Blink-182 tickets are so expensive because Ticketmaster is a monopoly

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7gx34/blink-182-tickets-are-so-expensive-because-ticketmaster-is-a-disastrous-monopoly-and-now-everyone-pays-ticket-broker-prices

by Victerius • 4 years ago

327 384 4 years ago

vice.com

advisedwang4• 4 years ago

I sometimes wonder why venues choose Ticketmaster; large as Ticketmaster is it's not the only option, and how did they come to be the main player? My only conclusion is that the venues (and bands) are benefiting.

Here's my theory:

Venues and bands know that for PR reasons they can't jack up the price of tickets, but they don't want to miss out on the revenue from people willing to pay scalper prices. So they set tickets at a nominal price but reserve huge blocks of tickets for the band and venues. Nominally these are "family and friends" tickets, but in practice the band and venue put them immediately for resale. This way the bands and venues can get that gigantic revenue. Meanwhile a small number of tickets are sold at face value and immediately sell out. Ticketmaster profits from fees on the ticket sales and resales.

A "known evil" company like ticketmaster is now a benefit, as "obviously" the jacked up costs are ticketmaster's fault. Meanwhile ticketmaster is really just a service to take the heat off of bands and venues for what would otherwise be seen as price gauging.

NickC255• 4 years ago

Ticketmaster is "chosen" because most venues are owned and operated by Live Nation, who in turn owns Ticketmaster.

Is this a monopoly, and a massive conflict of interest? Yes, and yes.

Most acts don't really have the ability to set their own pricing. Those that do either are huge acts, who kind of have to go to Live Nation venues (because an act like Taylor Swift can't really go to tiny venues when she could sell out a stadium) or are tiny, local bands or artists in niche genres that don't really play venues larger than clubs or bars.

robertlagrant3• 4 years ago

I don't understand - why can't a venue run its own tickets?

olalonde3• 4 years ago

I just checked Live Nation's interactive map and I don't see them having any sort of monopoly. Two venues in Manhattan, two in Miami, etc. Surely those locations have way more venues than that...

duped• 4 years ago

LiveNation only owns a few dozen venues, and it owns fewer than AEG.

They also don't own venues big enough for acts like Taylor Swift, most of them are small to mid sized concert halls. The major acts are selling out stadiums and arenas, none of which are owned by AEG or LiveNation.

bradleyankrom2• 4 years ago

The bands don’t see a cut of the fees that ticket providers charge consumers.

Source: I’m a former talent agent.

advisedwang4• 4 years ago

Do bands/venues get blocks of tickets? Do they resell those?

colinmhayes10• 4 years ago

The cut mostly goes to venues who then pay the bands a larger percentage of the ticket sales.

duxup3• 4 years ago

Many years ago I was told a story by someone who ran a company that ran midsize stadium shows that traveled the company:

Basically in the 70s and 80s there were so few venues that the folks who ran the venues called the shots in terms of costs, dates, etc. They paid venues to run a show there. What choice did they have, there was maybe one venue for hundreds of miles in some cases.

Sometime later new mid sized venues started popping up all over the place. Venues run by cities and etc (who had built these places) were operating at just about break even, there were lots to choose from. Venues sometimes paid up front for a show and then would take a small cut of some other activity on the day of the show. The tables had turned, for a while.

Now venues are run by the folks running the whole thing, the venues, the tickets, all sold by the same people.

What never seems to get mentioned (often enough) is people will pay these crazy prices ...

bombcar12• 4 years ago

Just like when baseball players started getting paid, there was a large amount of money being left on the table and it's now being taken.

It's decent in a way; I'd rather have the band, venue, and Ticketmaster make money directly than scalpers indirectly, but I can't really complain that people pay the prices asked; if they didn't eventually the prices would start dropping.

JKCalhoun• 4 years ago

People who want to see a specific artist have no choice but to pay those crazy prices.

neoyagami• 4 years ago

here in chile the venues must "wink wink" receive extra money from tickets sold. this is added to the total cost, also a lot of venues are being bought by you know who.

nharada• 4 years ago

reserve huge blocks of tickets for the band

Wait are you saying this is what happens or this is the theory? Any shows I've been given a friends/family ticket they just put your name on the guest list and you show your ID at the door. Unless this happens at massive venues (like stadiums) I don't think this is normally true.

robust-cactus2• 4 years ago

Yea they most definitely hold back seats for a variety of different reasons and release the holds as the concert date gets closer. You can probably find tickets day of as a result. (Mainly for seated events, less so for others)

advisedwang4• 4 years ago

I don't know if this is what's actually happening; it is my supposition. I probably got this from reading something along these lines somewhere but I don't recall if that was other supposition or fact, or whether I'm extrapolating.

robust-cactus2• 4 years ago

So funny story

Ticketmaster is chosen for 2 reasons

1. It actually does have the most robust tech - although much of it is dated

2. Most shockingly because it takes the brunt of the brand punishment

The ticketing, events, music, etc industry is built on many many middlemen. Lawyers arrange contracts between bands and venues. Promoters sit in between and set everything up but take their cut from TM.

