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.
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.