The promoters want to know very early whether the venue is the right one for the number attending and whether to upsize, add dates, or even to go the other way to a smaller venue. The time to book a venue is very long... So they need as complete data as they can about sales as early as possible (they would love if 80% of the tickets that will sell can be sold in the first week - as then they can quickly make a decision about whether this is the right venue and if more dates are needed).
The artists want to enable as many fans to get in as possible, including young and poorer fans... Who tend to be more evangelical about an artist and drive their growth more and ultimately are more loyal and spend more over the lifetime of being a fan. They are poorer but more sticky. The artists also want to play to as full a venue as possible as that is the best atmosphere.
The venues want to have surety in their bookings (see the promoter dilemma as to whether to change venue) and for the capacity to be as close to full as possible as they will make more revenue from bar and food sales than from pure ticket sales.
All of these... All of them... Are not solved by the technical solution proposed except when it doesn't matter... When you're absolutely sure you're going to sell out. In which case you also don't need to change anything or invest in anything new because you're going to sell out anyway.
There are solutions that can threaten the current model... But this blog is not one of them.
In fact, the idea that "I have more money and deserve more to have a ticket over someone that doesn't have as much money" is antithetical to the thinking of every artist I've ever worked with.
In the same line of thinking, you could say Ticketmaster is a "scape goat" business so the artists and venues can get max profit while still coming of as innocent angels.
It is now all Ticketmaster's fault. Venues and artists are innocent.
This would explain why you can't fix it: where would the scapegoating go? When you have larger demand than supply, then prices will always be high. And when venues + artists prefer full venues, then demand must be higher than supply.
Perhaps you are describing, and perhaps the author are tackling the upper strata. For myself, I swore off big venues decades ago. If I am unable to set my beer behind the monitor speaker, I'm not going.
I wonder if the lower strata could use a kind of "artists coop" to manage ticket sales. All smaller venues (bars and the like) could participate, all smaller artists could as well.
I think more artists would handle selling their own tickets if it was easy to do. In that way the artists are served (of course) and presumably they will do what is best for their fanbase.
Connecting artists and venue owners with a web portal, allowing ticket sales to fans via the same site shouldn't be heavy lifting for a lot of the readers on HN.
The solution is really simple, but the government no longer has the regulatory ability to do anything. You segment the distributor function from the retail, and end up with a bunch of retailers running volume driven low margin sales channels.
Ticketmaster brilliantly positioned itself as distributor, retailer and supplier for resale. So they have an exclusive on a venue, get a fee for the sale, get a seller commission for the resale, and a buyers fee for the resale. They “own” the customer and the venue.
If artists literally ALL wanted to hire a scapegoat that rips off fans then sure. But many don’t. The fact that there’s no other alternative is WHY it works.
Also there’s no such thing as “venues and artists” since they own the venues too. Which is another part of the overall problem.
Raising prices is a filter on who can buy to reduce demand, but it's not the only way
The process of purchasing a ticket will induce a lot of anxiety in the purchase process. They don't know the lowest price they could buy the ticket on, before it gets sold out. They have to pick a price and hope that it is available when the price reaches that value eventually. Many people may decide to go above their limits just to get tickets of popular concerts, decreasing their disposable income unnecessarily.
In theory this process sounds wonderful and exactly like an economics textbook envisions a free-market purchase, but I don't think buyers will enjoy this process. There are lots of other factors to consider in the purchase process apart from economics and API rate-limiting. I don't have a better solution to add for this though.
The problem is, with a limited supply of tickets you’re going to draw the line somehow whether you want it or not. Price sets the barrier explicitly. Attempts to avoid using that (e.g. in various social welfare programs all over the world, but also throughout the late Soviet consumer economy) have usually ended up instituting a different, implicit barrier that may seem less outrageous on the surface but at the end of the day is not that much better: networking or bribery skills, amount of time to spend standing in queue or refreshing the website (frequently turned back into price by various enterprising people—I wonder if the US Consulate in Moscow realizes the reduction in visa interview capacity a couple of years ago had as its main effect funnelling applicants’ money to a small, untaxed, and technically illegal industry of bot programmers).
If you’re trying to extract as much money from each customer as possible (as airlines and other “discriminating monopolies” do), those additional barriers might be intentional. Otherwise they don’t seem that much better than the original money one—I guess you could claim the most passionate fans will be able to buy cheap tickets that are sold out in hours (one possible barrier) but you’re automatically cutting off people who can’t afford the necessary time off work to monitor the sale as well, for example.
I don’t like this. But I don’t see a workable economic mechanism that can do substantially better, either.
Ticketmaster tried too offer that through a "verified fan" route, but it failed under the weight of its own monopolistic ineptitude. Whoever cracks the fan management+ticketing service and offers it to bands will have an incredibly strong moat.
Not better at all, in fact.
The solution is to break up Ticketmaster. The companies they gobbled up handled this fine. Imperfectly, sometimes shoes sold out in minutes, but the prices and the fees were fair, and Will Call can wipe out the scalpers.
I worked in the industry for almost a decade, had 2 record labels, and signed a number of bands that became famous (for some definition of that) as well as worked with bands that were famous (for any definition of that)... so I have some experience here even though that experience has aged a bit.