TM is chosen because it can make a promoter fee look like a ticketmaster fee. Which makes all the accounting work when the band/venue agreement say profits are split 50/50.

While TM and live nation are joined at the hip, the above was all true before they merged. Which is also ridiculous. Don't get me started on clear channel who owned livenation and all the radio stations... Or the fact the it spun out of CBS.

maxfurman• 4 years ago

You're absolutely correct. A big chunk of the extra fees on ticket prices goes back to the venue. Ticketmaster is just a cover, because everyone already hates Ticketmaster.

wdr14• 4 years ago

how did they come to be the main player?

In the 60s, venues had to pay someone to run ticketing for them. Ticketmaster came along and said "Hey, we'll do it all for you, and you don't need to pay us a cent. All we ask is you let us add a $0.25 fee to the ticket."

From the venue perspective, it was a no brainer.

Later, in the 90s/00s, Ticketmaster was lightyears ahead in building a scalable infrastructure that could handle peak onsale demand for major artists. Want to sell out the Staples center for 5 nights in 4 minutes? Most LAMP stacks of the era would just melt. Most ecommerce platforms weren't built with non-fungible inventory in mind. Meanwhile Ticketmaster, through VAX assembly & sharding, was able to handle the load.

adamgordonbell• 4 years ago

Isn't TicketMasters service to be the bad guy. Bands and venues get to blame them for the prices and in turn ticketmaster gets a cut. Company to blame as a service.

bombcar12• 4 years ago

This isn't only Ticketmaster! A registration tool I've used lets you add a fee that ostensibly is to pay for the registration processing but if you set it above X + 3% you get all the extra. Very sneaky!

Firmwarrior2• 4 years ago

Man, I hope all the electronic food ordering sites are like that

Every restaurant here takes online orders, but ordering online tacks on 10% or more in fees. I just call them on the phone to avoid the fees, since it seems insane to me to pay $8 just for 2 seconds of using a web app

non_sequitur• 4 years ago

So the real complaint is dynamic pricing, which is essentially raising prices to what the market will bear, instead of having (what was formerly artificially) low prices that get scalped. Now the extra money that used to go to scalpers goes to TM instead, and the downside is that some % of fans that could previously luck out and get cheap tickets no longer can.

Isnt this...not a bad thing? There's fundamentally just a supply and demand problem, with more people wanting to see these concerts than there are concerts. The article mentions that Garth brooks solved this by doing more concerts (e.g. 9 in a row in the same city!), but that's obviously not viable for everyone. Is there a better solution? Even if there were 5 different companies selling concert tickets, wouldnt they inevitably move to dynamic pricing for the same reason?

gregdoesit• 4 years ago

I was having the same question.

Original situation: tickets are priced too low, and sell out almost immediately, with scrapers buying much of the tickets, then reselling them. Fans are furious! Plus: the band+seller is leaving money on the table, scrapers are making a killing.

Current situation: tickets are priced at market value thanks to dynamic pricing, so they no longer sell out instantly, and scrapers are discouraged from buying them. Fans are furious! Plus: the band+seller make more money than before, scrapers make close to none.

exq• 4 years ago

Do you have a source for the last sentence?

nicoburns4• 4 years ago

You can ban resale (except at face value), and enforce this technologically. Some people are doing this already.

akudha3• 4 years ago

Life is too short and there are big problems to deal with - my grocery bill went up by 25% in the last couple of months, and my salary is still the same. My rent went up by more than 9% this year.

I don’t feel bad for people dropping hundreds, thousands of dollars to watch a band or a comic. I don’t feel bad for TM either - they are a monopoly.

The Whole situation is just terrible. Same for sports events

Me - I’m happy watching my favorite artists on YouTube or buying their singles or MP3s wherever available.

mschuster912• 4 years ago

Current situation: tickets are priced at market value thanks to dynamic pricing, so they no longer sell out instantly

And that means that ordinary working class people can't afford a lot of concerts any more. Entertainment only for the rich elites, bravo.

pedrogpimenta4• 4 years ago

I think the premise is wrong because:

- "tickets are prices too low": What do you mean by "too low"? Is the price that's set by the people involved low? Or is it what they think the value of the ticket is?

