For example - allow ticket resale only through the official platform and cap it at the original sale price.
Another approach - check IDs at the door and only let the original ticket purchaser through.
The real problem is that scalping is insanely profitable for Ticketmaster & co. They take a cut of the original sale and every subsequent transfer, most of them at highly inflated prices, from both buyer and seller. Why would they give that up?
> allow ticket resale only through the official platform and cap it at the original sale price.
That obviously doesn’t work because money can still change hands outside the official platform, unless you mean resale to a random buyer selected by the platform, in which case the resale is not terribly different from a refund and restock for any event where scalping is a problem.
You simply can’t stop scalping if you allow resale. Heck, people even attempt to scalp things where there’s no official resale mechanism (e.g. I change my id at this second, you immediately change yours).
A lot of festivals in Europe use ticketswap, your ticket gets raffled off to a list of people interested in buying it. It's the only way to sell your ticket. It's a the original price plus a small fee
Go back to the old way. Get in line physically and go get the tickets. This is one of those "technology should help here but actually makes the problem worse in weird ways" type of situations.
Nine Inch Nails/Trent Reznor did this in 2018 and it was infinitely better (I also met a lot of people just standing in line—we recognized each other at the show later and ended up throwing each other around in the mosh pit—a great time) [1].
I like it. Your last bit is good marketing against those who think paying a linesitter / spot holder is all upside.
Also economics of paying linesitters make it relatively much less attractive than all-digital scalping. So I think you have a solid plan. Should greatly reduce scalping.
Reminds me of technologically-inclined woman who pointed out the flawed thinking behind a grocery store handing out first-gen iPads to their shelf stockers. “I love my iPad at home but this will cost them so much time compared to pen and paper.” (Gotta go find out whatever happened to putting an RFID tag in every product, maybe they needed to hit 1/10 of a cent instead of a penny or something)
If it can still be resold online, it won’t mitigate scalping much for on-demand shows. You can see that on any scalping-heavy items that require a person to be there physically to purchase the item (cards, collectibles from restaurants, and etc.).
Above-face-value ticket resale is illegal here and it helps a lot. But you need to make sure this gets prosecuted hard.
Some people drove in. A few hardcore fans came into town (Chicago) the night before and had tents set up. There were also people coordinating with friends who did live in/close to the city to get the tickets and pay them back later.
Overall, that was the last really "old world" experience I had that reminded me why technology isn't always the right solution to a problem. Since then it's felt like this [1].
Not really. In the past you could buy tickets in tonnes of places. Ticketmaster had physical 'stores' all over and most of the big music retailers also sold tickets. Admittedly these aren't widespread anymore which poses a problem. It's also a terrible solution because it excludes people with jobs.
> That excludes all fans who don't live in big cities. A lot of people travel just to go to shows.
Not really. The place that sells the tickets doesn't have to be the performance venue itself.
This sort of distribution was quite common pre-Internet. In theory it's even easier now, because so many of the venues have (unfortunately) consolidated under vertically integrated ownership (e.g. directly owned by Live Nation). Which incidentally, after scalping, is the biggest reason that ticket prices are so high in the first place.
This doesn't solve the problem and selling on the internet has become easier in the last 8 years. As we've seen recently with the Swatch Watch Riots and Pokémon Cards, professional and have-a-go scalpers are happy to stand in line for hours and resell on the internet for massive markups.
This is the answer, Ive seen it in practice. You just have to show id at the door when your ticket/QR gets scanned as normal, and the names have to match. Obviously only works for over 18 events though, unless you purposely sell under and over 18 tickets seperately.
On the other hand, airplane ticketing is also notorious for stuff like overbooking flights with the assumption people won't show up and then in the rare circumstances where too many do show up, forcing people to give up their seats (in some cases even by force). I don't disagree with your thinking, but I'm hesitant to consider "what airplane tickets do" a good model for just about anything.
Concertgoer Bill of Rights - get bumped? Massive stipend, hotel room, free VIP ticket in future, & transportation+entry to a partner venue in the city with other music.
They haven’t all universally built in overbooking as a critical part of their competitive price structure or whatever, and we can stop it before it starts.
Anything requiring transferring "to friends" will be attempted to be used for scalping of course.
I suppose if we're requiring showing ID to attend anyway, it's not a lot worse to add an online ID verification step in order to be allowed to be a "sender" in the transfer system, and an identity is only allowed to have like 5 distinct "friends" in a rolling 12-month window.
Part of me thinks that Ticketmaster/Live Nation probably makes so much money from their own in-house scalping operation that they don't want to fix any kind of scalping problems for fear they would be somehow obligated to not participate themselves.
My first thought is a bunch of 12 year old girls that want to see Taylor Swift. They won't have national IDs. On the other hand, how does it work for children's airline tickets? Again, they won't have national IDs, but we know that children fly all the time -- with and without their parents.
Some festivals work just like that, you upload some ID when buying your ticket which they see when you enter the venue. Feels really nice and stress free.
FIFA’s solution seems reasonable. The tickets are auctioned. EDM festivals usually have an earlier round for people who attended previous iterations which is similar to this approach by Spotify.
One way is to run an auction and provide every attendee on site with a credit code they can apply to next year’s auction. That way you tip the scales slightly towards previous attendees in a way a scalper can’t reliably access.
Another way is to run separate auctions: one for previous attendees, one for fan club members, and one for GA.
The aversion to auctions transforms everything into a lottery but I can see why they do it. The event operator takes all the heat and the artist keeps much of the benefit.
It's a bandaid and not a particularly good one. Spotify reserving a ticket allotment is really no different to American Express doing the exact same thing. Amex uses their allotment to attract premium members through concierge services. Spotify doesn't quite have this same upsell potential (yet?) but they're doing it to make money. We just don't know how that'll happen yet.
