For those against this: I'm curious to hear your take on how you'd stop/mitigate scalping.
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.<p>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].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nin.com/tickets2018/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nin.com/tickets2018/</a>
I like it. Your last bit is good marketing against those who think paying a linesitter / spot holder is all upside.<p>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.<p>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)
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.<p>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].<p>[1] <a href="https://youtu.be/fnVQlwKAuLk?si=hVr30353SlKfnyRz&t=106" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/fnVQlwKAuLk?si=hVr30353SlKfnyRz&t=106</a>
> That excludes all fans who don't live in big cities. A lot of people travel just to go to shows.<p>Not really. The place that sells the tickets doesn't have to be the performance venue itself.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>Another way is to run separate auctions: one for previous attendees, one for fan club members, and one for GA.<p>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.
Named tickets, like airplane seats?<p>Sorry, I only thought about this for 5 seconds, but there are markets where scalping doesn't cause issues. We could look at those.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>EU version for flights: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Passengers_Rights_Regulation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Passengers_Rights_Regulati...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
Transferring tickets to friends is functionally indistinguishable from scalping
Would need to provide a decent refund system alongside named tickets, offering quick and easy refunds for maybe 10% cancellation fee.
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.
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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
There are many solutions.<p>For example - allow ticket resale only through the official platform and cap it at the original sale price.<p>Another approach - check IDs at the door and only let the original ticket purchaser through.<p>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?
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
> Why should anything be done?<p>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.<p>Why <i>shouldn't</i> anything be done? Because capitalism is God?
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.<p>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.
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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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:<p>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.<p>2. QR code tickets that rotate meaning they can't be screenshotted and sold.
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.<p>Non-transferable I think? But you could resell them via ticketmaster maybe for facevalue?<p>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.
Why is scalping a problem?
Fewer people go to concerts, fans can’t afford the tickets, less connection with the artists, less interest in music overall.<p>Artists lose, even if they get paid and all the tickets technically are sold out. Fans lose. The only people who win are scalpers who just abuse the system.
> Fewer people go to concerts<p>Scalpers don't buy tickets and not sell them. The most scalped concerts are obviously the most attended<p>> fans can’t afford the tickets<p>See above. I assume what you are upset about is that rich fans are the ones going.<p>> less connection with the artists, less interest in music overall<p>I think you need to explain your logic here.
If I bought 100 tickets, sold 20 of them at 10x the value I paid for them, and then ate the rest as a loss, I'm still making a tidy profit, and the artist/venue/etc. still make the same amount of money as if 100 individuals bought them and attended, but there are now 80 fewer people in the audience (edited to add: and potentially 80 people who could have afforded the original price but not the absurd upsell).<p>I don't have the data to say whether this happens or not (edited to add: and the numbers are obviously made up), but the logic is perfectly sound; nothing would stop it from happening today.
> See above. I assume what you are upset about is that rich fans are the ones going.<p>I'm upset that artists make the tickets affordable for different groups, and their fans want to see the concert. You have 2 sides that are in agreement. Then there's a 3rd, independent side that decides to abuse the system to make profit, hurting 2 other sides.<p>Imagine that you pay road tax and the government builds highway. Everyone's happy. Now there's a militia that sets up checkpoints and takes a toll for driving on the highway. Unrelated 3rd party tries to benefit by abusing the system.<p>> Scalpers don't buy tickets and not sell them. The most scalped concerts are obviously the most attended<p>If you buy 100 tickets for $100 and sell them for $300 you need to sell only 34 tickets to break even. The concert hall could be sold out and half empty at the same time. Of course there are concerts where scalpers will sell 100% of what they got, but they don't need to.
Not OP but - I think one could make the case that if tickets were sold via a lottery and non-transferable, the average lottery participant would be a bigger fan of $ARTIST than the average person who can afford the scalped price for a ticket today.<p>Arguably if rich people are just buying the $1000 concert tickets just to flex and take pictures for IG, that's a seat that could be going to a 17-year-old who loves the band's music but can't afford more than $100. The 17-year-old meanwhile may never get to go to a show of any of their favorite bands due to this situation, meaning they miss out on this meaningful chance to connect with the music in a personal, in-person way.<p>Basically the case hinges on the assertion that the richest fans are not the same as the most serious fans.
I’m against it from these angles:<p>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.<p>2 The monopolistic aspect. I subscribe to a much smaller Spotify competitor, now I’m at a disadvantage.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>If you are a proud edge-lord/hipster with your obscure choices, you should also learn to deal with consequences.<p>Scale brings advantages. You can't have it both ways
So your view is “accept a monopoly and become their bitch?”<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.