Artists are balancing revenue now, with future growth, with record sales, with drawing in new fans, with taking the tour to as wide a representation of their fanbase as possible... and it really truly isn't as simple as "charge the highest price possible".
Far better models can be seen in sales of things like the Glastonbury Music Festival (real identity required, but administered by See Tickets) and Dice ( https://dice.fm/ which allows fan to fan resale ).
Those are better because 1) they limit the ability of scalpers, and 2) the fan-to-fan resale also allows flexibility (less need for thundering herd, as there are always people who cannot attend and now they can safely and respectfully sell to their peers).
Both processes generate a vast amount of data on the sales process, as well as the resale process - which better informs promoters of venue sizing and ticket pricing in the future. Both are good platforms for future evolution of fan-to-fan resale in a way that can enable more of the value to be returned to the artist whilst balancing the other criteria well. What they do is provide promoters with richer data, which allows promoters to make better sizing and venue decisions earlier.
To the separate questions elsewhere in the thread as to how to tackle Ticketmaster, the answer is to not fight them in their space... i.e. to not sell tickets for venues under their exclusive control. Here you see Dice succeeding as they focused on major nightclubs, including Ibiza super clubs... they're selling larger venues than most rock venues, on a daily or weekly basis... outside of Ticketmaster... with more revenue going to the venue, artist and promoters despite the ticket price only having increased a few % points. Ticketmaster control some large venues... but think of festivals, smaller venues, theatres, nightclubs... Ticketmaster really only are present for a small number of super-sized venues, more of the industry exists outside the Ticketmaster venues than in it. Don't go for the red ocean market, go for the blue ocean market ( https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/tools/red-ocean-vs-blue-oc... ).
Data and time create a fairer market... not exclusive venue control or making people pay as high a price as possible.
However this could work really well for sporting events. The Leafs usually sell out all of their tickets and a good number to scalpers, having at least a more legit way to buy tickets for a game would be helpful
The "free market" is the closest thing we have to a meritocracy. It's also the only mechanism we have for decentralized decision making.
The only "fair" way to sell a good that's in high demand and you want everyone to have the same level of access regardless of their background is a lottery. Tell people what the price is, let them apply for tickets, and sell to people at random. Scalping can be stopped by not allowing people to transfer tickets to other people - people should get a refund in full and their tickets get resold to other people in the lottery if someone changes their mind.
The obvious problem with the lottery approach is that it entirely fails to maximize profit.
Personally, if I was selling tickets, I'd just not sell them "fairly". Accept that tickets are a luxury item, like Ferraris.
There's a few ways it is implemented and not all artists/venues do all of these but things I've seen are:
- Priority purchase for "fan club" registered members. Most artists have a LINE group fan club with a yearly subscription (like $50 or whatever), then if you are in this group, you get priority access to that artist's events. This means if you're a "real" fan you get to access tickets before everyone else.
- Lottery system based on price "bands". I've seen a few artists let the fans decide how much they want to pay based on tiers. Months before the event, the artist will send out a survey with price ranges you can choose (only one) like: $10, $15, $30, $50, $90 and then seats will be allocated based on a priority level as a self-chosen value. So if there's 5 people who chose $90, 10 people who chose $50, 30 people who chose $30, 200 people who chose $15, and 1000 people who chose $10, if the venue can only host 250 people then 5 + 10 + 30 + 200 (= 245) people will get in at their price, and only 5 remaining people will get in at $10 price point.
- Totally random lottery based on "waves". X people will apply to wave 1, and out of those X people let's say only 70% will get chosen. Then the artist/venue decides on a more approachable size and might host a second wave, another X people will apply to that second wave (including the previously excluded 30%) and another 70% will get chosen, then repeat until the venue is full or the artist decides they cannot host more events. Those who don't get chosen have to suck it up and try again another time.
It's far from perfect, and as I said it can be extremely frustrating, but it has its good sides too.
After centuries of failing to manipulate natural market forces, I don’t understand why people continue to think it’s possible. All that a lottery does is incentivize everyone to participate, even those who have no interest in going. Then a secondary market will engage in actual price discovery and you’re left with the current system.
There is really no way to beat the system. Prices are what people are willing to pay. I’m not sure how any other system is fairer? Let’s say I’m a middle class Taylor Swift mega fan and save up for years to drop $4k on a ticket. Instead, we move to a lottery system and I don’t get picked. I want to go way more than most people, as evidenced by the amount I’m willing to pay. But now I don’t get to go. How is that fair?
How would the secondary market work if you have to put peoples names on tickets upon buying the ticket. No renames allowed (bring your name change deed poll and old and new IDs I guess). Can’t make the concert? Tickets can be refunded for the original price (maybe minus a token handling fee), and the ticket goes back into the next lottery sale pool.
Agreed. Tickets are a luxury item. The only fix is for the artists to do more shows. Obviously this is hard on the artists, but I wonder if they could do short term residencies in a place like Vegas? If Taylor Swift played every other night for 3-6 mos. in a fixed location, it seems like everyone could eventually see her show if they wanted. Fans would probably spend less than 2-4k each even accounting for any travel.
I also don't find the lottery method 'fair' either. Random yes, but not necessarily fair if a person can only see a show on a certain date and doesn't win the lottery.
Exactly. High demand and low supply means not everyone gets to see Taylor Swift. That's life. I don't see the issue.