Defeating bot buyers, scalpers and resellers would actually be a noble goal but its' really the tip of the iceberg. If anyone was actually interested in tackling this (hint: they aren't) then you need to tackle a much bigger problem: the venue monopoly with Ticketmaster and Live Nation.
Many venus, particularly larger venues, have exclusive contracts with Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster also has an official platform for reselling tickets, of which they get a cut. In a more equitable world, you would only be able to resell tickets for their face value. It's alleged (and I believe this) that Ticketmaster only releases a tiny portion of tickets to the general public. The rest they have arrangements to sell through scalpers and resellers and their own platform because, hey, they make more profit that way.
There was a time when businesses were a tool to generate income. Small businesses still work this way. But any sufficiently sized company now is just a tool to speculate on and make a capital gain on. Ticketmaster doesn't need to grow into a trillion dollar company but they want to and, at a cewrtain point, the only way companies can continue to grow is by cutting costs and raising prices.
Back in the nascent days of Internet music piracy it was pointed out that almost no bands make enough money from selling music to live on. It's why the biggest anti-piracy advocates were huge bands like Metallica. Most bands make their living for performance fees ie playing concerts. And even then they might make barely enough to cover gas. What really gets them over the line is selling merch at the venues.
I'd say that music would be in a better state if bands could see more of the value of their labor from playing concerts. But even concerts aren't about bands or their fans anymore. They're about upselling premium services to high-net-worth clients. You ever notice that at sports venue, for example, general seating always gets mysteriously ripped out and replaced by suites? Same principle: venues make more per square foot from a corporate suite than they do from sports fans. There was a time when ordinary people would be fans of their home teams and just go to every home game. That's increasingly out of reach.
In short, the entire system is broken. Spotify participating in it won't change anything.
Two options, both of which seem to work well in venues near me:
1. When an event sells out you can join the 'waitlist' and people can offer their tickets back to the ticket company who give the person at the top of the waitlist the opportunity to purchase. All at face value. Good for the artist too as there is less chance of empty seats when people can't make it.
2. QR code tickets that rotate meaning they can't be screenshotted and sold.
I'd rather them just go straight to lottery limited by government ID.
Spotify's solution can't remain completely anonymous because Spotify will need to limit botters and verify attendee identity at the door. So we're all just pretending that ID isn't involved, and there's no reason Spotify needs to be in the middle.
Spotify's solution obviously sucks for non-platform users, and if the implementation is "sort fans by listen hours in the last month to find true fans", it would also suck for fans who can't listen at work, fans who were on vacation, fans who don't like the latest album as much, etc. This is basically the modern equivalent of JPop/KPop acts putting concert lottery tickets in CDs and forcing a gross incentive on the fan.
Why should anything be done? If people are willing to pay five times the face value for a ticket, then it signals that tickets are priced too low. Let the market price itself.
Harry Styles is playing in my city, he's apparently very popular, but there's still plenty of tickets available for as low as 47€ for tomorrow.
I never understood the issue with scalping and reselling tickets for a higher price. At all. And I've read a bunch of opinions here and on other forums and articles. None make any sense to me. It's a good that's being resold for profit. Not an essential one like rare medicine during a pandemic.
I think some artists want to appeal to the poorer people so pricing their tickets higher or letting the free market work out the price would damage their reputation. So it doesn't seem to be a real problem we need to solve. It's a problem some artists feel they have. Let them figure it out.
If I was an artist and I expected a full venue with tickets that cost 10, I'd start selling them at 1000, then at 500, 200, 100, 50, 20 and finally 10. If someone buys all of them at 1000 and only that person shows up - awesome! Maybe there will be less drug sales because 1 person bought all tickets but that 100x per ticket could be used to pay the vendors.
If you want view ticket pricing as a pure economics problem (it is not), consider that live shows are also a way to build up and expand a fanbase. If only a handful of rich people (or people who bought tickets the second they went on sale) are at your show, you are not expanding your audience. Since streaming has decimated most artists' income from record sales, it makes sense to try and build a large fanbase who will regularly come to shows as well as buy merchandise. Tours often have exclusive merchandise than fans will want to buy, so all the more reason to attract more people.
As a side note, this notion that a phenomenon being the result of market forces means it is fair and has no issues seems to be a blinkered view of the world. Surely enjoying high quality art should be possible for a broad section of society?
This would make sense if they were an airline and only need to maximise profits. An artist – even one who really wants to make as much money as they can – still needs to think about other things, like atmosphere (that gig with one very rich person won't be much fun), and happy fans. If she sells all tickets at $10k each then maybe she'd clear the market, but she'd piss off a lot of fans, so maybe there won't be as much demand next time.
Because there is demand for it. A lot of people like going to live music and theatre events and scalpers make it more difficult and more expensive for them.
Why shouldn't anything be done? Because capitalism is God?
A lot of people like going to live music and theatre events and scalpers make it more difficult and more expensive for them
Scalpers make it possible to get a ticket at market price, instead of maybe being able to get it for less and maybe not being able to get it at any price. It's not at all clear that the latter is better.
I'm probably one of the least capitalism-minded commenters on HN, but this is a case where I'm happy to let the market sort itself out. It's not food, shelter, medicine, or housing.
I'm absolutely not convinced that the problem is as widespread as people make it out to be, outside of a few big names or events.
> Why shouldn't anything be done? Because capitalism is God?
Because it's just the system manifesting itself. There are winners and losers, and the winners are usually those with the most money.
I really find it odd to see people being this vocal for Taylor Swift tickets or Pokemon cards. If I use my capital to buy ten houses to rent, then I'm an investor. If I use it to outbid a city for electricity to feed my data center, then I'm a captain of industry. But the shiny charmander card is where people draw the line?
