again, X is not a price it's a demand level (for scalper tickets). Everyone can 'bid their price' and scalpers will still buy out the bottom of the auction and take control of the pricing.
Those hypothetical scalpers will indeed have control of the pricing, but they will have no customers willing to pay what they have paid, because all customers willing to pay more will have already bought tickets.
In theory, there may have been holdouts who wanted to get a better price, as you are suggesting, who then turn to the scalpers. Those holdouts are either (a) irrational for not bidding the price they were willing to pay or (b) not actually willing to pay whatever price the scalpers want to get.
By taking this strategy of picking a demand level X and buying out all the tickets once the supply is below that level, scalpers are virtually guaranteed to lose money.
For most goods, there is no demand that is independent of price.
The dutch auction doesn't solve the race aspect. There are plenty of situations where people can't buy tickets when they want - they're at work when the price is reached, driving, the webserver is at capacity, etc. Scalpers have the advantage in all these scenarios.
Secondly, people will pay more money once scarcity and FOMO kick in. I may want a ticket for $40 but scalpers knew X would happen somewhere around $50 so they bought all the tickets then. Am I not going to see the concert for $75 buying a scalper ticket? Not a straightforward decision to make! These are the sorts of inputs scalpers will consider when deciding X.
It's straight up supply and demand. I have no idea why anyone is surprised why scarce goods are expensive. Their is no solution. Idk unless you want to socialize entertainment or something. Give out entertainment credits.
YES! I love this concept. The big clock featured in the post was described in a Tom Scott video[1] earlier this year. It's the Royal FloraHolland's flower auction in Aalsmeer. Fascinating to see how it worked then and how it works now. Same concept, just computerized and accessible remotely by bidders.
Talk about fair distribution all you want, it doesn't matter. People who buy tickets are not the customers of Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster does not have any incentive to implement any system that better serves the people who actually attend ticketed events.
The customers for Ticketmaster are venues. That's the only party that Ticketmaster cares to please. Of course Ticketmaster wields their monopoly power such that venues have little choice but to go with them. But even if they did not do that, Ticketmaster serves the interests of the venues very very well.
If you want to defeat Ticketmaster with a market solution, you can't do it by creating a Ticketmaster competitor. No matter how good it is, venues can't be swayed. You will have no customers. The only market solution is to own venues. As a venue owner you could refuse to renew with Ticketmaster and use any other system you wanted.
Of course, if you do that, good luck booking anyone to perform in your venue. It better be a big famous one that they can't ignore.
The obvious fix to bots and scalpers is just to not allow ticket transfers - you give your name when you buy the ticket and show your ID at the door. Why this isn't the current process is left as an exercise to the reader.
I remember Green Day doing a local show where you had to pay cash at the door.
This seems to address botting, though scalping organizations can still pay people to stand in line (and presumably take a cut when they are paid to give up their spots.)
Personally I think this approach helps out kids who have time to wait in line but don't necessarily have the money to pay huge markups and fees from the secondary market.
The simple solution to getting fans rather than grifters is to make the tickets cost something other than money. Time is a nice obvious cost element to add.
If only we could channel that time more productively (and in a more palatable way) than having people wait in line.
Taylor Swift did do something a bit like this this for a previous tour - you could get early access to the ticket sales by doing various kinds of fan activities, including buying physical copies of her records, watching videos, and posting on social media [1]. People were kind of mad about it, although I think in part that was because the "fan activities" that gave you the best chance to get tickets were the ones that also involved buying things.
Indeed, maybe with a more bulletproof implementation though (eg. you must show the same driver's license, enforced via matching the pdf417 on the back at purchase and entry)
If I'm not mistaken, this[0] seems to be a commentary on the law. As I understand it after having read that article, the law seems to be in an effort to encourage reselling by the regular person in case of travel/event plans changing, while introducing fines to prohibit egregious scalpers. However, it seems it's just some fines for these activities, and I can't find any case where scalpers were convicted and fined under this statute (but maybe my Google-fu is weak).
Ice is the old practice of producers (aka rights holders) or box office staff taking tips to make tickets available to resellers. This is illegal and is not common anymore. The era of computerized ticketing has made it much harder to do.