And that’s in addition to Taylor Swift, personally, wanting non-elites to share in the show experience, which I have no proof of but happen to believe
The scalpers have more lottery tickets than everyone else (via bots).
I guess the main difference is to not allow ticket transfers?
I’ve been pasting this Rolling Stone link since I was in my teens. I can’t believe how old I am…
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taki...
Seems like it would make deter scalpers since they'd have to show up at the concert or provide you with a fake ID which might not work.
Example 1: Limit of 6 tickets per purchase. I buy 6 tickets, I invite 5 friends. I show ID at the door and it doesn't matter which 5 friends I bring with me.
Example 2: Same deal, but instead we're allowed 1 "flex" ticket in case someone backs out. Or some proportion allowed as flex.
Obviously this still allows scalping, but it seems less attractive for a scalper to have to attend with the people they're scalping to. Especially if you make 50% of the group show ID.
The only way to defeat it is a RICO case brought by the Federal government, as venues, artists (not all, but many), are collaborating behind closed doors to enable it.
I gave up on big acts long ago because of TM and stick to local bars and local bands. Relativity and all that; I’m in a major metro with many cover bands that nail the vibe of the original and novel acts; not lacking options here. YMMV
How do you find out when a cover band of your favorite artist is playing in your city?
But TM really isn't that bad. There's always going to be a problem when demand far exceeds supply. If you went with pure supply/demand sales rich people would buy all.
Got to the venue to discover that I now had two will-call tickets, since that's how I'd originally purchased the first one, but TicketMaster somehow broke that record on their end.
Never encountered that level of bullshit from any of the smaller providers. TicketWeb was great when I lived in a market where they were the majority and Eventbrite is fine AFAIK. But now I live in a major market and TicketMaster is the only option for all but the smallest venues. What are you gonna do if you don't like them, anyway? Buy out the venue yourself?
A large war chest with which to pay venues for the exclusive right to sell tickets there.
This is the solution. Strong authentication into a lottery.
I really don't like using a lottery, because it assumes that everyone who wants to go to a particular concert has the same level of desire to go.
A lot of people might just kind of want to go, while for others going is the most important thing in the world. With a lottery system, each of those people have an equal chance of getting to go. It seems unfair to me.
I want a system that allocates tickets to the people who want to go the most. I know an auction type system isn't completely fair, since some people have more money than others, but it least it has some semblance of trying to distribute tickets to people who want to go the most.
The known-price door tickets set a bound on the value of advance tickets, with the latter having a premium for certainty of getting in. Younger people with less money will place less value on certainty (they can wait in line at another concert).
Scalpers can still buy advance tickets and scalp them, but they have reduced pricing power because buyers might rather take a chance at $50 door tickets than pay $500 to a scalper. And there may be less bad press about tickets costing $500 if most of them are sold at the door for $50.
set up a membership/trust/reputation system for fans and/or frequent venue goers (eg. locals), and if they actually show up to gigs, then you can reduce the refund wait time for them, etc.
And I want to experience being a dragon, unicorn, billionaire, etc. We can want impossible things, but ignore reality at our own peril.
You can't "beat" the market, you just force the market underground (black market, scalpers). The market ALWAYS pays what it can afford. If demand is greater than supply, and someone is willing to pay more for it, refer to Economics 101.
There are always ways of influencing the market. Taxes, subsidies, regulations, advertising. It requires imagination, but let's not feel ourselves enslaved completely to the invisible hand of the new leviathan.
Then do more shows. If the goal is to satisfy as many fans as possible across all economic spectrums, then more shows is the only answer.
If they want some people to be able to buy tickets below market price, then they could use some form of scholarships.
IMO artists should stop trying to sell below market and instead move the market by increasing supply. TSwift tickets wouldnt sell for $1000 a ticket if she played 3 nights... It's also a contradictory goal to what basically everyone else in the industry cares about (eg vendors, venues, crews etc).
Perhaps for super super stars like tswift she'd literally end up playing 24/7/365 ... But for a lot of artists additional nights would really change the curve.
I'm curious how alternatives might effect elasticity, something like simulcast at theaters for less than live in person?
In the absence of some system that prevents resale, scalpers will likely still buy up all of the Taylor Swift tickets before they drop to a price that is affordable for these less-affluent fans.
The bots will likely still win if they can determine how many tickets are left and how fast they are selling.
In this model, anyone willing to pay more than the scalper paid already had the opportunity to buy at the higher price, so the only people the scalper could sell to would be people who really want to go, are willing to pay a high price, but weren't organized enough to actually buy when the ticket was being sold at that price.
That will almost certainly limit the profit so much that it isn't worth it at all, and even if it doesn't, anyone who plans ahead will be able to get the ticket directly from the system.
In the end, it's an auction system. Which auction system is chosen doesn't matter much economically. You could get similar results by having people bid on the available tickets. But psychologically, that will alienate fans more than a system like this. This only works for shows that will definitely sell out though, because otherwise it creates an incentive to wait for a lower price, deterring people from buying.
(Your first paragraph remains valid of course.)
Allow people to sign up to buy, optionally as a group (all/none "win") - then randomly assign "purchase rights".
The main downside might be the need for ID checks to verify no scalping.