The only real solutions to scalping are to impact supply/demand by increasing supply (extra show in each city) or lower demand (raise prices). As a jazz fan I don’t know much about shows that sell out and attract scalpers, but I’m curious why the artists don’t double prices to cut out middlemen.
Er, I don't feel like you're thinking of what "supply" means here. We can't clone humans (yet). How many times do you expect a singer to sing in each city in a tour?
I recently bought tickets to a concert in France (I live in Germany) and ended up not being able to travel and had to resell my tickets. Apparently according to French law you are not allowed to resell a ticket above its face value and so I had to resell it through the same ticketing company I bought it. They allowed me to set a price with up to a maximum amount which was less than how much I bought it (by a Euro or two) to cover their fees. It was also possible to name a specific buyer who would then get be able to buy your ticket.
Maybe there’s still another way for scalpels to game this system, I don’t know, but I’ve been to a few concerts in Paris and I’ve never seen scalpels hanging outside the venue selling tickets, which would be the norm in Germany, so maybe the system does work.
Have the tickets debut at a very high price and get cheaper towards event day. This encourages folks to wait and scalpers to lose money. Enables privacy, although other factors are working to eliminate it.
so they're partnering with Live Nation, the same company that's part of the vertically integrated monopoly on ticketing, venues, and resale. Nobody is buying these tickets for cash from a scalper outside of the venue. My 2-min tought: tie use of the ticket to the payment method or id of the purchaser; allow limited transfers. If LN/TM actually cared they'd provide for risk-free transfer without charging ridiculous mark-up. Since they sell the orginial ticket 95% of the time they have almost complete control over the pricing and consumer's id.
New idea: You have to tie a valid credit card to a ticket in order to transfer it, if the card doesn't authorize for $500 at the gate, admission is denied, and the ticket can be used to charge unlimited concessions and merch to the original buyer's card. If a scalper sells a ticket to a stranger, the customer could bankrupt them at the show.
I know this doesn't work for most subscribers to mass media culture, but I'm right there with you. Personally I kind of hate celebrity as a social phenomenon, and I love seeing an amazing talented set and then getting to talk with the musician afterward. I don't give Live Nation my money.
My 12 year daughter REALLY doesn't care about the local band scene. Avoiding mass media culture is alright for weirdos and nerds like us that can get in line physically for NIN tickets because of feelings and nostalgia, but that is not viable for 90%+ of people.
As a parent, you have an opportunity to help her experience music on a different level. I know that is not a trivial thing to do, I have teenagers in my life too.
I was a big fan of what the Cure did, they played our town and they did not allow any tickets to be resold for anything above what they originally went for.
Non-transferable I think? But you could resell them via ticketmaster maybe for facevalue?
It was amazing, we sat on the ticketmaster page, refreshed over the course of a day and we got 8th row for I believe $75 - it was an amazing concert, and being able to pay a reasonable price for tickets like that was amazing.
Livestream more things and sell digital tickets. Doesn’t do anything directly, but acts as a substitute to shift demand away. Not much point in scalping tickets to a livestream unless the supply is limited, either by an artificial cap or technical constraints.
Spotify is another entity dipping into the limited pool of available tickets and further limiting supply. I don't pay for/use Spotify and don't want to, so as far as I'm concerned this is only worsening the problem by further constraining the supply of tickets available to me.
They might limit supply early on but they also increase supply when they later sell the tickets, so the net effect on supply is zero (unless they leave many tickets unsold, which would be stupid of them).
Tickets can’t be resold. You can get a refund, but the ticket goes back to the vendor and the seat goes on sale through their site, with a randomized delay.
1. I like live concerts but I don’t spend my days listening to a lot of music. I would be considered “not a fan” by these metrics.
2 The monopolistic aspect. I subscribe to a much smaller Spotify competitor, now I’m at a disadvantage.
3. I don’t consider scalping a problem. The market price is determined by demand. It’s also been a problem that has been solved by artist presales and fan club gates.
I also think that as a recognized monopoly Ticketmaster should have more limitations on its business model. For example, their compassion on resale tickets should be limited. At present, they are encouraged to double dip on fees by finding ways to send more tickets to the secondary market.
So your view is “accept a monopoly and become their bitch?”
I use a competitor to Spotify because I like the other product better overall. It’s a better value and better suited to my needs. I never said I’m using something else just to stick it to Spotify or become an edgelord.
I’m perfectly happy to be “punished” by missing some concerts. I think you misunderstand my comment as complaining about the situation. I really don’t care that much, I just am giving my opinion that this is a system that doesn’t seem ideal to me.
Many artists are struggling to fill seats right now. The industry can have fun trying silly schemes like this while they cancel tours in oversized venues.
> Scalpers will just do two transactions, one high one for the privilege of being able to buy the ticket, and then the sale at the listed limit.
I don’t understand this. If you can’t resell for higher than ticket price, how do they make any profit? Are you saying they’d sell the cheaper ticket for the more expensive ticket’s price? Wouldn’t price stick to the ticket, since presumably different price tiers afford different location/etc?
This reads like you just made up a workaround without reading the proposed law or without looking at the reality of the situation in other countries that it has been implemented. Your suggested workaround doesn't work.
I'm a perfect world, artists would rent a facility and sell/resell their own tickets (or partner with a ticket processor that offers price caps on resales) thereby controlling the issuance and resale of tickets. In reality, the facilities often have their own deals with people like ticketmaster and the artist has no control. It works out for the artist because they lock in the msrp of every ticket and don't have to deal with demand. But it sucks for the fans. Capitalism.
This is ultimately a supply and demand problem. If tickets sell out on the secondary market for 10 or 100x the face value, then that's the fair market price. Either artists should charge more, or perform more shows.
