I absolutely hate the ticketing system now. I tried to get my mom tickets to see the Lion King, impossible. Tried to get tickets to the Smashing Pumpkins a few months back, sold out. I was lucky enough to find tickets on Ebay for LESS than face value, but most people aren't so lucky and/or persistent in their search. Something needs to be done, although I'm not sure really what CAN be done.

Maybe it's not RMG that has the flawed business plan, maybe it's Ticketmaster.

@zentec: So their business plan is flawed because they were scammed? I'm not sure what you're trying to blame here.

Ticket Resellers are the very reason why I will not go to alot of concert venues. If I can't get it from the original source, I simply just won't go.

But I certainly REFUSE to give in to the bastard ticket-resellers, no matter if they are "official" or not. (Who the hell would pay $2K for a Hannah Montana concert, anyway?)

Buran, if the tickets are worth (will sell) for more than face value then it's inevitable that scalpers will suck them all up in order to make a quick buck.

TicketMaster should simply auction them off on varying (overlapping) time periods which will raise more money for the event AND deprive the scalpers of profit.

Everyone should have an equal shot to get the tickets at a fair price. The ticket resellers are taking advantage of the public. I am not a big fan of ticketmaster but I am glad they are doing something about this. It is about time.

@Buran:

The tickets are worth whatever someone will pay for them. If someone is willing to pay $250 for a seat to Hannah Montana, then that's the value. If the venue or Ticketmaster are stupid enough to charge $80 for what is worth $250, then they get to tolerate the secondary market.

Put the damned tickets for sale on eBay and be done with it. If people want to go *that* bad, they'll pay whatever price is necessary. If the acts are concerned about the high price of tickets, they'll add more shows.

Ticketmaster adds on 20% to 30% in fees. Regardless, you are going to pay more than face value.

@zentec:

It isn't that simple. If the venues charged those kinds of prices for tickets, they'd see their attendance plummet, because not everyone WOULD pay that. This secondary market introduces stratified pricing.

Putting them on ebay could actually drive prices DOWN after a while, as it allows easy comparison. It wouldn't neccesarily get them any more than they're making now...and it wouldn't prevent ticket brokers from once again artificially cornering the market. (Well, unless you did all sales as auctions set to end on the day of the event...but that would make it impossible for customers to plan for the event)

And they don't actually have to put up with it. They could make the tickets non-transferable, or place restrictions on transfers which would make it unprofitable or unfeasible for brokers to operate.

I became aware of this when the hanna montanna concert ticket controversy happened here locally (no I am not a fan).

IMO the BIG ticket resellers should only be allowed to purchase a small percentage of the whole amount of tickets. Individual people who want to have a FAIR CHANCE of obtaining tickets should be able to do so without the big price-gouging resellers snatching them all up.

Perhaps they should go back to not selling online so that the greedy scumbag ticket resellers dont have the advantage? Mail in your request with proof of ID or buy tickets on site. I realize that this handicaps & punishes the legit fans , but sometimes there is no other choice to keep out the resellers who break the rules.

Great, some of you folk would let scalpers sell them for thousands a piece so that only the most wealthy of yuppies could afford to attend. Ticketmaster has the right to sell them for whatever price they want and to control the distribution of the tickets.

@Buran: No, because Ticketmaster is using a vulnerable CAPTCHA (image recognition). [haacked.com]

Suppose the system can be fixed thus:
1. When tickets are sold, they are assigned to the buyer.
2. Once at the event, the said buyer must show his/her ID to let his/her party into the venue.
3. In order to resell tickets, a "transfer" must be made by calling in to TicketMaster.

@zentec: Doesn't mean it's OK to illegally scam a legitimate business. If you want to make money selling tickets, start your own ticket business, legally.

@zentec:
Then you piss off the 99% of your fans that went from having a small chance of getting tickets to absolutely zero since tickets start at $500/ea (because they simply cant afford it). You're just catering to the 1% of your fan base making over $150,000/yr. Its not good PR. Its why you'll never see the prices rise beyond what the middle of the target audience will pay.

I don't know a single living soul who enjoys Ticketmaster. I think their entire web system needs a total overhaul. I miss the days when I'd line up at a record store or concert venue to buy tickets.