I once had a company put me in an async queue for months to wait for my brand new gadget. I wish Sony had done the same with the PS5.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/21/23020823/sony-direct-play...
More work for the artist though, and for the mega-popular (Taylor Swift atm) it might be hard to schedule enough shows.
I think they messed up here by only running one fan presale, since it made them predict how many tickets each person with a code would actually purchase. They probably underestimated this number (eg. from people tagging along with their friend who got into the presale), so they ended up selling way more than they thought they would. I suspect this because, at one point, I had 16k people in front of me for 1 night at Mercedes-Benz[0], which is a lot given concert capacity is probably around 50k.
With a two-wave presale (or even "verified fan presale only"), you can put out tickets in even smaller waves and continuously evaluate how many you're giving out based on demand and order ticket quantities.
0: while the queue-it frontend was set up to hide any number above 2,000, the API faithfully showed the actual amount of clients ahead of you in line.
This is tough to enforce unless you have a "1/10th extra fee if you don't show up" policy or allow refunds.
The strategy for scalpers now appears to be get in as fast as possible and buy as many tickets as they can. But if we can assume the event will sellout completely and there is sufficient demand (e.g. Taylor Swift which I think I read would need to do 900 concerts to meet the initial demand) then scalpers could still win. Scalpers would just need to set a desired amount of tickets to buy and attempt to buy them at the last possible moment. They will get the tickets for the cheapest price for the event and could then sell them for a markup.
I think people would buy the scalpers tickets since they may have been waiting to see how low the prices can get, or they are able to obsess over remaining ticket numbers like a bot could and just missed out.
The only benefit I could see to the Dutch auction is it increases risk to scalpers by making them pay larger prices and get the last pick of seats, but only for events with allocated seats. So maybe instead of half the tickets for an event being scalped, they may only have the risk appetite for 10% of the tickets.
[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/the-go...
Open up for registration. Keep registration open until the date of the show. Registration costs the price of the ticket. As the show comes close, for as long as there are tickets not sold, randomly select some people every day who receive a ticket. On the day of the show, refund -- with interest -- the money of the people who were never offered a ticket.
I've never understood this obsession with first come, first served for extremely limited resources. Due to technical limitations it pretty much always turns out to be a lottery anyway, and we would save both customers and sysadmins trouble by explicitly turning it into one instead.
(Back in the days when it required camping outside the ticket office, it instead unfairly favoured those with lots of time on their hands, and/or lots of money.)
(I'm assuming "fair" here means that everyone has an equal chance, uncorrelated with any other aspect of their life. A random selection is the only method that can guarantee this property.)
If you could do something like this for some large proportion of the tickets, and give a month's notice, it might work.
I'm imagining a large scale Vickery auction, sorry if I'm not explaining super well. Everyone pays the same, but people get a price they think is fair.
A Vickery auction would not, I think, lend itself to that kind of price discovery.
People could even bid "conditionally" for multiple sections, and once bidding closes you resolve the separate auctions in order from best to worst. If a person with multiple bids gets a good seat, their bids in the other sections get cancelled.
Seems to me that this could have very similar results as the dutch auction method, but each ticket is more fairly priced. Your ticket costs the same as the next guy, assuming they have a seat in the same section as you.
Edit: also, as mentioned somewhere else here, you're likely to have a threshold where everyone wants to buy once they see available seats start to disappear, causing a kind of "bank runoff" where everyone rushes to buy tickets all at once, putting us back where we started.
In that sense you could chose the system that fits you the most. I personally think that selling tickets via auction is indesirable for other reasons.
Same applies to PS5 etc
There wouldn’t be a shortage at all if it were priced appropriately. And scalpers just end up capturing that value anyway
If they simply sold to the highest bidders, the populace at large will stop being fans and they will move onto the next entertainer. In the short term, you might make a little extra from richer people, but longer term you will fall out of popular culture, and the rich will move on or not be sufficient in quantity to maintain as profitable of a following.
And I doubt that a very large number of fans are concertgoers at all. How many football fans actually go to the superbowl?
I looked it up and it's ~80k, while 100M watch on TV. The cheapest tickets are ~$5000 dollars
That said, I think it might work if they start every sale of tickets with an initial high price that reduces on a defined schedule. So people with more money to spend can gaurantee a spot for themselves, while everyone else waits for the tickets to get cheaper.
Edit: ha! I obviously didn't rtfa before my comment.
Though volume/liquidity would be at question, but bots/arbitrage would hopefully help there.
If they really want to set artificially low prices and prioritize fans over scalpers then they need a queue and a process by which they verify the queued person is human. Lots of labor involved. Though maybe using SSN (in the US) to limit tickets per buyer?
So I got tickets to the Sunday 7/23 show in Seattle and the 5/27 show in New Jersey (and would have had seats for the 4/29 in Atlanta but my dad’s phone was on silent and he missed the 2FA code for his capital one card — I’ll have to get those from scalpers) and what’s interesting is that I got floor seats for a VIP package in New Jersey and “regular” non-VIP floor seats for Seattle. It was $190 difference after fees between shows.
For New Jersey, it was $749 list for floor VIP and then $866 per with fees. For Seattle, it was $539 list and $650 with fees. Getting the LED laminate thing and the other collectible stuff isn’t worthless but it’s not a $200 upcharge.