No, it‘s an audience/artist experience problem. I worked for one of Australia's biggest outdoor summer music festivals through the 2000s (I built a direct ticket selling platform for them). Their popularity grew each year, and, sure, they could have just raised their prices to try and match supply and demand. They 100% did not want to do that because they knew it would completely change the audience demographics and make a less fun event for everyone to attend and a less fun event for the artists to perform at, thus making it harder to attract audiences and artists in future years.
They ended up being acquired by a company that was much more into charging top dollar to big-spenders. The company was ultimately acquired by Live Nation and the ticket
prices kept increasing until suddenly ticket sales stopped, and that whole category of festivals is now largely dead in Australia.
It sounds like they found the price ceiling. Trying to pick your customers is a fools errand, particularly with a music festival where tastes change and people age out.
The last/marginal ticket in the venue sells for 10x face value. The majority of tickets don’t sell for much more than face value.
Taylor Swift can’t realistically play more shows than she did during the Eras Tour, and it’s unlikely that she’d have sold a million seats in London if she were charging much more than she did.
It seems like you could sell tickets in tranches at tiered prices. It seems very tractable. I suspect artists don't want to look greedy by personally charging what fans are often willing to pay.
There is a physical limit to how many shows you can put on and the Economics 101 explanation of ticket pricing misses the part where the price of the ticket is a part of the whole image the musician is selling to the audiences.
Taylor Swift can probably still sell out if she raises the price ten fold, but what kind message does this send to her average listeners? What does it mean if the most popular popular musician of our times prices the populace out? You can of course dismiss the likely negative responses as emotional and irrational, but that's the whole deal with art and culture. You can't build a fan base without catering to their emotions.
And then on the other extreme of music you have people like Fugazi, whose low ticket pricing is very obviously a part of the band's entire artistic and ideological project.
If you want to see what happens when you apply supply and demand to ticket pricing, you can just look at your nearest big league sports team. The recent trend seems to be jacking up the prices as much as they can get away with and catering more and more to VIP guests who spend a fortune in one of those "hospitality" suites. Perhaps not a coincidence that less and less people, especially younger people, around me are casually into sports these days. They got told that they are not welcome in the corporate owned sports venue and they take their attention elsewhere, and all it's left are a dwindling set of diehard fans and C-suite people who are there not for sports but for overpriced steak dinners and are too nicely dressed to cheer for their home team.
I think its more complicated than that. An artist is pretty constrained by how many shows they can play in a given area which makes the total market for any given show really small and trivially manipulated for profit.
This may come as a shock to capitalists, but some artists don't want to charge their fans more. Fugazi famously capped their ticket prices at $5 because they wanted their shows to be affordable.
I agree with the libertarians on this. Scalping isn't an issue. People who are willing to pay more for tickets should get them. Concert tickets are not basic needs like housing or food.
If there is room for arbitrage (which is what scalping really is) then the tickets are too cheap in the first place.
I agree with supply and demand dictating the price on scarce items. I don’t agree with letting middlemen butt in and drive the price up by exacerbating the scarcity, and making a profit with no value add to the market.
Markets are more efficient than you give them credit for. If there was no value-add it wouldn't happen. The value-add is that the scalpers take the risk and hassle off of the artist/venue. They can instantly sell out and then get back to worrying about the actual performance. Selling the tickets at their fair market value initially sounds good in theory, but then you have to spend weeks and months trying to get them sold, which is not a core competency a musical artist really wants to have. It is advantageous to underprice and know that you are sold out upfront and let someone else deal with the slog.
It's much the same as why wholesalers sell to Walmart for pennies on the dollar instead of trying to capture the retail market themselves. Selling direct to retail seems like a good idea... until you have to do it and realize you'd rather get back to what it is you're actually good at producing.
There are many solutions.
For example - allow ticket resale only through the official platform and cap it at the original sale price.
Another approach - check IDs at the door and only let the original ticket purchaser through.
The real problem is that scalping is insanely profitable for Ticketmaster & co. They take a cut of the original sale and every subsequent transfer, most of them at highly inflated prices, from both buyer and seller. Why would they give that up?
> allow ticket resale only through the official platform and cap it at the original sale price.
That obviously doesn’t work because money can still change hands outside the official platform, unless you mean resale to a random buyer selected by the platform, in which case the resale is not terribly different from a refund and restock for any event where scalping is a problem.
You simply can’t stop scalping if you allow resale. Heck, people even attempt to scalp things where there’s no official resale mechanism (e.g. I change my id at this second, you immediately change yours).
A lot of festivals in Europe use ticketswap, your ticket gets raffled off to a list of people interested in buying it. It's the only way to sell your ticket. It's a the original price plus a small fee
I have some tickets to big gigs coming up and they cannot be resold. On Ticketmaster.
Because it's up to the event promoter if they want to enable it
1 reply →
Go back to the old way. Get in line physically and go get the tickets. This is one of those "technology should help here but actually makes the problem worse in weird ways" type of situations.
Nine Inch Nails/Trent Reznor did this in 2018 and it was infinitely better (I also met a lot of people just standing in line—we recognized each other at the show later and ended up throwing each other around in the mosh pit—a great time) [1].
[1] https://www.nin.com/tickets2018/
I like it. Your last bit is good marketing against those who think paying a linesitter / spot holder is all upside.
Also economics of paying linesitters make it relatively much less attractive than all-digital scalping. So I think you have a solid plan. Should greatly reduce scalping.
Reminds me of technologically-inclined woman who pointed out the flawed thinking behind a grocery store handing out first-gen iPads to their shelf stockers. “I love my iPad at home but this will cost them so much time compared to pen and paper.” (Gotta go find out whatever happened to putting an RFID tag in every product, maybe they needed to hit 1/10 of a cent instead of a penny or something)
If it can still be resold online, it won’t mitigate scalping much for on-demand shows. You can see that on any scalping-heavy items that require a person to be there physically to purchase the item (cards, collectibles from restaurants, and etc.).
