I recently bought NBA tickets to Game 3 of the Western Conference Finals (Oklahoma City Thunder vs. Golden State Warriors), and I was absolutely pissed off at the whole process.
I went on a small Twitter rampage to vent about it, with a picture that shows NO TICKETS available LITERALLY THE SECOND they went "on sale" (10AM Thursday May 19, 2016), and then beside it another screenshot of ALMOST 1,300 TICKETS FOR RESALE at the exact same time.
https://twitter.com/vlucas/status/733315798068953089
I learned the system was rigged against me the hard way, and it totally sucked. It was painfully obvious that all the tickets were sold out well before the game, and that a whole lot of scalpers were making lots of money on reselling tickets that were not fans, and never had any intention of going to the game in the first place. The kicker is that the system actually seemed designed intentionally for this to happen, screwing the actual fans in the process.
A couple of my friends are scalpers. They said there's a limit of 8 tickets for most shows per address, but if you walk in with thousands of dollars in cash that limit goes away. Online it's a little different since you need to put your address in for your credit card, but there's plenty of ways to get multiple addresses with your name for credit cards.
They make more than me as a software engineer, but they can easily lose thousands if a show doesn't pan out. They follow tours across the US and hope they find "the one" that makes them rich.
Not only were they sold out within seconds, I also got the impression the process was designed to make sure anyone with an automated process would "win". Being a developer and knowing how people would use a system like theirs, it blew my mind they took basically no precautions to stop automated buyers from buying everything immediately.
Someone is making lots of money.
my sister had a friend from college who grew up on the upper east side who in turn had a friend from childhood who 'invests' ~10,000$ every year by buying tickets to broadway shows and reselling them
when we went looking four tickets were offered to us for free because 'i've made 4000x on this show already'
That way more tickets will be sold, the artist can't be accused of being greedy, there won't be much profit in the resale market, and everyone who attends the show will have paid an amount they thought was reasonable during the bidding process.
Why don't we 1) make tickets non-transferrable (but refundable), 2) start pricing half the tickets as what the person will pay via auction and the other half as a fixed-price lottery? I'm not aware of many other ways to make things fair when demand outstrips supply so much.
Why does it need to be fair? It's a private business putting on an event that nobody needs to go to except as a luxury entertainment. It's not access to food and water. We don't expect that other limited luxuries should be available to everyone, so why concerts and sport events?
Surely tickets going to the people who'll pay the most is fair?
If you want to avoid a Hunger Games situation where only the rich and famous enjoy your product (the NBA and many musicians care about this) that sort of person needs to be provided for
This is apparently what Louis CK is doing for his latest tour. I ordered tickets and I have to pick them up from the box office with ID starting 1 hour before show starts. Or I can request a refund.
https://louisck.net/tour-dates : 'Regarding ticket resale: we take great efforts and have many methods of finding out what inventory is being sold on "broker" sites like Stubhub and Vivid Seats and immediately invalidating those tickets.'
These fans seems to be asking for Right to watch live. What if less popular artists/sports teams ask for Right to Audience? I think government should start looking into that also after all there must be lots of mediocre artists/sports persons/chefs etc looking for patrons.
Other examples include "Who's willing to wait in a 15 minute line for the water fountain," "Enter a lottery for the limited number of season football tickets," and "Only people with an even numbered license plate can buy gas today."
I think there are longer-term factors for the NBA here. If your fans can't get reasonably priced tickets to any of the games they're excited about because of scalping, some percent of them are going to get fed up and do something else with their lives. The NBA gets long term value out of fans being able to connect with their brand at the prices that the NBA is setting, but scalpers are scraping up the benefits from both sides and pocketing it.
NBA doesn't get the money that they could have earned by charging higher prices, and fans don't have a shot at affordable access to events.
I'm more curious why they have to be sold on a FCFS basis rather than an auction or via random selection.
You have bad friends.
Edit: Aren't scalpers viewed as the scum? Why the downvotes?
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837077 and marked it off-topic.
