Defend the indefensible: Ticket touting

When it comes to making a thread all about him, stephen is like early LJ without the charm.

(stephen: if you disagree with this then the best way to prove it is not to post to this thread again, since you've made your views on touting clear.)

for the record, i'm entirely okay with discussion shifting back to the original question. i'm not trying to seek attention here, it's just that admitting to reselling tickets on an anti-reselling thread is like a magnet for personal criticism and insults.

Shut up.

do you think the same about people buying limited edition records and selling them on, for example?

Depending on the circumstances, yeah why not? Ok if you're just crate digging and come across some rare vinyl that otherwise would have gone undiscovered then sure, coin it in. That's to a large extent what the whole antiques trade is based on. But if some limited commodity is initally readily available to everyone, and you pull it out of circulation just to line your pockets - asshole. Fuck a free market.

HAHA thanks dom (xpost)

I started a thread on hoarding limited records a few weeks back which got roundly ignored: How much of a dick move is it, in the grand scheme of things, to buy records with a view to selling them in the future at higher prices? but it's all good. Was quite surprised to see ESOJ being that blithely accepting actually

stephen, to gleefully take way over the odds off people then make even more back again and NOT refund the difference makes you a total cock. it's not that difficult to comprehend - you'd still end up quids in but you'd soften the blow for these people you skanked. to not do that and to brag on a message board *and* quote ebay selling rules makes you a shit, a real dirty toerag. but you know this already, right?

Was quite surprised to see ESOJ being that blithely accepting actually

well i wouldn't say it was blithe acceptance, it's just one of the "evils" i've had to learn to deal with as a collector/fan.. i gave up getting shitty about it a long time ago

http://music.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2222013,00.html

I see bands want a slice of that ticket-touting moolah now. Fuck's sake. Heaven forbid they don't want fans ripped off, no they just want their cut.

cuntscuntscuntscunts

Radiohead, Robbie Williams and Arctic Monkeys joined calls yesterday for a levy to be added to tickets resold on the web to allow musicians to claw back some of the profits made by touts and fans.

The acts' managers, together with about 400 other artists, including KT Tunstall and the Verve, said the move was vital to bring some regulation and rigour to a market they described as "the wild west".

They proposed the creation of a Resale Rights Society, which would collect a fee from each ticket sold on eBay and other websites such as Seatwave, Viagogo and GetMeIn.com that have sprung up to satisfy the demand to trade concert tickets.

Wait till blogger Lefsetz sees this. Actually, wait to the major labels now pushing 360 degree deals with bands (where they share in all of the revenue for everything supposedly in exchange for marketing efforts) see it. But yea, not much concern show for consumers here with this proposal.

This is just Radiohead getting their revenge on fans who paid 1p for In Rainbows.

Jeez, why don't the promoters just sell all the tickets by auction themselves? Stagger the availibility for maximum profit incentive? Bet it's legal.

i just heard on the radio this morning that van halen are being accused of making a deal with their promoters who are holding back tickets and putting them on ticketmaster's ticketexchange site (auction site), essentially scalping their own tickets. although I don't think this is anything new so I don't know why it's news (I guess the tickets showed up on ticketexchange within a minute or two of tickets going on sale, so it was some kind of proof).

but if you think seeing van halen is worth paying $2k, I just feel sorry for you, and don't necessarily see the evil in it.

so why is this listed as "having new answers" at the top of ILM?

OK never mind, it was because I had it bookmarked.

pretty cool, actually.

trent reznor to fans: yes i know, it sucks:

I assure you nobody in the NIN camp supplies or supports the practice of supplying tickets to these re-sellers because it's not something we morally feel is the right thing to do. We are leaving money on the table here but it's not always about money.
Being completely honest, it IS something I've had to consider. If people are willing to pay a lot of money to sit up front AND ARE GOING TO ANYWAY thanks to the rigged system, why let that money go into the hands of the scalpers? I'm the one busting my ass up there every night. The conclusion really came down to it not feeling like the right thing to do - simple as that.

My guess as to what will eventually happen if / when Live Nation and TicketMaster merges is that they'll move to an auction or market-based pricing scheme - which will simply mean it will cost a lot more to get a good seat for a hot show. They will simply BECOME the scalper, eliminating them from the mix.

Nothing's going to change until the ticketing entity gets serious about stopping the problem - which of course they don't see as a problem.

touting never bothered me as much as booking fees. they're fucked up. seeing people apologise for this but not for regularly using ticketmaster etc ... ehhh

I've done this once but only for a nominal profit. obv ticket brokers in general suck ass.

what's yr experience?

This story is getting a lot of play here in L.A.: https://variety.com/2019/music/news/black-keys-hundreds-turned-away-wiltern-ticketmaster-1203344146/

Honestly, this is the overcorrective reaction that I can't stand. Yeah, the resale industry is fucked, esp with revelations that bands are actually releasing thousands tickets for sale directly to third party resellers. But there are people that pay it - sometimes when I'm traveling for work or pleasure, I'll find out an act is in town that I want to see but the tix are above face value, and I just pay it.

But how is that more fucked than denying people who can't make a show due to some emergency from selling to someone who can? Is this going to endear fans to the band more when buyers got kept out of the show?

Non-transferrable is really fucking stupid and no matter my opinion of scalping, Black Keys are the ones who look like shitheads here. same as when Smashing Pumpkins did the same thing in 1996.

"We wanted to ensure fans got into the venue at the low price we set for them. Instead they didn't get let in at all! but fuck em, they're not true fans!"

You'd think there would be a way to make them digitally transferable but only at the price they were purchased at.

