Comment by lbreakjai
3 days ago
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?
Why would "only a handful" of rich people show up? If I'm a scalper, and demand is lower than expected, I'm incentivised to resell at any price, even at a 90% discount, because I can't just sit on my stock hoping for demand to pick up later.
If anything, as an artist, I'm incentivised to seek out the whales that can absorb ridiculous prices, because they are the ones that will buy the 25 limited editions of my album.
It's not necessarily a choice between the 1000 genuine fans vs the 10 posers. If the artist is popular enough, it's between the 1000 rich genuine fans, and the 1000 broke genuine fans, so might as well please the rich. It's a selection that already happens when picking the venues. It's always London, NYC, Paris, Tokyo, and never Skopje or Pine Bluff, AK.
I'd also like the news to talk about the show "so popular people are willing to pay a fortune to see" rather than the one with plenty of cheap seats still available.
I was reading an article earlier this week about "blue dot fever". Promoters like ticketmaster show the available seats as blue dots on a plan of the venue. The more blue dots, the more seats available, which seems to lower the demand even more, by signalling that the show is not popular, which drives the status-seekers away.
I understand what you're saying but it still mostly an issue for the artist - building a fan base. Otherwise if you have X amount of tickets to be distributed, you'll get X people at the venue, at most. Since the same number of people will show up, it's a matter of distribution. What should the distribution be? You, and many others, say it shouldn't be the richest people, or more accurately those who'd pay the highest price for the ticket. What about the poorest people, if we're talking about fairness? Should we have a quota for homeless people, too? For people of certain ethnicities, political views, sexualities, etc.? That's what I see when you talk about fairness outside of market forces - we should try to include "everyone", whatever that means. Maybe it's the most hardcore fans? So first allow people with tattoos of the artist on their chest? Yes, it's a ridiculous example, but what is fair to you? What makes a fan that will only be able to pay 10 $ not less worthy than a fan who will pay 1000 $? Will they be more worthy to attend than a fan who can only afford 0.01 $?
To me it seems it IS an economics problem - the artist needs to make money and they need to decide whether they want to optimize for the profit from ticket sales or for the profit from merch or from a broader fan base. But it's an economic problem for the artist, it's not really a societal problem or anything more major.
As a disclaimer, I'm not rich and I don't care for concerts anyway. It just doesn't make sense to single out tickets for concerts as some special thing. As an example, I'm OK with not being able to buy some fancy ethically sourced gourmet food yet I still support the company that makes it. Or maybe I won't buy it often, but I'll save up and buy it once in a while. Many parallels to be made, but of course not perfect. Still, it's not a necessity, so it's strictly an economic problem (not a moral one), mainly for the artist. Whether they want to solve it and how they want to solve it is their issue. Whether it's non-transferable tickets or ID-bound tickets with a strict policy on how they're transferred or an auction or a lottery or whatever.
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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.
There's a very easy solution. Put the name of the owner on the ticket. Limit the number of tickets per person. Verify the identity before entering the premises. Allow the resale at face value via the organiser's platform. Allow to resell your ticket at face value to a specific person, for the case where the friend who bought the tickets six months ago is suddenly sick.
I don't know why this is being made to look like an insurmountable problem. We're talking about multi-billion dollar companies, organising billion dollar tours.
> If she sells all tickets at $10k each then maybe she'd clear the market, but she'd piss off a lot of fans
If I was conspiracy-minded, I'd say blaming "the scalpers" would be a very convenient way of dodging responsibilities while taking a cut.
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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.
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> 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.
The "market price" you're talking about, is set by how many scalpers are creating scarcity. If the number of scalpers is 0, then the "market price" is different. It becomes the price that both the vendor is willing to sell for, and the event visitor is willing to buy for. Which is a more desirable "market price" to achieve.
The only thing scalpers make possible, is pricing out people that the vendor wanted to sell tickets to.
Scalpers are the primary reason it’s practically impossible to get a ticket at face price in the first place
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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?
>But the shiny charmander card is where people draw the line?
this isn't just about trendy commercial items. Michael Sandel in 'The Moral Limits of Markets' called this 'Skyboxification'. These mechanisms like scalping affect sport events where people of different classes used to sit next to each other and where now low income earners are either priced out or delegated to the backrow. Cultural spaces that do not separate people into 'winners' or 'losers' but treat people equally are the basis of any civil society. It's where people from different walks of life come into contact.
One guy driving a nicer car or having a nicer watch than another person is fine but when you start tearing apart culture, sports, art, music you end up with well, the US of today https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-money-cant-buy_b_1442128