Also, the fact that these bots are able to get around the stupid captcha so easily points directly to Ticketmaster having a flawed and crappy system.

@doormat: Who cares about pissing off fans? Madonna does this crap all the time. She pretty much hates her fans.

If I were ticketmaster I'd go after two tech-based solutions:

How they're obscuring their internet addresses to make it look like its coming from various IPs - I doubt its proxies since TM could easily turn around and check to see if the host has ports open. I'm willing to bet they're using a botnet of some kind - an otherwise illegal tactic they could tip the FBI off to.

Second, the payment method. I doubt the person is using the same credit card for every transaction (TM should already be blocking that). How are they creating enough identities to get around any limit?

@b612markt: Madonna does that because her fans have the money. The same goes for The Eagles, Paul McCartney, and other acts aimed at baby boomers - their kids are out of the nest and they're spending their retirement money. So $200+ ticket prices are expected.

Hannah Montana on the other hand, its usually one or two kids and a parent, so you're starting off with two tickets.

No big shock here.

I take great delight in pouncing on ads on ebay going less than face from the obvious resellers (located in Texas, selling 8 tickets to a Seattle event and 6 to an NYC event and then 4 more to something in Nebraska? Suuuure). Screw them, and let them eat the Ticketmaster fees too. The local scalpers are bad enough.

I mean, I went to a show in Portland with 2 extra tickets because a couple friends got stranded due to a snowstorm..nevermind that it wasn't sold out as expected, some dude was hawking TWENTY tickets. What the hell!

Maybe now I'll be able to get tickets to shows I actually care about seeing at a reasonable price again..or maybe TicketsWest will start kicking Ticketmaster's ass (the fees are far smaller, at least)

Another vote for auctioning the tickets and destroying the scalpers resale market.

This is why I'm happy to be an indie snob and disown favorite bands as soon as they're big enough to play in Clear Channel/Ticketmaster venues.

*Granted, my favorite venues sell through Ticketweb, a Ticketmaster subsidiary, but it's a much friendlier, less scalper-friendly operation (you can't get paper tickets via web, iirc).

@morganlh85: I almost think they'll have to do what some colleges with high resale value on the student tickets do: put names on the tickets and require people to show ID.

---

Re: charging what the market will bear -- I see the point to that, but these ticket resellers create an artificial scarcity that drives up the price, which isn't quite the same as charging what the market will bear.

But I wonder, as a practical matter, how much this hurts the acts. Maybe not the biggest of the big, but others. I know sometimes I'm interested in a local concert by a band/act I've heard a lot about from other people, and I look into availability, and the tickets sold out in the first 30 seconds. Well, I just don't care that much, and I certainly don't care above face value. (And locally I've seen concerts that were half-empty because resellers snatched them all up and nobody WAS willing to pay their inflated prices!) This sort of pricing and reselling seems to limit many acts to only their most rabid fans, and deprives them of a chance to grow a base.

I think it also off-puts some people from lesser acts and smaller concerts, when they get used to concerts they want to see already being sold out, they don't bother even checking for smaller acts that DON'T get bought up that way. I hear a lot of people say, after a local concert by some up-and-coming band gets a tiny draw, "Oh, yeah, I wanted to see that, but I didn't want to deal with finding tickets" ... when there were excellent seats at the box office up through concert night! The half-price ticket scheme that London does for its theaters seems a savvier way to build audience.

And on a somewhat related note, Disney's going to have to get those kids' act ticket issues under control. It's one thing for this kind of reselling for a Rolling Stones concert. For a Hannah Montana concert, when the poor girl has to do the talk show circuit urging parents NOT to spend $2000/ticket, that's horrible PR and it's a system badly out of whack. (And yeah, they've already added more shows.)

I dont think that Visa, Mastercard, Amex will let them store and compare the CC numbers to identify mass purchases, otherwise the fix would be simple. 1 CC number = a specified number of tickets.