Above-face-value ticket resale is illegal here and it helps a lot. But you need to make sure this gets prosecuted hard.
That excludes all fans who don't live in big cities. A lot of people travel just to go to shows.
Some people drove in. A few hardcore fans came into town (Chicago) the night before and had tents set up. There were also people coordinating with friends who did live in/close to the city to get the tickets and pay them back later.
Overall, that was the last really "old world" experience I had that reminded me why technology isn't always the right solution to a problem. Since then it's felt like this [1].
[1] https://youtu.be/fnVQlwKAuLk?si=hVr30353SlKfnyRz&t=106
Not really. In the past you could buy tickets in tonnes of places. Ticketmaster had physical 'stores' all over and most of the big music retailers also sold tickets. Admittedly these aren't widespread anymore which poses a problem. It's also a terrible solution because it excludes people with jobs.
1 reply →
> That excludes all fans who don't live in big cities. A lot of people travel just to go to shows.
Not really. The place that sells the tickets doesn't have to be the performance venue itself.
This sort of distribution was quite common pre-Internet. In theory it's even easier now, because so many of the venues have (unfortunately) consolidated under vertically integrated ownership (e.g. directly owned by Live Nation). Which incidentally, after scalping, is the biggest reason that ticket prices are so high in the first place.
This doesn't solve the problem and selling on the internet has become easier in the last 8 years. As we've seen recently with the Swatch Watch Riots and Pokémon Cards, professional and have-a-go scalpers are happy to stand in line for hours and resell on the internet for massive markups.
I lived through the '90s when all presales were physical and scalping absolutely happened.
It's actually a lot easier, the scalper would just hand a wad of cash to the teller and walk away with a stack of tickets to resell.
Named tickets, like airplane seats?
Sorry, I only thought about this for 5 seconds, but there are markets where scalping doesn't cause issues. We could look at those.
This is the answer, Ive seen it in practice. You just have to show id at the door when your ticket/QR gets scanned as normal, and the names have to match. Obviously only works for over 18 events though, unless you purposely sell under and over 18 tickets seperately.
On the other hand, airplane ticketing is also notorious for stuff like overbooking flights with the assumption people won't show up and then in the rare circumstances where too many do show up, forcing people to give up their seats (in some cases even by force). I don't disagree with your thinking, but I'm hesitant to consider "what airplane tickets do" a good model for just about anything.
Concertgoer Bill of Rights - get bumped? Massive stipend, hotel room, free VIP ticket in future, & transportation+entry to a partner venue in the city with other music.
They haven’t all universally built in overbooking as a critical part of their competitive price structure or whatever, and we can stop it before it starts.
EU version for flights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Passengers_Rights_Regulati...
3 replies →
Still have the issue of transferring tickets to friends or such if you can't make it. Axios and some providers handle this.
Anything requiring transferring "to friends" will be attempted to be used for scalping of course.
I suppose if we're requiring showing ID to attend anyway, it's not a lot worse to add an online ID verification step in order to be allowed to be a "sender" in the transfer system, and an identity is only allowed to have like 5 distinct "friends" in a rolling 12-month window.
Part of me thinks that Ticketmaster/Live Nation probably makes so much money from their own in-house scalping operation that they don't want to fix any kind of scalping problems for fear they would be somehow obligated to not participate themselves.
1 reply →
Transferring tickets to friends is functionally indistinguishable from scalping
6 replies →
Would need to provide a decent refund system alongside named tickets, offering quick and easy refunds for maybe 10% cancellation fee.
Handle it the same way airlines do. If you think you might not be able to go, then pay extra for a refundable ticket.
If you "can't make it", you just have to eat the loss. True fans will make it.
4 replies →
[dead]
My first thought is a bunch of 12 year old girls that want to see Taylor Swift. They won't have national IDs. On the other hand, how does it work for children's airline tickets? Again, they won't have national IDs, but we know that children fly all the time -- with and without their parents.
This is how all the big video game conventions do things to prevent it, it’s very effective.
Some festivals work just like that, you upload some ID when buying your ticket which they see when you enter the venue. Feels really nice and stress free.
FIFA’s solution seems reasonable. The tickets are auctioned. EDM festivals usually have an earlier round for people who attended previous iterations which is similar to this approach by Spotify.
One way is to run an auction and provide every attendee on site with a credit code they can apply to next year’s auction. That way you tip the scales slightly towards previous attendees in a way a scalper can’t reliably access.
Another way is to run separate auctions: one for previous attendees, one for fan club members, and one for GA.
The aversion to auctions transforms everything into a lottery but I can see why they do it. The event operator takes all the heat and the artist keeps much of the benefit.
It's a bandaid and not a particularly good one. Spotify reserving a ticket allotment is really no different to American Express doing the exact same thing. Amex uses their allotment to attract premium members through concierge services. Spotify doesn't quite have this same upsell potential (yet?) but they're doing it to make money. We just don't know how that'll happen yet.
Defeating bot buyers, scalpers and resellers would actually be a noble goal but its' really the tip of the iceberg. If anyone was actually interested in tackling this (hint: they aren't) then you need to tackle a much bigger problem: the venue monopoly with Ticketmaster and Live Nation.
Many venus, particularly larger venues, have exclusive contracts with Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster also has an official platform for reselling tickets, of which they get a cut. In a more equitable world, you would only be able to resell tickets for their face value. It's alleged (and I believe this) that Ticketmaster only releases a tiny portion of tickets to the general public. The rest they have arrangements to sell through scalpers and resellers and their own platform because, hey, they make more profit that way.