Look at paragraph (c), a little pro-reseller nugget buried in an otherwise very consumer friendly law. That paragraph is the reason obvious anti-scalping practices can't work in one of the US's largest live event markets.
This is what newer Pearl Jam concerts do - they sell on Ticketmaster, but made a deal where you can't transfer the tickets to anyone else, and must present a Photo ID upon entry to the venue with a name that matches the name on the billing address.
Better solution is to just price the tickets higher. Scalpers are only taking advantage of arbitrage. This requires a bit of complex demand estimation up front though.
I went to a concert that requires you to match your ticket, but allowed you to sell tickets on a site they control for the face value. I think the buyer has to pay a transaction fee as well.
I got the tickets by signing up and they took my credit card, and charged me when I was next in line and someone had tickets for sale. It was pretty neat, though I suspect I lucked out because a bunch of people sold their tickets when they announced vaccines would be required (September 2021).
There was no market place. Just fifo queues of people willing to buy tickets, and tickets for sale. that constantly works its way down to atleast one of them being 0.
I signed up for the main concert and a few of the after parties, and over the next month I got emails saying I had purchased tickets for the various events.
Some venues do this, but it does slow down entry (though during the pandemic some venues where checking IDs anyway along with covid test results, etc..)
AXS requires that you use their app and it must be logged into the account that purchased the tickets. The QR codes need to be refreshed before entry and expire in 60 seconds.
This presumably requires scalpers/bots to create an account per ticket purchase, and there is probably a limit on the number of accounts that can share the same payment method and address.
AXS allows them to resell on their own platform, so "the account that purchased the tickets" doesn't have to be the one that originally purchased the tickets.
Yes, it includes resale on its own platform. As I noted, I'm not sure this prevents scalping, but it seems like it would require bulk scalpers to create a large number of accounts, and presumably it allows AXS to take a cut and to monitor it.
Also I believe they limit the resale markup to 10% above the face value. This seems good for buyers and fair to sellers, and it may also reduce the profit for scalpers.
I imagine they could also ban resale of tickets for certain shows if they wanted to.
You can also transfer tickets on their platform, so even if there's a cap you can go off-platform for payment and "transfer" (aka sell) through the platform
AXS is really not invested in trying to stop scalpers, they do all this to defeat double use of tickets.
Australia has a few “major events” laws aimed at preventing the worse of scalping. They mostly require that any reselling not be more than a fixed percentage of the original resale price (I think it’s 20% from memory). While not perfect, it does prevent the insane ticket prices.
This is all managed through an offical resale partner with ticket tek and ticket master. You can only transfer tickets officially though the site, with options to do it for no (or low) charge if you’re sending it to a mate.
I’ve used the service quite a bit, picking up tickets on the day of an event. I’ve had some wins buying tickets for ~30% of the original price, but also plenty of times paying slightly over the original price or I’ve missed one event as there were no available tickets. It’s just something I’ve come to expect for the flexibility it provides.
I think the majority of people use this service rather than trying a third party as it’s official, easy for the seller and no one wants to support insane scalpers.
The only problem I’ve seen with the system is events can elect to not allow reselling on the platform till the event is sold out. This can prevent people recouping their losses if they can’t attend the event, and stops me from potentially getting a small deal.
I wasn't able to go to a convention because my girlfriend already bought plane tickets to Las Vegas. If I weren't able to sell the ticket, there would be no way for me to recoup the cost
Shit happens? Lots of things have the same problem but if you bought steaks from a butcher and you came home to find that your girlfriend already prepare dinner?
In the system that I can resell my ticket I don't have a loss, in a system where it's by name I can't
I believe it should be auctioned anyway, so that the people with the highest desire to go can put their money towards it. This is the most practical solution to the problem - the organizers get paid what the tickets are worth, anyone who wants to go knows how much the tickets will go for, scalpers become futures traders
Ok but what about someone with not much money, but time. They may be willing to camp out for several days (certainly desire there) but would lose out to someone with money who can easily afford it.
If they make tickets non-transferable, they should also make them refundable. We're talking about events that are guaranteed to sell out, they should have a problem finding someone to buy returned tickets, even at the last minute.