But as you said, the whole thing was so opaque, I just bought what I could buy. I would’ve paid more if I’d needed to. A friend who is going on 7/22 in Seattle (we were on Zoom doing it together) wound up paying $900 after fees for her floor seats that were in a differently named (but identically featured, perk wise) VIP package, meaning some of them went even higher.
So the whole thing was just totally opaque but there wasn’t even choice for people who were indiscriminate on pricing (buying from scalpers aside). It was madness just trying to get tickets at all. I needed six seats for 5/27 and I’m still not sure how I was able to get six floor seats together, VIP or otherwise. After doing the whole thing in three cities across two days, every ticket they had available sold, regardless of price. If they’d raised prices 50%, I don’t think it would have changed anything. Some of it is demand but some of it is absolutely people buying on speculation to try to flip.
Unless an industry connection comes through, I’ll wind up paying well above list for the Atlanta show I want to take my mom to, I know that. My only issue is that StubHub/Vivid/others charge at least 50% on top of the resale price in fees. So even if I was willing to spend $1500 a ticket for 100 section seats (and to take my mom, I would), I’d wind up paying another $600 or $700 per ticket just in fees. And that’s when I get pissed off and start to try to wait out the people who bought tickets just to speculate until they lower their prices to be more aligned with market forces.
Sorry for the almost political comment but that's how it hit me
The way to make sure TS tickets go to the biggest TS fans is to remove the influence of ability to pay and sort only by preference intensity.
Solving wealth inequality fixes this problem entirely - among others!
Edit: like all good economists, I leave solving that particular bit of the problem as an exercise to the reader.
Too many people would be thrown off by the falling price, and want to wait. Friends who bought earlier than other friends feel like suckers for spending more money on the same thing.
Lastly, what we call scalping _is_ a service to the ticket-buyer. The scalper is providing a market for the ticket at a price which is agreeable to the buyer. Dads love to complain about the “high” price of a ticket while they stand in line for $15 popcorn. Meanwhile, scalpers effectively do the work described in the article by adjusting prices very quickly based on actual demand. As an event gets close to starting, unsold inventory drops precipitously in price until it’s sold.
The reason scalping has a bad reputation is that most entertainment pricing is set well below the actual value of the event.
So okay, you want to scalp tickets, you have to pay more and people who don't want to transfer pay less.
Second, it would need to heavily rely on device fingerprinting and obfuscation to give scalpers hard time trying to modify the app. Software protection will likely fail anyway when both scalpers and people buying from them have aligned interests. Even if the software protection holds, the price of second-hand phones may be too low compared to price of the tickets, so the "transferability fee" has a practical ceiling, especially since the phone can be sold again afterwards.
I don't think you need to rely on device fingerprinting, just make sure they're logged into their ticketing account. You might see people start to sell accounts with single/pair tickets but that just sounds like a pain, and we could mitigate it if it becomes a problem.
I used to go to lots of shows; any time there was a show I was interested in, I’d check the online used goods marketplace 2-72 hours in advance and see if I could get tickets below face value. Often I could. Sometimes I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t go to those shows.
As the result of the move of big shows to digital-only tickets, I’ve just stopped going to big shows. I just go to local venues where I can pay in cash on entry.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7gx34/blink-182-tickets-are...
Also you have to navigate gambling laws in all the different states, provinces, and countries you're selling in.
And you also lose the freedom to bring a different friend if your original date drops out.
The Dutch Auction idea in the article is actually really simple and cuts out the complexity that comes with transfer limits, ID-must-match rules, etc.
Resale for above original value is not allowed, and if you're reported the ticket may be forfeit and original seller banned. You can transfer a ticket to another person using their ticket management system, and I imagine you could also "sell back" your ticket to be given away at the box office as hardship tickets.
Most people do buy as many as they can and sell or give away the extras to their friends or people on forums looking for tickets. While controversial, it is nice to go to an event with your friends, and it does feel like you're helping strangers who are interested enough that they hunt around on forums for a ticket.
There are just choices about what resource you want to prejudice for: money, time or luck.
Who should get to see Taylor Swift? How much should they pay? How should profits be distributed?
These are philosophical questions. If you assume a particular set of answers to these questions, designing the correct sales process is not difficult. But everyone has a different set of answers.
I think a better approach that could deal with this would be to avoid trying to come up with the 'max' and 'min' amounts and instead simply let people submit bids for how much they are willing to pay for tickets. You would pre-authorize that amount at order time, but it wouldn't yet be deducted. At the end of every day, the top n bids would 'win' and actually actually purchase the ticket.
In the simple case where the artist's popularity stays the same over time, this would probably result in a similar outcome to OP's suggestion. But if the artist undergoes a big increase in popularity, the ticket price would rise again to a much higher value later.
Maybe scalpers get in around this "stretch" point and then when there are no tickets left at all, people realise they really want to go and stretch a bit further to buy from the scalper.
As others have pointed out too - this really selects for wealth. As someone with a decent income, I might get to go and see all my favourite bands, but lower income folks might be priced out of the market entirely (which they already are by scalpers to a greater or lesser extent).
There should also be an option to automatically place a bid once the price reaches a certain level.
That’s the most fair way to auction off a bunch of identical things.
