This timeline is weird
Thieves are just there out on the open bragging how they steal, and then just taunt people with saying that they’ll come back and steal some more
Yet he doesn’t get jailed?
I mean from an economics standpoint if people are willing to pay higher prices on tickets being resold then they are underpriced. The price people are willing to pay is the “true” value of the thing. Personally I think concerts are too expensive even at list prices but artists are consistently selling out venues at these prices and even higher because people are paying more for tickets on secondary markets. Obviously there are people for whom seeing Taylor Swift is actually worth over a thousand dollars, and to be honest, if that’s how much it is worth to them there’s not much you can do to stop them from going, and I’m not sure I even want to. I might go see Taylor Swift for $40 a ticket just for the experience but is that really worth denying it to some super fan willing to pay 10x that? I won’t get nearly as much from the experience as they will, and it’s obviously not worth it to me.
From a purely economics standpoint, when scalpers are able to sell at a higher price, yes they are underpriced.
But doing so limits access to cultural events to only those that can afford them.
Underpriced for who? 😑
Well I think live nations CEO could use a bullet in a non non vital area to make him rethink his position
If y’all keep paying them, they’ll assume you can pay more. Every big business takes a such as possible from you.
Ah, yes, the ole “it’s the customers fault they’re getting screwed.”
Why do I have to think about market forces and corporate politics just to buy a fucking concert ticket? Can’t we just have a well regulated market that doesn’t constantly treat customers like a resource to be mined?
I get this argument for something people actually need but going to a Taylor Swift concert is the very definition of a luxury.
No, we can’t. Both are captured by cruel and selfish people who will keep taking until something breaks and they got to where they are because people kept voting for them on the ballot and in the store instead of supporting the people who aren’t trying to economically rape us into the grave.
Not with Democrats or Republicans in power
I go to a lot of live music shows but I haven’t purchased a TicketMaster or Live Nation ticket in forever. I don’t see huge bands because they are prohibitively expensive but I get to see a lot of really fun shows and experience a far more engaged crowd.
You’re doing it right. The way to deal with overpriced concerts and scalpers is to vote with your wallet. Don’t buy overpriced tickets. Don’t buy from scalpers. Nobody needs to go see a particular artist at a particular concert, I don’t care how much you “love” them, or that you might never see them on tour again, you don’t NEED that. Let it go. Let go of the FOMO. Step one of defeating scalpers is to remove their market. If they cannot make money, they will not exist.
We tried something similar with convincing people not to preorder games. There’s a proven method to make things better but everyone loves to shit in their pants.
I understand your frustration, but I think you also have to keep in mind that it’s not a binary true/false success condition. Plenty of partial success can still be had in the gray area in between, and partial success has its own proportional rewards. Realistically we’re never going to solve 100% of the problem this way (or probably any way). But what we can do is shrink the proportions of the problem. Yes, there are always going to be people paying many thousands of dollars for Taylor Swift tickets and people preordering the next Assassin’s Creed game or whatever. But by shifting your own purchasing decisions away from such things, and hopefully with the cooperation of many other people also making the same shift, you start to funnel more money into the artists and games that don’t do that. You make that area of the creative space richer with your money, and then those creatives make their art richer with the money you’re supplying. As a result, we earn better future rewards for ourselves without having to participate in the behaviors we find objectionable. We are all working together, this is a collective effort, and even partial success is a perfectly appealing goal on its own. The more success the better, but I’ll take any success we can get, because every little bit counts and every little bit makes the situation a little bit better.
Very solid points. Well said. I was only thinking of the condition of stops or doesn’t stop rising prices and that needs x amount of the market to do so. The other half I didn’t consider. Thank you for taking the time
Nah this is some whack advice. I go to plenty of shows, small little ones that have 20-50 people or giant stadium tours.
If something is prohibitively expensive and you can’t afford it then that’s different. But going and seeing some of your favorite bands is a memorable experience and usually a social one as well.
Like when Radiohead played my city in 2018 that was the first time they played here since like 1996 or something. I doubt they will again within the next decade. I’m supposed to just go “I don’t like ticket sales practices so I’m gonna miss this opportunity all together”?
I guess if you want to feel special for going to local shows to “stick it to Ticketmaster” go ahead, but that’s a far different experience then seeing big acts. Ticketmaster is not even going to notice that you skipped a concert because you don’t like them. People aren’t going to every concert under the sun, only the bands they like. How well ticket sales do is going to be determined by how popular the band is. That’s all they’ll be considering when they look at sales vs venue vs marketing, etc.
Scalpers are another thing all together. I’ve never purchased one from them. If a show sells out, it sells out and becomes not worth it to me 9 times out of 10.
My friends book a lot of small DIY shows. The kind you pay like $5-20 at the door in cash. They’re usually very niche or underground artists. It’s just a fundamentally different experience.
If a band has any sort of notoriety and it’s at a medium sized venue the concert is almost always being booked by Ticketmaster or livenation anyway.
Honestly smaller local shows are so much better anyway. I’d go see some local band at the dive down the street over a stadium show any day.
My friend sometimes gets free tickets to bigger concerts and invites me. I saw ELO (or whatever the name is now) and Incubus recently and both were great in a different way. They’re too different to compare IMO, even though I do prefer smaller shows because that’s what the bands I like play
Millionaire willing to pay higher prices for luxuries because they aren’t worried about money. How shocking.
The CEOs pay requires that belief of them, and so they are not free. They are in fact, yet another entrapped enemy of humanity, enmeshed as gears in a system.
This, of course, does not factor in the problem of scalpers and the hugely increased fees charged on the secondary market.
Well, if tickets for a given band are being scalped, then it’s a good sign that they’re probably initially selling below market rate.
No, it’s a sign of an improperly regulated market.
If the tickets were auctioned, they would basically be sold at market value. You submit the highest price you are willing to pay for the section you want, and the system eliminates the lowest bids until you get to the set of people that bid higher that match the number of seats. Those people get the seats at $1 higher than the highest bid eliminated.
tbh how do you regulate the ticket market to demotivate scalpers?
The same way everyone else who regulates it does it - require the ID of the purchaser to be presented upon entry. Ticketmaster/LiveNation are simply not interested in curbing scalping as they make directly money off of it. Small independent vendors have employed ID verification for a long time to stop scalping along with explicit obvious messaging that tickets cannot be resold prior to purchase.
Also add reasonable limits for the number of tickets someone can buy at a time. Being able to buy 8 tickets in one go is absolutely ridiculous.
Absolutely. And if it’s a large group of people, it’s not difficult to have several people buy a few tickets each.
I think that would depend on how you define both the words market and rate.
Simply because some people are buying tickets that were scalped and sold at higher prices, doesn’t mean that the scalp price is the true rate.
When you raise prices you actually change your market demographic. The more affluent you require your demographic to be, the less available customers you will have.
If tickets are bought even entirely by scalpers, then live nation is still selling every ticket they have and should therefore be able to profit. If they raise prices, there will still be scalpers but now they have more risk that there’s less buyers.
Honestly though, everyone is probably better off saving money and watching local performances and giving money directly to the venue and bands.
The last time I went to a large event that was well priced, it was an insane amount of sweaty people rubbing against me for about 6 hours, most of that was spent waiting, and I got the flu afterwards. It really turned me off to large venues.
Always have been. We had a system where bands didn’t make as much as they humanly could because it was generally accepted that the art of live music wasn’t made just for the enjoyment of the highest bidders in society. And this is still largely true from most artists’ perspective. But they aren’t the one setting the prices anymore and profit maximizing, when playing in most medium-to-large venues in NA.