However, many venues were already checking ID for over 18/21 shows and also covid test results during the pandemic.
Also regular buyers already have to provide contact and payment info (usually very personally identifiable.)
Some venues have tried to fight scalping by requiring presentation of the card used for payment - though obviously that disadvantages cash buyers and scalpers can still use burner cards which they provide with the ticket.
This isn't to be argumentative, but life isn't fair. This article discusses how to make buying a Taylor Swift ticket fair, meanwhile there are much larger social issues, like homelessness. I'm not a concert guy, and all the more power to those who do enjoy it, but it's absolutely a luxury to those that want to go.
I have an idea. Hire a bunch of lobbyists to advocate legalizing scalping, then allow the biggest monopolist ticketing middleman to setup the largest resale marketplace.
Then, we act surprised when “hackers” somehow are able to defeat the anti-bot systems and resell (with another set of fees) bulk quantities of tickets on said resale marketplace.
Something not talked about here is that there's a finite number of seats that can be sold for all the tours in the year.
At a smaller scale, look at Broadway productions. There are 41 "broadway" theaters in New York, each with between 500-2000 seats performing 8 shows each week. Ballparking because I don't have the exact numbers, that's a total number of tickets you can sell of under about 350,000 tickets for all broadway shows that can be sold each year. Even if you include all the touring and local productions of shows in cities, there are not enough theaters to meet the demand for live musicals and plays (and while locally, shows will underperform and not sell out, and there are periods of downtime between shows changing, it's still capped).
Now these massive tours are limited in a similar way. There are only a few dozen arenas that can seat tens of thousands of people year round, and only so many nights they can operate. But unlike those shows, a single production team can't "own" a venue for months at a time. So they need to tour, which is about the most expensive way to get a production of that scale off the ground. Moving a production and staffing it throughout a tour is so expensive that guaranteeing the endeavor is profitable is still difficult - many of the "biggest" tours with sellout crowds across the country have been financial disasters.
Basically my point is that the issue isn't just in fairness in ticket sales. It's lack of venues. Which makes sense. If we had cities operate like Las Vegas, and have venues that put on high profile shows for months at a time with residencies, the access to the shows might be (paradoxically) improved despite being hyper local. If you can guarantee a low risk/profitable production and rely on people traveling to the show (which many do! look at broadway - people can and do see shows affordably with the highest cost being the plane ticket) then the problem might be better mitigated. Or maybe not. I'm not an economist, but the point is that the supply problem goes a lot deeper than people trying to buy tickets at the same time.
Back in the day, The Who was presenting "Tommy". First time they were doing it live again. The "cheap" tickets were $75. This was a smaller venue.
$75 was a bit of money to be sure.
Back then you waited outside record stores to buy tickets. You'd line up, and sometime before the sale, they'd come out and hand out numbers, say 1 to 100. Then you'd sort by the number. Then they'd come out and say "We're starting the line at 37". 37 would be the front of the line, everyone else would sort behind that, wrapping around at the back. #36 would be the last in line.
When I went to buy Tommy tickets, they were also selling another acts tickets.
Since the tickets were so expensive, I went out of my way to go to a lower income neighborhood with the hope that there would be less folks in line to buy tickets, simply due to the price.
In the end, I got my ticket and the lady behind me did not. If they weren't selling the other act, maybe she would have made it.
When the Rolling Stones with Guns and Roses in LA went on sale, they gave out wristbands days in advance. My spot in line was around the building, the first show was sold out before I got there. The seats I did get were basically lousy when I did get them. That took an afternoon.
When I went to buy tickets at the venue, they handed out numbers, but they didn't scramble them. The numbers were random, but #1 was first in line. As soon as I got my number, there was a guy offering to buy low numbers. I had not doubt he was going to buy the 8 ticket limit. He wasn't a fan, he was a professional scalper.
U2 tried to sell tickets over the phone in LA, trying to route around TicketMaster. It literally disabled the Los Angeles telephone system for several hours. You'd pick up the phone and not be able to hear a dial tone (I was listening to the modem trying to dial in to a client site). It would take up to 30 seconds to get a dial tone, and good luck getting your call through anyway. Total disaster.