Black Keys are the ones who look like shitheads here

seems it would be fine if ticketmaster had a feature allowing you to return your ticket for face value

the tale of a woman from Boyle Heights who’d spent $700 on three tickets for herself and her two young children and waited in line for two hours, only to be told after finally passing through security that the tickets weren’t valid, sending her back onto the sidewalk with a crying 9-year-old.

lol tbh

if Ticketmaster had a feature allowing you to return tickets, that'd be a step, but there are plenty of people who are paying for the privilege of getting into a sold out event, whether we were too slow to get tickets, or perhaps didn't think they'd be able to go, or traveled somewhere and found the show on their doorstep unexpectedly.

yeah $700 is much more than I'd spend for three tickets to ANYBODY, much less Black Keys, but hey, it's their money. lol @ the idea that anybody in the 3rd party markets was in any way significantly hurt by what the Black Keys did.

plus I mean they used Ticketmaster, how much do they really care about markup

I assume the venue is LiveNation/Ticketmaster only, so they probably didn’t have a choice there.

Seems like if a band does their best to make sure True Fans have the best shot at buying tix (maybe release the code via email right before they go on sale?), then if some fans end up reselling, that’s the breaks.

the other thing, the article made it sound like if you sent a ticket barcode from one phone to another, i.e. someone buying the ticket as a gift, it would also not be honored, the software would recognize it and disallow the scan?

Right, seems it’s a “dynamic barcode”

the argument between stephen and everybody else upthread is always entertaining

The most depressing result of the consolidated, decentralized ticket scalping operations is sitting in the near-premium area in a large seated venue only to have the seats near you stay empty throughout the entire show when they were sold out online.

he went on to post as ilxor, iirc?

If they're purely interested in making sure tix only wind up in the hands of 'true fans', seems like the lower the ticket price the less likely that is, tbh. If theyre interested in keeping ticket prices low by stopping scalping that's commendable, but the whole idea hinges the nontransferability being super clear to everyone right upfront, so that resellers don't bother buying tix in the first place. If you hide that feature in the fine print it defeats the whole purpose.

i just did this with madonna tickets. I bought some for us, and then 4 additional on another night, and resold them on stubhub for enough to cover the cost of all the tickets. yeah I suppose that was kind of shitty but whatever.

honestly anyone who pays to see madonna deserves to get ripped off.

rude

Just try to understand, she's given all she can

It's starting to get that the efforts to combat 'scalping' are making legit "I can't go" resale more difficult.

I have a ticket to a small club show I can't go to Sunday that I'm trying to sell. These are harder to sell on StubHub, since they're GA shows, so you pretty much have to sell at a loss to move them (plus you lose fees). But in this case, I had no choice - the show wasn't listed, it takes days to get a new show added, and this particular promoter actually calls Stubhub to take his shows down from being listed. Craigslist is useless as nobody looks on CL for small events like this. I've tried with no success multiple times.

So I go to the event page to offer the ticket, under face value, and make very clear that I'm not one of the 3 million bots offering tickets. The promoters know me, I go to a billion of their shows. The page is moderated to cut out the bots offering tix. Today, I find out they didn't approve my post so it never went up.

so now outside of posting it for sale on my own FB page, which will have less success than it would have on the event page itself due to the algorithms, I have no real options to sell, even at a loss. It's an Eventbrite ticket, they have no marketplace of their own.

I could ask for a refund but it seems stupid - meh.

it seems less stupid than spending days to sell it at a loss

right, cos making zero money back is better than making some money back. good tip!

literally think you just pop up to be really fucking annoying sometimes

nevermind, I misread you completely. sorry.

:)

https://variety.com/2020/biz/news/pearl-jam-congressmen-boss-ticket-reform-act-flawed-1203506450/

https://variety.com/2020/biz/news/pearl-jam-congressman-rejects-boss-ticket-reform-1203508207/

Don’t know more than what’s in this articles, but not sure I get Pearl Jam’s position here... “Non-transferable ticketing” is not good, right?

(for the reasons discussed this thread, beginning last September)

it's inconvenient, sure, but it also really helps defend from scalping surely?

I'm sure it does, but it also seems "anti-consumer," steers folks toward buying that "ticket insurance" offered at check-out (b/c what other recourse will you have if you can't go?), etc. It's a tricky problem for sure.

Trying to read more about the bill... the Springsteen focus in the bill's name & PR is so perfectly Jersey: https://pascrell.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=3931

This seems like a basic rundown of the bill's provisions: https://pascrell.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=3377

There are legit sanctioned ways to resell tix like Ticketmaster Resale Marketplace but then these services will set a minimum price for your tickets sometimes that is too high to garner interest.

For a sold out event, you're golden, but if it's not, you just want to recover *something*.

People will just start demanding refunds and attempting chargebacks as even ticket insurance can only be used in specific instances. Illness, you're good. Laid off, you're good. Work demands you work on a day you weren't previously scheduled? Out of luck. Someone dies but they weren't a member of your immediate family or going to the show with you? Out of luck. And the insurance inflates the already bloated sale prices of many tickets.

The resale sites aren't the primary issue as much as a symptom. The primary issue is that third parties also seem to acquire large allotments of tickets with only resale as an intent. Sometimes even Ticketmaster has promoted this.

I admit I don't know how to stop that but while making tickets non transferable might curb scalping, it just about guarantees empty seats in the house, and that many people who didn't want to pay another $20 for ticket insurance, or who missed for a non-covered reason will take a bath on it. And possibly stop attending.

And how would gifts work?