There was a time when businesses were a tool to generate income. Small businesses still work this way. But any sufficiently sized company now is just a tool to speculate on and make a capital gain on. Ticketmaster doesn't need to grow into a trillion dollar company but they want to and, at a cewrtain point, the only way companies can continue to grow is by cutting costs and raising prices.
Back in the nascent days of Internet music piracy it was pointed out that almost no bands make enough money from selling music to live on. It's why the biggest anti-piracy advocates were huge bands like Metallica. Most bands make their living for performance fees ie playing concerts. And even then they might make barely enough to cover gas. What really gets them over the line is selling merch at the venues.
I'd say that music would be in a better state if bands could see more of the value of their labor from playing concerts. But even concerts aren't about bands or their fans anymore. They're about upselling premium services to high-net-worth clients. You ever notice that at sports venue, for example, general seating always gets mysteriously ripped out and replaced by suites? Same principle: venues make more per square foot from a corporate suite than they do from sports fans. There was a time when ordinary people would be fans of their home teams and just go to every home game. That's increasingly out of reach.
In short, the entire system is broken. Spotify participating in it won't change anything.
Two options, both of which seem to work well in venues near me:
1. When an event sells out you can join the 'waitlist' and people can offer their tickets back to the ticket company who give the person at the top of the waitlist the opportunity to purchase. All at face value. Good for the artist too as there is less chance of empty seats when people can't make it.
2. QR code tickets that rotate meaning they can't be screenshotted and sold.
The only real way is to pass a law against reselling tickets above face price, which is what many European countries have done
I'd rather them just go straight to lottery limited by government ID.
Spotify's solution can't remain completely anonymous because Spotify will need to limit botters and verify attendee identity at the door. So we're all just pretending that ID isn't involved, and there's no reason Spotify needs to be in the middle.
Spotify's solution obviously sucks for non-platform users, and if the implementation is "sort fans by listen hours in the last month to find true fans", it would also suck for fans who can't listen at work, fans who were on vacation, fans who don't like the latest album as much, etc. This is basically the modern equivalent of JPop/KPop acts putting concert lottery tickets in CDs and forcing a gross incentive on the fan.
Why should anything be done? If people are willing to pay five times the face value for a ticket, then it signals that tickets are priced too low. Let the market price itself.
Harry Styles is playing in my city, he's apparently very popular, but there's still plenty of tickets available for as low as 47€ for tomorrow.
>Why should anything be done?
For the same reason anything is ever done about anything -- because it upsets a large enough portion of your community.
I never understood the issue with scalping and reselling tickets for a higher price. At all. And I've read a bunch of opinions here and on other forums and articles. None make any sense to me. It's a good that's being resold for profit. Not an essential one like rare medicine during a pandemic.
I think some artists want to appeal to the poorer people so pricing their tickets higher or letting the free market work out the price would damage their reputation. So it doesn't seem to be a real problem we need to solve. It's a problem some artists feel they have. Let them figure it out.
If I was an artist and I expected a full venue with tickets that cost 10, I'd start selling them at 1000, then at 500, 200, 100, 50, 20 and finally 10. If someone buys all of them at 1000 and only that person shows up - awesome! Maybe there will be less drug sales because 1 person bought all tickets but that 100x per ticket could be used to pay the vendors.
If you want view ticket pricing as a pure economics problem (it is not), consider that live shows are also a way to build up and expand a fanbase. If only a handful of rich people (or people who bought tickets the second they went on sale) are at your show, you are not expanding your audience. Since streaming has decimated most artists' income from record sales, it makes sense to try and build a large fanbase who will regularly come to shows as well as buy merchandise. Tours often have exclusive merchandise than fans will want to buy, so all the more reason to attract more people.
As a side note, this notion that a phenomenon being the result of market forces means it is fair and has no issues seems to be a blinkered view of the world. Surely enjoying high quality art should be possible for a broad section of society?
5 replies →
This would make sense if they were an airline and only need to maximise profits. An artist – even one who really wants to make as much money as they can – still needs to think about other things, like atmosphere (that gig with one very rich person won't be much fun), and happy fans. If she sells all tickets at $10k each then maybe she'd clear the market, but she'd piss off a lot of fans, so maybe there won't be as much demand next time.
8 replies →
You're letting middlemen profit from providing zero value to society. Artists don't benefit. Fans don't benefit. Scalpers benefit.
It should be obvious we want a system that is optimally beneficial to artists and fans rather than middlemen.
1 reply →
> Why should anything be done?
Because there is demand for it. A lot of people like going to live music and theatre events and scalpers make it more difficult and more expensive for them.
Why shouldn't anything be done? Because capitalism is God?
A lot of people like going to live music and theatre events and scalpers make it more difficult and more expensive for them
Scalpers make it possible to get a ticket at market price, instead of maybe being able to get it for less and maybe not being able to get it at any price. It's not at all clear that the latter is better.
5 replies →
I'm probably one of the least capitalism-minded commenters on HN, but this is a case where I'm happy to let the market sort itself out. It's not food, shelter, medicine, or housing.
I'm absolutely not convinced that the problem is as widespread as people make it out to be, outside of a few big names or events.
> Why shouldn't anything be done? Because capitalism is God?
Because it's just the system manifesting itself. There are winners and losers, and the winners are usually those with the most money.
I really find it odd to see people being this vocal for Taylor Swift tickets or Pokemon cards. If I use my capital to buy ten houses to rent, then I'm an investor. If I use it to outbid a city for electricity to feed my data center, then I'm a captain of industry. But the shiny charmander card is where people draw the line?
1 reply →
The only real solutions to scalping are to impact supply/demand by increasing supply (extra show in each city) or lower demand (raise prices). As a jazz fan I don’t know much about shows that sell out and attract scalpers, but I’m curious why the artists don’t double prices to cut out middlemen.