Taylor Swift sold out 2M tickets. I don't care what the time frame that was in, that's a boat load of traffic. Think not of the 2M they sold, think of how many were not sold. I think there are few companies that could handle that load, especially something as specific as selling seats A29, A30, A31, and A40 to Bob Jones. Let's see a paper on that locking problem.
The production company sets the ticket prices, TM sets the service fees, if you want to save on service fees, go to the venue. I'm not defending TM, they certainly don't need me, but it's been an intractable problem for a long, long time, at all sorts of levels. If you think TMs fees are bad, try StubHub.
>Taylor Swift sold out 2M tickets. I don't care what the time frame that was in, that's a boat load of traffic. Think not of the 2M they sold, think of how many were not sold.
Shopify did 3.1M sales per min last year during peek season https://www.shopify.com/ca/blog/bfcm-data. There's more contention for this use case, but I don't think this is as an intractable problem. I do think an alternate model like the post proposes would greatly help.
I think randomized queues are pretty fair. You give everyone who arrives within a certain time the same chance. This wouldn't be too hard to implement as a system either.
Say ticket sales open at 2pm. From 1:45pm, everyone who gets to the site gets assigned a random queue number. Then from 2pm, users are given access to the ordering system in the order of their queue number. We can even limit throughput with that (e.g. let in n users per minute).
Ticket sites in South Korea already implement queueing systems to control server load. When sales open at 2pm, everyone refreshes the page at exactly that time, but the request is put in a waiting queue. This can be considered randomized in a way (the time someone refreshes the page is somewhat random), but I'd like to see the concept of "advance queue building time" added to that to reduce the stress of "I have to refresh the page exactly at the right moment." Give me a few minutes to get to the queue.
What are the variable "fixed" costs? And when are they incurred?
This is about revenue maximization, not user enjoyment maximization or fairness maximization.
Ultimately I don't think most artists actually want revenue maximization - they're probably far more interested in fairness maximization in ensuring their fan base of all economic strata get to see them live.
I don't think anyone would make that decision; the bar for good enough is pretty low, and if you won't get any incremental revenue (no one is selling or advertising on the various parameters of audio quality), why would you spend that money?
If you're selling out shows at double the price, wouldn't the next step be to reduce the sound quality so you can play cheaper shows with a higher profit?
This is a really interesting question. I feel like I see it with airlines all the time. The question that comes eventually though is do people notice and does a culture of penny-pinching trickle down into an inferior product that makes people resent the high price enough that sometimes they won't pay it.
I mean that's literally yield maximization - you don't need to capture all the demand for a given good or service. You just need to capture the right mix of it. I would broadly say that I don't think anyone who goes to a typical Arena concert is making their buying decision on the audio quality.
The current system isn't very fair to those people either.
Professional scalpers act like high frequency trading firms (some HFTs are ticket scalpers), and employ tens of thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment to get those seats before the poor rubes who hoped for standard priced tickets.
By contrast, an auction system actually levels the playing field by removing the technological advantage.
They don't have to run a Dutch auction specifically, other kinds of auctions exist too.
The technological advantage is meaningless though. Anyone wealthy enough can set up the same tech solution, so it's just as fair. The wealthiest get the tickets in both cases
The unfairness remains, in that who gets to go to the concert is decided by who can spend the most in going to it.
If fairness is what you care about, any auction system is irrelevant
I feel like Dice.fm already solved this. You can buy an untransferable ticket and if you cant go, you simply return it to a wait-list of people who have signed up. You get your money back, and they pay the same price. Maybe there are some transaction fees involved but overall this eliminates the ability for someone to buy just to sell?
Depends of the definition of "fair". To me, giving away infinite free tickets to interested people and then extract with a uniform distribution would be fair. Of course you need to provide some kind of ID and go at the concert with that. Comes the problem of fake ID, but that seems negligible.
The biggest problem is ticket scalper. We have developed a ticket system with personalized encrypted tickets. When you are not able to go the event, you to give your tickets back at us and we will refund the money. Because the tickets are personalized and encrypted, you can not swap them.
I will start to sound like a broken record soon but blockchain has provided a wealth of information about “fair” distribution games and their downfalls.