Why not sell the tickets on the day of the show or a day before and go to a strict RF-ID wristband system where you have to be in the line and get the wristband slapped on your wrist for admission. This would prevent scalping, the wristbands would be tamper proof and would be tied to your ID such as a drivers license, so they wouldn't be able to sell fakes out of a truck or transfer bands. For kids it could be tied to the parents driver's license. If your not in the line you don't get to go to the concert. Yes I realize this would be a huge hassle but something similar needs to be done. Paper tickets are the whole problem imo, there is better technology out there for use at events to prevent this.

wouldn't the easier way to boycott the resellers and boycott the scalpers

If a specific concert was happening and nobody went because of the price/availability of tickets at a fair price - then the resellers and the scalpers would probably be pooched

Yes, but that is realistically not going to happen, someone will show up at that show, boycotts do not really work, there are people that will do anything to get into concerts.

If Ticketmaster and the venues want to end this, they can provide a ton of kiosks at the sites for ticket distribution, just as the airlines and many cinemas are now doing. A purchaser must swipe the credit card used for purchase at a kiosk on-site (no earlier than 4 hours prior to event) or the tix go begging.

The interested parties can designate for which events it would adopt this system. For example, Staples Center in L.A. could implement this for concerts, but not for the Clippers, Kings, and Lakers.

BTW - My brother's best friend made hundreds of thousands back in the day by getting the special code from inside one of the famous ticket distributors. He could then go to a "friendly" agent, like a local grocery store who had the hardware to sell/print tix. This guy would get all the great event seats, nationwide, in advance. Kickbacks are a beautiful thing, people.

If ticket master wasn't such a huge monopoly to begin with the tickets wouldn't sell out so easily.

@latemodel: Incorrect, atleast for Visa. You can store the PAN (the card number), name, service code, and expiration date if you protect it all according to the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). They could easily block multiple purchases on Visa. I imagine other cards have similar rules, but I'm not 100% sure.

Perhaps they get around the limits by using gift cards or using "virtual" credit cards like Citibank can generate?

Ugh, I have no sympathy. Can't we just get rid of Ticketmaster?
I recently bought tickets to Morrissey here in LA. They had a special price of $25 and EACH ticket had a "convenience charge" of $7.50.
For that convenience, I got to stand in a huge line outside for will-call for about 20 minutes. Not sure what was convenient about it at all.
I absolutely HATE them but it seems like less venues here in LA [as opposed to NYC] sell tickets at their own box offices. I would take the extra time out of my life just to not have to deal with Ticketmaster anyday.

To me, the interesting thing here is how the lawsuit is structured. I haven't reviewed it carefully, but it appears that Ticketmaster is not suing the scalpers, but instead the company that makes the software that scalpers use to (allegedly) violate Ticketmaster's TOS.

In this way, the suit is nearly identical to the RIAA's suit against Grokster, based on the logic that the software/tool can only be used to infringe copyright (or here, to violate TOS). This is the same theory that was rejected in the old Sony Betamax case, but is obviously seeing a resurgence now.

Interesting question to those who hate scalpers - does the end justify the means? And if so, will you feel the same when the TV networks sue DVR makers for letting you skip past commercials?

@doormat: It's not hard to get a lot of credit card numbers to fake out TicketMaster. MasterCard and Visa both have some kind of virtual credit card number you can pre-generate and use once. I use it all the time when dealing with online merchants that are new to me.

Economically, there is a problem here: tickets are being sold at a price that is clearly below what the "market" will pay. Hence the reason so many people try to profit by reselling tickets. Now I agree that there are good reasons why the tickets shouldn't just get auctioned off to the highest bidder; some of them are mentioned above, but a big one is that you're then limiting your audience only to people with lots and lots of money to spend or those who will pay almost any price. This makes it harder to build a loyal fan base because it excludes a bunch of (for example) young people who might be your fans for decades but won't get to go at all if tickets are going at auction for $500+.

So, since the underlying problem that creates this massive incentive for brokers to come in and do this is economic, they need to address it in a way that prevents large purchases by any single person. They should force people to register with a real identity to purchase tickets, and then use that to enforce purchase limits. Prosecute people who commit fraud by signing up under false identities. They could also sell the tickets by random lottery if demand exceeds supply.

Conclusion: Ticketmaster is incompetent.