Another modification I would add to this is that let’s say 20% of the tickets should be sold for very cheap using a lottery system. So that not only the richest people could go to the concert.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-the-live-event-ticke...
I believe the problem they cited with this approach is it provides a poor UX where someone would have to keep checking the site to see if the ticket price has hit their desired target.
It would also still leave room for bots front running although still a better solution since the effects are dampened. Still, it's a lot easier for a bot to watch for a 'good price' to come up than a 'true fan'.
Perhaps to get around that there could also be an ability to make automatic purchases for a user once the ticket price reaches desired target? Something like a batch auction that randomizes winners in a cohort might work.
There are also people working in this area that would like to simply prevent resales. The problem there is it also might discourage purchases since people might be more reluctant to make such a big purchase if there is no way to recoup their money in case something happens that prevents them from going.
Perhaps another alternative to discourage scalping is if there was an identity system that requires each ticket holder to prove their identity. That, however, would also decrease the UX dramatically and would be a tough sell. But maybe the time is right to make such a hard sell?
In this case the game is to find X where X is the percent of concert goers willing to pay scalpers. Then you buy the bottom X% of tickets for the current price and list them for more money. This is easy to do because the auction site tells you the number of remaining tickets.
Since there's no supply of auction tickets left, scalpers can now set the price. And since they paid the lowest price out of any of the ticket holders, they hold all the power.
Buying the first 1-X% tickets nearly guarantees you will pay more than the scalp price except for a thin band right before X where the prices are within the scalper's margin.
Basically this system only beats scalpers if everyone is richer than scalpers, which most concertgoers are not. If you're rich you might like the sound of this new system on paper but it's actually cheaper for you to stay with the current system and buy all your tickets on the secondary market.
But they choose not to pursue because of reputational/brand damage. It’s a shame!
The customers for Ticketmaster are venues. That's the only party that Ticketmaster cares to please. Of course Ticketmaster wields their monopoly power such that venues have little choice but to go with them. But even if they did not do that, Ticketmaster serves the interests of the venues very very well.
If you want to defeat Ticketmaster with a market solution, you can't do it by creating a Ticketmaster competitor. No matter how good it is, venues can't be swayed. You will have no customers. The only market solution is to own venues. As a venue owner you could refuse to renew with Ticketmaster and use any other system you wanted.
Of course, if you do that, good luck booking anyone to perform in your venue. It better be a big famous one that they can't ignore.
This seems to address botting, though scalping organizations can still pay people to stand in line (and presumably take a cut when they are paid to give up their spots.)
Personally I think this approach helps out kids who have time to wait in line but don't necessarily have the money to pay huge markups and fees from the secondary market.
If only we could channel that time more productively (and in a more palatable way) than having people wait in line.
0: https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
I got the tickets by signing up and they took my credit card, and charged me when I was next in line and someone had tickets for sale. It was pretty neat, though I suspect I lucked out because a bunch of people sold their tickets when they announced vaccines would be required (September 2021).
AXS requires that you use their app and it must be logged into the account that purchased the tickets. The QR codes need to be refreshed before entry and expire in 60 seconds.
This presumably requires scalpers/bots to create an account per ticket purchase, and there is probably a limit on the number of accounts that can share the same payment method and address.
This is all managed through an offical resale partner with ticket tek and ticket master. You can only transfer tickets officially though the site, with options to do it for no (or low) charge if you’re sending it to a mate.
I’ve used the service quite a bit, picking up tickets on the day of an event. I’ve had some wins buying tickets for ~30% of the original price, but also plenty of times paying slightly over the original price or I’ve missed one event as there were no available tickets. It’s just something I’ve come to expect for the flexibility it provides.
I think the majority of people use this service rather than trying a third party as it’s official, easy for the seller and no one wants to support insane scalpers.
The only problem I’ve seen with the system is events can elect to not allow reselling on the platform till the event is sold out. This can prevent people recouping their losses if they can’t attend the event, and stops me from potentially getting a small deal.
How could it be done without invading privacy?
However, many venues were already checking ID for over 18/21 shows and also covid test results during the pandemic.
Also regular buyers already have to provide contact and payment info (usually very personally identifiable.)
Some venues have tried to fight scalping by requiring presentation of the card used for payment - though obviously that disadvantages cash buyers and scalpers can still use burner cards which they provide with the ticket.
Then, we act surprised when “hackers” somehow are able to defeat the anti-bot systems and resell (with another set of fees) bulk quantities of tickets on said resale marketplace.
At a smaller scale, look at Broadway productions. There are 41 "broadway" theaters in New York, each with between 500-2000 seats performing 8 shows each week. Ballparking because I don't have the exact numbers, that's a total number of tickets you can sell of under about 350,000 tickets for all broadway shows that can be sold each year. Even if you include all the touring and local productions of shows in cities, there are not enough theaters to meet the demand for live musicals and plays (and while locally, shows will underperform and not sell out, and there are periods of downtime between shows changing, it's still capped).
Now these massive tours are limited in a similar way. There are only a few dozen arenas that can seat tens of thousands of people year round, and only so many nights they can operate. But unlike those shows, a single production team can't "own" a venue for months at a time. So they need to tour, which is about the most expensive way to get a production of that scale off the ground. Moving a production and staffing it throughout a tour is so expensive that guaranteeing the endeavor is profitable is still difficult - many of the "biggest" tours with sellout crowds across the country have been financial disasters.