The NFT summer of 2021 saw first come first serve distros gamed by parties with superior network positioning.
Dutch auctions (from the article) strongly favored the wealthy buyers not fans or parties who “pay” with other things of value like their time.
Lotteries were easily games by sock puppets.
Lotteries with “strong” identity verification created grey markets for identities. Think about mechanical Turk but peoples task is to get a lottery ticket and remit the winnings.
People tried social credit systems where participating in community activities like discords earned you the spot in line. Again, services arose to farm these spots.
Fascinating microcosm of human behavior.
I agree with commenters that suggest refundable non-transferable tickets however, for goods this scarce where a secondary market is valuable, I don’t think we have a simple good solution.
It is not, not if you can build this system on your own.
Demanding you be paid for your time to build this demonstrates you aren't convinced it's a profitable idea, which is a huge red flag to potential investors.
I mean, I’m in this exact situation right now and it’s working great. I wrote a short story about an automated farming commune running on open source farming robots. But I can’t afford to spend years of my life working on a problem I’m not getting paid for. Then I met someone who dreams of running automated farming robots at his farm, and now for four years now he has been paying me to develop it.
I’ve done entrepreneurship, and it’s extremely stressful. Sometimes people know how to do something but don’t want to do it unless they’re going to get paid directly for the labor. Despite all the stories here on HN, this is actually fine.
Take a look at your comment at the start of this thread, including the quote from the article:
>> Shameless plug: I understand how to make and launch exactly this kind of system, at least technically. If you want it built, please contact me.
> I cannot roll my eyes hard enough - if you can, then do it already. Why the hell do you need the encouragement?
There is no discussion of partnership. The point is, some people know how to do something and they want to work on it just because they would find the work enjoyable. In which case they may not care who owns it. If they are always working on someone else's product then they are used to not owning their work. They would just rather work on something they feel good about working on.
In my case, I have significant decision making power and all of the engineering work is open source, so I will maintain access to the IP no matter what. I would have to pay for a robot in the future if I want one of my own, but that is a very low cost compared to the years of engineering I've done that I have not had to fund myself. But I don't really know if I want my own farm. It was a dream I had six years ago, but now I have other dreams. Mostly I am happy that I am able to provide these machines for people who need them.
This isn’t farming, he needs zero resources to build this on his own, the fact that he doesn’t do it means he doesn’t think this idea has merit on its own.
Investors, cofounders want to see skin in the game. This disclosure shows he doesn’t have that, full stop. That’s disqualifying for nearly any partner who would be worth working with, and justifiably so.
This guy doesn’t have the stamina to see this idea through.
Or, you release tickets for auction starting from 6 months prior slowly. Whatever the auction price is, that's what they are sold for. Start with the best seats, then the auction results might inform buyers how to bid on the next seat.
How about an auction of lottery tickets where the price is fixed but the probability of winning increases over time? Still identity verified so that each person can buy only one ticket and if they win they must attend themselves.
This model assumes that everyone is just sitting around paying attention to your concern tickets. If I see your prices are $2000/seat, I will just find somewhere else go spend my $300.
Interestingly a major band I saw last night, Crowded House, just came out against any kind of demand driven pricing, and forced TicketMaster to refund all premium ticket charges.
As an artist, connect with your top listeners on Spotify / Apple Music and give them a onetime use link to buy $20 tickets and allocate the rest of the tickets by auction.
I wonder if you'd see "bank runs" happen spontaneously as nervous fans see the number of available tickets start to drop, causing a spontaneous feedback loop.
Ticketmaster could have done everyone a huge favor by simply staggering the sales for separate dates a bit and not trying to sell tix for every show all at once.
We attended a few gigs in Italy this summer. Two of them we bought tickets first hand, they were indeed tied to a name with ID required. Was ID checked? Nope, of course not. One was a medium sized venue (3000), one a stadium, and one small (c. 300).
Tying to an ID is a nice idea in principal...
Another gig we bought tickets second hand, the seller had to go through the original site to return their tickets and then we could purchase them (I wrote a script to poll the site to find available tickets as they had sold out quickly). Did they check our IDs? Nope, of course not.