> by increasing supply
Er, I don't feel like you're thinking of what "supply" means here. We can't clone humans (yet). How many times do you expect a singer to sing in each city in a tour?
> but I’m curious why the artists don’t double prices to cut out middlemen
That is essentially what they have done. Ticketmaster is basically "We take PR heat to make you more money".
They would to multiple the prices multiple times to even discourage the middlemen, gentrifying at the same time the fan base, which is sad
It is, but it still feels better that the money goes toward the artist than it does to go to a middleman.
Reality is there is no good solution IMO, no matter what you do, someone is missing out. Just the reality of supply vs demand.
1 reply →
I recently bought tickets to a concert in France (I live in Germany) and ended up not being able to travel and had to resell my tickets. Apparently according to French law you are not allowed to resell a ticket above its face value and so I had to resell it through the same ticketing company I bought it. They allowed me to set a price with up to a maximum amount which was less than how much I bought it (by a Euro or two) to cover their fees. It was also possible to name a specific buyer who would then get be able to buy your ticket.
Maybe there’s still another way for scalpels to game this system, I don’t know, but I’ve been to a few concerts in Paris and I’ve never seen scalpels hanging outside the venue selling tickets, which would be the norm in Germany, so maybe the system does work.
I assume the scalpers demand their additional payment first and upon receipt, name the buyer who can buy the ticket "for face value".
It's trivially easy for scalpers to game that system.
Of course, but not by "hanging out outside the venue selling tickets".
So if not seeing them there means the problem is solved, this problem is in fact easy to solve.
Have the tickets debut at a very high price and get cheaper towards event day. This encourages folks to wait and scalpers to lose money. Enables privacy, although other factors are working to eliminate it.
so they're partnering with Live Nation, the same company that's part of the vertically integrated monopoly on ticketing, venues, and resale. Nobody is buying these tickets for cash from a scalper outside of the venue. My 2-min tought: tie use of the ticket to the payment method or id of the purchaser; allow limited transfers. If LN/TM actually cared they'd provide for risk-free transfer without charging ridiculous mark-up. Since they sell the orginial ticket 95% of the time they have almost complete control over the pricing and consumer's id.
New idea: You have to tie a valid credit card to a ticket in order to transfer it, if the card doesn't authorize for $500 at the gate, admission is denied, and the ticket can be used to charge unlimited concessions and merch to the original buyer's card. If a scalper sells a ticket to a stranger, the customer could bankrupt them at the show.
Not a direct answer to your question but go to see local bands. The ticket prices are way better and so is the crowd and the show.
I know this doesn't work for most subscribers to mass media culture, but I'm right there with you. Personally I kind of hate celebrity as a social phenomenon, and I love seeing an amazing talented set and then getting to talk with the musician afterward. I don't give Live Nation my money.
My 12 year daughter REALLY doesn't care about the local band scene. Avoiding mass media culture is alright for weirdos and nerds like us that can get in line physically for NIN tickets because of feelings and nostalgia, but that is not viable for 90%+ of people.
As a parent, you have an opportunity to help her experience music on a different level. I know that is not a trivial thing to do, I have teenagers in my life too.
Make it illegal to sell tickets above face value.
I was a big fan of what the Cure did, they played our town and they did not allow any tickets to be resold for anything above what they originally went for.
Non-transferable I think? But you could resell them via ticketmaster maybe for facevalue?
It was amazing, we sat on the ticketmaster page, refreshed over the course of a day and we got 8th row for I believe $75 - it was an amazing concert, and being able to pay a reasonable price for tickets like that was amazing.
How does this not just bias who gets ticket to those with more time preference.
willingness to stand in line for a ticket probably correlates well with fandom
7 replies →
Livestream more things and sell digital tickets. Doesn’t do anything directly, but acts as a substitute to shift demand away. Not much point in scalping tickets to a livestream unless the supply is limited, either by an artificial cap or technical constraints.
Spotify is another entity dipping into the limited pool of available tickets and further limiting supply. I don't pay for/use Spotify and don't want to, so as far as I'm concerned this is only worsening the problem by further constraining the supply of tickets available to me.
Yeah, I’m not against the idea, but I don’t have a Spotify membership. They’re simply not my music vendor of choice.
Why should that lock me out of a reasonable reservation system?
We have a massive centralization problem in these industries and this doesn’t fix it.
They might limit supply early on but they also increase supply when they later sell the tickets, so the net effect on supply is zero (unless they leave many tickets unsold, which would be stupid of them).
Same here.
Tickets can’t be resold. You can get a refund, but the ticket goes back to the vendor and the seat goes on sale through their site, with a randomized delay.
I’m against it from these angles:
1. I like live concerts but I don’t spend my days listening to a lot of music. I would be considered “not a fan” by these metrics.
2 The monopolistic aspect. I subscribe to a much smaller Spotify competitor, now I’m at a disadvantage.
3. I don’t consider scalping a problem. The market price is determined by demand. It’s also been a problem that has been solved by artist presales and fan club gates.
I also think that as a recognized monopoly Ticketmaster should have more limitations on its business model. For example, their compassion on resale tickets should be limited. At present, they are encouraged to double dip on fees by finding ways to send more tickets to the secondary market.
You are just being punished for your poor judgement for not backing the winner. Not sure why you should be rewarded.
It's the same logic for de-googlers. You can't De-Google yourself and then bitch about some Google products work better on Google products.
If you are a proud edge-lord/hipster with your obscure choices, you should also learn to deal with consequences.
Scale brings advantages. You can't have it both ways
So your view is “accept a monopoly and become their bitch?”