Basically my point is that the issue isn't just in fairness in ticket sales. It's lack of venues. Which makes sense. If we had cities operate like Las Vegas, and have venues that put on high profile shows for months at a time with residencies, the access to the shows might be (paradoxically) improved despite being hyper local. If you can guarantee a low risk/profitable production and rely on people traveling to the show (which many do! look at broadway - people can and do see shows affordably with the highest cost being the plane ticket) then the problem might be better mitigated. Or maybe not. I'm not an economist, but the point is that the supply problem goes a lot deeper than people trying to buy tickets at the same time.
$75 was a bit of money to be sure.
Back then you waited outside record stores to buy tickets. You'd line up, and sometime before the sale, they'd come out and hand out numbers, say 1 to 100. Then you'd sort by the number. Then they'd come out and say "We're starting the line at 37". 37 would be the front of the line, everyone else would sort behind that, wrapping around at the back. #36 would be the last in line.
When I went to buy Tommy tickets, they were also selling another acts tickets.
Since the tickets were so expensive, I went out of my way to go to a lower income neighborhood with the hope that there would be less folks in line to buy tickets, simply due to the price.
In the end, I got my ticket and the lady behind me did not. If they weren't selling the other act, maybe she would have made it.
When the Rolling Stones with Guns and Roses in LA went on sale, they gave out wristbands days in advance. My spot in line was around the building, the first show was sold out before I got there. The seats I did get were basically lousy when I did get them. That took an afternoon.
When I went to buy tickets at the venue, they handed out numbers, but they didn't scramble them. The numbers were random, but #1 was first in line. As soon as I got my number, there was a guy offering to buy low numbers. I had not doubt he was going to buy the 8 ticket limit. He wasn't a fan, he was a professional scalper.
U2 tried to sell tickets over the phone in LA, trying to route around TicketMaster. It literally disabled the Los Angeles telephone system for several hours. You'd pick up the phone and not be able to hear a dial tone (I was listening to the modem trying to dial in to a client site). It would take up to 30 seconds to get a dial tone, and good luck getting your call through anyway. Total disaster.
Taylor Swift sold out 2M tickets. I don't care what the time frame that was in, that's a boat load of traffic. Think not of the 2M they sold, think of how many were not sold. I think there are few companies that could handle that load, especially something as specific as selling seats A29, A30, A31, and A40 to Bob Jones. Let's see a paper on that locking problem.
The production company sets the ticket prices, TM sets the service fees, if you want to save on service fees, go to the venue. I'm not defending TM, they certainly don't need me, but it's been an intractable problem for a long, long time, at all sorts of levels. If you think TMs fees are bad, try StubHub.
Shopify did 3.1M sales per min last year during peek season https://www.shopify.com/ca/blog/bfcm-data. There's more contention for this use case, but I don't think this is as an intractable problem. I do think an alternate model like the post proposes would greatly help.
Say ticket sales open at 2pm. From 1:45pm, everyone who gets to the site gets assigned a random queue number. Then from 2pm, users are given access to the ordering system in the order of their queue number. We can even limit throughput with that (e.g. let in n users per minute).
Ticket sites in South Korea already implement queueing systems to control server load. When sales open at 2pm, everyone refreshes the page at exactly that time, but the request is put in a waiting queue. This can be considered randomized in a way (the time someone refreshes the page is somewhat random), but I'd like to see the concept of "advance queue building time" added to that to reduce the stress of "I have to refresh the page exactly at the right moment." Give me a few minutes to get to the queue.
That is I might need no capital at all to run my tour if I sell tickets at a highish (but sub-optimal) price early on.
This is about revenue maximization, not user enjoyment maximization or fairness maximization.
Ultimately I don't think most artists actually want revenue maximization - they're probably far more interested in fairness maximization in ensuring their fan base of all economic strata get to see them live.
Well except that everyone would try to grab the very last ticket, which would be the cheapest.
https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2022/10/25/sports-ticket-... https://hbr.org/2013/05/any-business-trying-to-sell
It will maximise profits, but is not fair.
Other platforms do waves, split across time zones. That would distribute the load to prevent crashes.
Professional scalpers act like high frequency trading firms (some HFTs are ticket scalpers), and employ tens of thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment to get those seats before the poor rubes who hoped for standard priced tickets.
By contrast, an auction system actually levels the playing field by removing the technological advantage.
They don't have to run a Dutch auction specifically, other kinds of auctions exist too.
The NFT summer of 2021 saw first come first serve distros gamed by parties with superior network positioning.
Dutch auctions (from the article) strongly favored the wealthy buyers not fans or parties who “pay” with other things of value like their time.
Lotteries were easily games by sock puppets.
Lotteries with “strong” identity verification created grey markets for identities. Think about mechanical Turk but peoples task is to get a lottery ticket and remit the winnings.
People tried social credit systems where participating in community activities like discords earned you the spot in line. Again, services arose to farm these spots.
Fascinating microcosm of human behavior.
I agree with commenters that suggest refundable non-transferable tickets however, for goods this scarce where a secondary market is valuable, I don’t think we have a simple good solution.