Requiring ID and having to return the tickets to the original site for resale is probably the optimal solution. But in reality if IDs are not checked it pretty much falls apart.
Probably something specific about applying it to concert tickets and/or over the internet. In the US, patents are good for 20 years, so a patent expiring in 2020 would have been issued during the dot-com bubble.
Also, although the patent office does review the applications, they aren't perfect: it isn't uncommon for patents to be invalidated if they are challenged or there's a lawsuit.
a dutch auction seems neither fair nor in line with how artists would want their tickets sold.
sure, some artists may want as much money as they can make but surely the majority want their fans to be able to see them affordably? at least, i hope.
Weird that this got downvoted. In response to "Is ${artist} that good?", I link to an objective list of awards and accolades showing that ${artist} is very good at their job. Compare Swift's success against the Beatles, Dolly Parton [1,2] or anybody else, and it's a very strong showing. If you don't like the art, that's a completely different matter. But in the sense of whether Swift is good in the way that matters here, the answer is clearly, "Yes."
In the case of transferable concert tickets that’s already the ‘solution’. Even if someone ‘poor’ is lucky enough to beat the odds and buy a ticket under the current system at the initial offer price, they still have the same opportunity cost to weigh up - it’s just they’re deciding whether to resell their ticket and realise a gain, or go to the concert and forfeit the gain.
This proposed system would be fairer in that it would at least deliver whatever the maximum amount a rich person is prepared to pay to the artist, rather that some scalper intermediary. Those at the lower end of the willingness-to-pay spectrum are no worse off, except to the extent that you think they’re disproportionately lucky, disproportionality motivated (which I accept is possible), or are themselves looking-to/willing-to scalp tickets.
It also seems however that it’d be pretty trivial to just prohibit resale of tickets and require ID at the venue. Artists/promoters might make less money but it’d preserve equality of access and largely eliminate scalping.
It's not the ticket system that is broken; it's the people.
The problem with stadium tours is that 95 percent or more of the seats are awful. They provide an extremely poor concert experience.
The sound is very bad for most of the audience. Many technological innovations in stadium sound have tried to address this, but the underlying physics has been resistant to an acceptable solution.
The visuals are even worse. An enormous fraction of the audience cannot resolve the headliner on stage as a result of the size of the performer and the distance to the viewer. The visuals then devolve to the viewers ability to see an enormous television screen.
So why would anyone want to go to a stadium show, if not for the visuals and the audio?
It comes down to human competitiveness. Bragging rights. Ingesting mass media nonsense about how a product or experience will make one feel, and then disgorging it to a peer group as a method of creating an artificial distinction between the "haves" and the "have-nots".
Taylor Swift, in particular, has been a genius at creating hysteria among her fans. They have ingested the idea that, if Taylor is in town, and you are not there, then you are a resident of the outer, miserable, darkness.
The truth, however, is that if you attend a stadium show, the only positive aspect is that you "were there". You will not see, hear, or in any meaningful way, experience the object of your hysteria. You will be packed into a seat with a group of strangers also experiencing a mass-media induced mental derangement.
The foregoing may lead you to believe that I am not a fan, but you would be wrong. My opinion was formed by the experience of going to all the Taylor Swift stadium tours, up to a certain point.
What changed was that I stopped fighting Ticketmaster at one point. I opted out and did not buy a ticket. However, I still wanted to go to the show. All seats were prohibitively expensive on the secondary market; good seats, even more so.
There were two shows in my city on subsequent nights. The first night, I watched prices on the scalper sites and I discovered that, in the last few minutes before the start time of the show, prices for even the best seats tumbled dramatically.
This was simple economics; unsold seats are a cost that subtracts from overall profit. It makes sense to dump them for any amount, even at a loss.
The second night, I waited until the price for a single front-row seat fell below the original price of the least expensive seat anywhere. I bought it, printed my ticket, and went to the show.
This was a transformative experience because I was literally a few metres from the stage. I could get out of my seat and stand by the barricades and see and hear as if the show was at at my neighbourhood folk club or an open mic night. I then turned around, with Taylor directly behind me, and I could see the view of a packed stadium waving lights and singing along, just like what those on stage would see.