I use a competitor to Spotify because I like the other product better overall. It’s a better value and better suited to my needs. I never said I’m using something else just to stick it to Spotify or become an edgelord.
I’m perfectly happy to be “punished” by missing some concerts. I think you misunderstand my comment as complaining about the situation. I really don’t care that much, I just am giving my opinion that this is a system that doesn’t seem ideal to me.
Many artists are struggling to fill seats right now. The industry can have fun trying silly schemes like this while they cancel tours in oversized venues.
In the UK they're making it illegal to resell tickets for more than the original cost. That should deal with the majority of the problem.
Scalpers will just do two transactions, one high one for the privilege of being able to buy the ticket, and then the sale at the listed limit.
No, the real solution is to make tickets strictly id-bound and non-transferable in any way.
> Scalpers will just do two transactions, one high one for the privilege of being able to buy the ticket, and then the sale at the listed limit.
I don’t understand this. If you can’t resell for higher than ticket price, how do they make any profit? Are you saying they’d sell the cheaper ticket for the more expensive ticket’s price? Wouldn’t price stick to the ticket, since presumably different price tiers afford different location/etc?
2 replies →
This reads like you just made up a workaround without reading the proposed law or without looking at the reality of the situation in other countries that it has been implemented. Your suggested workaround doesn't work.
I'm a perfect world, artists would rent a facility and sell/resell their own tickets (or partner with a ticket processor that offers price caps on resales) thereby controlling the issuance and resale of tickets. In reality, the facilities often have their own deals with people like ticketmaster and the artist has no control. It works out for the artist because they lock in the msrp of every ticket and don't have to deal with demand. But it sucks for the fans. Capitalism.
This is ultimately a supply and demand problem. If tickets sell out on the secondary market for 10 or 100x the face value, then that's the fair market price. Either artists should charge more, or perform more shows.
No, it‘s an audience/artist experience problem. I worked for one of Australia's biggest outdoor summer music festivals through the 2000s (I built a direct ticket selling platform for them). Their popularity grew each year, and, sure, they could have just raised their prices to try and match supply and demand. They 100% did not want to do that because they knew it would completely change the audience demographics and make a less fun event for everyone to attend and a less fun event for the artists to perform at, thus making it harder to attract audiences and artists in future years.
They ended up being acquired by a company that was much more into charging top dollar to big-spenders. The company was ultimately acquired by Live Nation and the ticket prices kept increasing until suddenly ticket sales stopped, and that whole category of festivals is now largely dead in Australia.
It sounds like they found the price ceiling. Trying to pick your customers is a fools errand, particularly with a music festival where tastes change and people age out.
3 replies →
The last/marginal ticket in the venue sells for 10x face value. The majority of tickets don’t sell for much more than face value.
Taylor Swift can’t realistically play more shows than she did during the Eras Tour, and it’s unlikely that she’d have sold a million seats in London if she were charging much more than she did.
It seems like you could sell tickets in tranches at tiered prices. It seems very tractable. I suspect artists don't want to look greedy by personally charging what fans are often willing to pay.
> The last/marginal ticket in the venue sells for 10x face value.
That's only if the event sells out. The ticket should have sold for a higher price such that the demand was exactly the number of seats available.
There is a physical limit to how many shows you can put on and the Economics 101 explanation of ticket pricing misses the part where the price of the ticket is a part of the whole image the musician is selling to the audiences.
Taylor Swift can probably still sell out if she raises the price ten fold, but what kind message does this send to her average listeners? What does it mean if the most popular popular musician of our times prices the populace out? You can of course dismiss the likely negative responses as emotional and irrational, but that's the whole deal with art and culture. You can't build a fan base without catering to their emotions.
And then on the other extreme of music you have people like Fugazi, whose low ticket pricing is very obviously a part of the band's entire artistic and ideological project.
If you want to see what happens when you apply supply and demand to ticket pricing, you can just look at your nearest big league sports team. The recent trend seems to be jacking up the prices as much as they can get away with and catering more and more to VIP guests who spend a fortune in one of those "hospitality" suites. Perhaps not a coincidence that less and less people, especially younger people, around me are casually into sports these days. They got told that they are not welcome in the corporate owned sports venue and they take their attention elsewhere, and all it's left are a dwindling set of diehard fans and C-suite people who are there not for sports but for overpriced steak dinners and are too nicely dressed to cheer for their home team.
I think its more complicated than that. An artist is pretty constrained by how many shows they can play in a given area which makes the total market for any given show really small and trivially manipulated for profit.
Then she should charge more.
1 reply →
This may come as a shock to capitalists, but some artists don't want to charge their fans more. Fugazi famously capped their ticket prices at $5 because they wanted their shows to be affordable.
Fan club lottery.
I agree with the libertarians on this. Scalping isn't an issue. People who are willing to pay more for tickets should get them. Concert tickets are not basic needs like housing or food.
If there is room for arbitrage (which is what scalping really is) then the tickets are too cheap in the first place.
I agree with supply and demand dictating the price on scarce items. I don’t agree with letting middlemen butt in and drive the price up by exacerbating the scarcity, and making a profit with no value add to the market.
> no value add to the market.
Markets are more efficient than you give them credit for. If there was no value-add it wouldn't happen. The value-add is that the scalpers take the risk and hassle off of the artist/venue. They can instantly sell out and then get back to worrying about the actual performance. Selling the tickets at their fair market value initially sounds good in theory, but then you have to spend weeks and months trying to get them sold, which is not a core competency a musical artist really wants to have. It is advantageous to underprice and know that you are sold out upfront and let someone else deal with the slog.
It's much the same as why wholesalers sell to Walmart for pennies on the dollar instead of trying to capture the retail market themselves. Selling direct to retail seems like a good idea... until you have to do it and realize you'd rather get back to what it is you're actually good at producing.
6 replies →