This is another fight that shouldn't be fought. It cannot be won.

Sure, you 'fight the fights that need fighting,' but as [www.despair.com] so eloquently puts it:

'Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win AND never quit are idiots.'

I suppose [www.despair.com] also applies:

'At some point, hanging in there just makes you look like an even bigger loser.'

Ticket brokers (those legal scalpers like Stub Hub) made sense when everyone paid cash and you could only get the tix at the venue...now everyone can get the tix online/on the phone from the venue so why can't we just make the ticket resellers illegal and treat them lik the scalper scum they are?

I don't understand why Ticketmaster cares who buys the tickets. They still get paid.

I'd buy the argument that letting the market rate rule prohibits "early adopter" and fans with less income from getting into the shows, except this is a problem that could be cured by the artists if they wanted to.

Let's face it, concerts have always been expensive. If the acts were concerned about their loyal fans getting tickets, there would be special offers made directly to those fans. They don't, and now with the web, it should be easier and they still don't.

I'd accept the above argument if there was one shred of proof that the acts really cared about those elements of their fan-base.

Yes, it seems TicketMaster simply doesn't want to have to fix their system (to save money, probably). They could store a hash of the credit card number, I would think.

Alternatively, venue owners could simply require a butt in a seat to pay the ticket vendor. If you sell 1,000 tickets but only 2 people show up, then you get paid your commission for two tickets, not 1,000.

Why is everyone such a scammer these days, anyway? What happened to just being nice to everyone.

The free market needs to fix this. Obviously people are willing to pay more to go to a live show. The price should be higher or auctioned off.

And gee, people aren't willing to pay as much for pre-recorded music. So again, let the market decide. Use pre-recorded stuff at under cost to basically drum up business for high-priced live shows -- and wow, a live show experience just can't be duplicated either.

The answer is out there...

@cmdr.sass:

Because eventually people will become disillusioned with Ticketmaster, when they are unable to get good tickets through them. When Ticketmaster is no longer doing any business with the end customer, they become a completely dispensible middleman, and the venues will look at the profits the resellers are making, and the fees that Ticketmaster is getting and start thinking "screw Ticketmaster, I'm keeping that" and deal with the resellers directly.

Actually, didn't ticketmaster start it's own reselling system and even changed scalping laws in most states?

@legotech: We can't make scalping and reselling illegal because ticketmaster lobbied to allow scalping so they could do their own reselling business.

You can always scalp them on Craigslist . . .

For the greedy bastids at Ticketmaster:

Dont sell tickets. Sell PERSONAL SEAT LICENSES to the individual event only. Make it a license for that person,that time.Charge a transfer fee for any sale (change fees are common in other businesses) If someone sells their license without the fee,deny admission. Require all PSL holders to confirm attendance within 30 minutes of showtime (much as airline require check in at the airport) Sell the no shows seats to the walk up crowd beginning 15 minutes before the start.Yield management - Near 100%

For the general public- You can hear the music on the radio for free.A CD costs $20 tops. Other than those two options,get ready to pay market prices for the right to attend.

Easily solved: Ticketmaster sets the initial ticket price to an astronomically high price. The price precipitously falls as no sales are made and the price decline slows as sales increase. The sales price for each ticket is the market price and viola, no resellers.

@weave:

I'd just like to point out that where copyright is involved, there is no such thing as a free market.

Concerts are for rich people only now. The only group that can fix this are the artists themselves, because they have control over the only thing that can really put a monkey wrench in the system -- themselves. If they cared, they wouldn't perform unless the tickets were sold directly to fans at a fair price. They could make that a condition of their performance contract. The technical aspects of doing it aren't tough, but they would be criticized on here and in other places. If you made it so that you had to buy tickets from a vendor using your credit card and then your name and the names of the people you bought tickets for were printed on the ticket and you had to show ID to get into the show -- well, people would just be up in arms every time the new system failed them. Oh the complaints on here would never end. Every week a new story on how Joe Shmoe from New Jersey wanted to see "The Boss" but ended up not being able to go and was not allowed to give the tickets to his brother. Then somebody would coin a snarky name for whatever company was associated with the perceived wrongdoing.