I learned the difference between what the few who had the money or influence to obtain the best seats experience, and what the great majority of stadium show concert-goers endure.
I was cured. I have never, since that day, had any desire to attend a stadium show or buy a ticket for a standard seat in any large venue.
Unfortunately, it isn't really practical to educate a significant fraction of fans by demonstrating this.
Maybe there is a technological solution, though. If we could arrange for people to have a feed from a front row observer in fully immersive VR, we could perhaps recreate enough of the experience that the rush to purchase a grossly substandard product would diminish.
There are probably significant economic forces that would oppose this (Ticketmaster, obviously) because education is often the enemy of mass-market driven capitalism.
The longer-term solution is probably to recognize that the innate social behaviour of humans has been exploited to our total destruction by those who would hoard all wealth for themselves, and to begin another great eugenics experiment: breeding selfishness, conflict and the tendency to self-destructive herd behaviour out of the human genome, But that is beyond the scope of this discussion.
An NFT solution to ticketing seems like it would be trivial given how NFTs operate already. One ticket could be verifiably owned by one person. If that person wanted to resell the ticket, there could be restrictions on how much they could sell it for. If bots can't make a profit there's no use in buying out all the tickets. It would also decentralize the space. Sure you need a marketplace for the NFT tickets, but that could easily be a open source software suite that the venues themselves host. Gas price will probably be a lot less than ticketmaster fees.
Honestly it seems like the biggest problems here are that Ticketmaster in particular has a huge sway in the current venue and artist market, having contracts that require an artist or venue to exclusively use their ticketing system.
NFTs actually can't algorithmically restrict transfer prices or algorithmically take fees. The fee taking that happens today is done by an exchange as a courtesy to the "artist."
Not even close. You are very much limited by what each chain's VM allows. The bitcoin VM is extremely limited. The EVM lifts most of those limitations. All of the VMs have a fee you pay based on the complexity of your program, too.
You are also limited in what cryptography you can do because all of the data involved has to be public - so no private keys can be involved in that computation if you want them to stay private.
Take the example of transaction fees on sale of NFTs. A lot of NFT creators wanted to be able to take X% of the sale price of NFTs as an ongoing royalty. Here's how that might have to happen if you did it algorithmically:
1. You initiate an NFT transfer that requires the creator's signature to be processed
2. You pay a fee to the creator and provide proof of the purchase price to get them to sign the transaction
3. The creator signs your transaction, completing it
This step involves trusting the creator to do (3). You cannot automatically do (3) without the creator's private key being on-chain.
Note that if it were a flat fee, there would be no problem - the transfer transaction would be able to auto-deduct the ETH from your account and move it to the creator's, but the variable fee creates problems.
Why wouldn't you associate the NFT with a contract that automatically changes its "owner"/controller when you pay it, forwarding the payment to the previous owner and deducting a percentage of the fee to send to a fixed address?
I'm assuming the Ethereum chain; the Bitcoin VM is primitive by comparison.
The promoters want to know very early whether the venue is the right one for the number attending and whether to upsize, add dates, or even to go the other way to a smaller venue. The time to book a venue is very long... So they need as complete data as they can about sales as early as possible (they would love if 80% of the tickets that will sell can be sold in the first week - as then they can quickly make a decision about whether this is the right venue and if more dates are needed).
The artists want to enable as many fans to get in as possible, including young and poorer fans... Who tend to be more evangelical about an artist and drive their growth more and ultimately are more loyal and spend more over the lifetime of being a fan. They are poorer but more sticky. The artists also want to play to as full a venue as possible as that is the best atmosphere.
The venues want to have surety in their bookings (see the promoter dilemma as to whether to change venue) and for the capacity to be as close to full as possible as they will make more revenue from bar and food sales than from pure ticket sales.
All of these... All of them... Are not solved by the technical solution proposed except when it doesn't matter... When you're absolutely sure you're going to sell out. In which case you also don't need to change anything or invest in anything new because you're going to sell out anyway.
There are solutions that can threaten the current model... But this blog is not one of them.
In fact, the idea that "I have more money and deserve more to have a ticket over someone that doesn't have as much money" is antithetical to the thinking of every artist I've ever worked with.