The cost of meat space sock puppets is much higher than coming up with a billion secret keys
I cannot roll my eyes hard enough - if you can, then do it already. Why the hell do you need the encouragement?
You can actually go through with the buying from a third party, and demand a refund for the additional price afterward (and keep the ticket)
Tying to an ID is a nice idea in principal...
Another gig we bought tickets second hand, the seller had to go through the original site to return their tickets and then we could purchase them (I wrote a script to poll the site to find available tickets as they had sold out quickly). Did they check our IDs? Nope, of course not.
Requiring ID and having to return the tickets to the original site for resale is probably the optimal solution. But in reality if IDs are not checked it pretty much falls apart.
I have never had a ticket tied to ID anywhere in Europe.
Also, although the patent office does review the applications, they aren't perfect: it isn't uncommon for patents to be invalidated if they are challenged or there's a lawsuit.
sure, some artists may want as much money as they can make but surely the majority want their fans to be able to see them affordably? at least, i hope.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awards_and_nominations...
This seems like a solution where rich people get the good things and poor people don't. I wouldn't call that fair.
In a democracy, everyone has an equal weight, an equal say, in the governance of the country. We often call that fair, or sometimes just.
In capitalism, every dollar has an equal weight, an equal say in what gets produced or built or done.
This proposed system would be fairer in that it would at least deliver whatever the maximum amount a rich person is prepared to pay to the artist, rather that some scalper intermediary. Those at the lower end of the willingness-to-pay spectrum are no worse off, except to the extent that you think they’re disproportionately lucky, disproportionality motivated (which I accept is possible), or are themselves looking-to/willing-to scalp tickets.
It also seems however that it’d be pretty trivial to just prohibit resale of tickets and require ID at the venue. Artists/promoters might make less money but it’d preserve equality of access and largely eliminate scalping.
The problem with stadium tours is that 95 percent or more of the seats are awful. They provide an extremely poor concert experience.
The sound is very bad for most of the audience. Many technological innovations in stadium sound have tried to address this, but the underlying physics has been resistant to an acceptable solution.
The visuals are even worse. An enormous fraction of the audience cannot resolve the headliner on stage as a result of the size of the performer and the distance to the viewer. The visuals then devolve to the viewers ability to see an enormous television screen.
So why would anyone want to go to a stadium show, if not for the visuals and the audio?
It comes down to human competitiveness. Bragging rights. Ingesting mass media nonsense about how a product or experience will make one feel, and then disgorging it to a peer group as a method of creating an artificial distinction between the "haves" and the "have-nots".
Taylor Swift, in particular, has been a genius at creating hysteria among her fans. They have ingested the idea that, if Taylor is in town, and you are not there, then you are a resident of the outer, miserable, darkness.
The truth, however, is that if you attend a stadium show, the only positive aspect is that you "were there". You will not see, hear, or in any meaningful way, experience the object of your hysteria. You will be packed into a seat with a group of strangers also experiencing a mass-media induced mental derangement.
The foregoing may lead you to believe that I am not a fan, but you would be wrong. My opinion was formed by the experience of going to all the Taylor Swift stadium tours, up to a certain point.
What changed was that I stopped fighting Ticketmaster at one point. I opted out and did not buy a ticket. However, I still wanted to go to the show. All seats were prohibitively expensive on the secondary market; good seats, even more so.
There were two shows in my city on subsequent nights. The first night, I watched prices on the scalper sites and I discovered that, in the last few minutes before the start time of the show, prices for even the best seats tumbled dramatically.
This was simple economics; unsold seats are a cost that subtracts from overall profit. It makes sense to dump them for any amount, even at a loss.
The second night, I waited until the price for a single front-row seat fell below the original price of the least expensive seat anywhere. I bought it, printed my ticket, and went to the show.
This was a transformative experience because I was literally a few metres from the stage. I could get out of my seat and stand by the barricades and see and hear as if the show was at at my neighbourhood folk club or an open mic night. I then turned around, with Taylor directly behind me, and I could see the view of a packed stadium waving lights and singing along, just like what those on stage would see.
I learned the difference between what the few who had the money or influence to obtain the best seats experience, and what the great majority of stadium show concert-goers endure.
I was cured. I have never, since that day, had any desire to attend a stadium show or buy a ticket for a standard seat in any large venue.
Unfortunately, it isn't really practical to educate a significant fraction of fans by demonstrating this.
Maybe there is a technological solution, though. If we could arrange for people to have a feed from a front row observer in fully immersive VR, we could perhaps recreate enough of the experience that the rush to purchase a grossly substandard product would diminish.
There are probably significant economic forces that would oppose this (Ticketmaster, obviously) because education is often the enemy of mass-market driven capitalism.
The longer-term solution is probably to recognize that the innate social behaviour of humans has been exploited to our total destruction by those who would hoard all wealth for themselves, and to begin another great eugenics experiment: breeding selfishness, conflict and the tendency to self-destructive herd behaviour out of the human genome, But that is beyond the scope of this discussion.
Honestly it seems like the biggest problems here are that Ticketmaster in particular has a huge sway in the current venue and artist market, having contracts that require an artist or venue to exclusively use their ticketing system.
“ Tickets become tradable digital collectibles (NFTs), with a variety of awesome possibilities for fans & event organizers.”
This is one of the limitations of the NFT model.