- Can you imagine if bananas were now $50 per banana? I mean, if there was only ONE company selling them, it would actually probably have already happened. So that would ultimately be the "market value".

mattgreenrocks2• 4 years ago

The crux of it is this change was implemented at a time when people are already being squeezed five ways from Sunday by everything else.

It may feel more fair that the fastest clickers win and ticket prices don't change (and many people don't get them) versus the fastest clickers get the cheapest tickets and other people have to pay 2-5x as much.

MrPatan• 4 years ago

Everybody understands economics. Everybody pretends not to when it's in their benefit.

trynewideas2• 4 years ago

Fans are furious!

Fans who remember when Ticketmaster didn't have a vertical monopoly on arena tours are furious at how everything they warned other fans or the industry about 20 years ago came boringly true.

Fans who had a slim chance of affording a $60 ticket that they had a slim chance of actually buying under the old model are furious because now they have a zero chance of affording any ticket to any in-demand show.

Fans who could always afford and always bought $250 tickets, whether through resellers under the old model or first parties under the new model, are less angry but still have complaints about how Ticketmaster is still as bad 20 years into selling tickets online at the actual ticket sales motion - carts getting dumped out before the end of the transaction, timeouts due to overloaded infrastructure, bad venue experiences. (Resellers could actually exchange money for goods and services about as well as or better than TM, and when the tickets were legit they actually got you into the venue 100% of the time.)

All three face the same core problem - Ticketmaster's monopoly makes their lives worse.

Artists _who are big enough for TM to pay attention to_ are about the only typically shorted party who like how this played out. The rest of the industry is basically locked out with few or no alternatives depending on the market.

unethical_ban3• 4 years ago

Some bands don't want to maximize their profits. Shocker: Some artists want people of all incomes to enjoy their work.

But allowing scalpers/TM to do pure market pricing can fuck over the ability for a lower-middle income person to see these kinds of shows that to them might be the equivalent cost of a weeklong vacation.

Therefore, the idea (which should be at the discretion of the artist and only the artist, to hell with TM) is "charge an affordable price and ban scalping". Scalping can be controlled by technology; making sure any resales/transfers of ticket ownership go through the ticketing agency and only for the original price.

polio• 4 years ago

I think it's worth mentioning that price is only one way to allocate the scarce resource. What strikes me as better socially and for the liveliness of the audience is to offer discounts to the top 25% of fans, as determined by Spotify or Apple Music, and then let the free market fill in the rest. Some balance of this would let regular fans get a shot while also maximizing revenue for the other block of tickets.

jypepin• 4 years ago

Yeah, high prices suck but I do agree and fail to see what, exactly, is wrong here?

Don't get me wrong, I don't like TM, I don't like monopolies and I don't like high prices, but... price = equilibrium between offer and demand, it's the basics of our capitalist society, and all this look like to me is that TM is doing a good job at figuring out the equilibrium price for their tickets?

pfortuny• 4 years ago

With the consequence that “only rich people get to see Beyoncé live”.

Which may be good or not, I have not an opinion.

conradfr2• 4 years ago

You have priced out part of your fanbase which can create resentment, and concerts where only the rich people attend are not the best, ambiance wise, especially if you want to play other songs than the radio hits.

bena• 4 years ago

Yeah. The problem is really scarcity. A venue can only hold so many people. And one of the easier ways to filter out people is to price the item so that only so many would buy a ticket.

That's essentially what scalpers are taking advantage of. They're betting that the ticket will sell for more than the cost to someone, they just have to find that person.

If tickets were $5 or whatever is deemed reasonable, that doesn't mean more people can go, it means a slightly different group of people will go.

xeromal2• 4 years ago

This is just my shower thoughts, but I think it's because getting tickets for the past century has been getting in line early / getting lucky, but now it's just whoever is the richest wins.

Nextgrid• 4 years ago

In practice, can't rich people just pay people to stand in queues on their behalf and acquire tickets the same way?

redox99• 4 years ago

This is a typical comparison between capitalism and communism. In capitalist countries, given a scarce resource, what determines who gets it is generally money. In the USSR this was often determined by queues. [1]

[1] https://www.qminder.com/blog/queue-management/queues-in-ussr...

nicoburns4• 4 years ago

Is there a better solution?

The other option is to prevent ticket resales (except through the original ticketing website at face value). This arguably leads to a more equitable distribution of tickets as your ability to buy tickets isn't dependent on how wealthy you are.

Even if there were 5 different companies selling concert tickets, wouldn't they inevitably move to dynamic pricing for the same reason?

Not necessarily. It would presumably depend on the preference of the artists (who would choose which ticketing company they use). I see two models being popular: one with dynamic pricing where the extra money in paid to the artists. One with fixes pricing. I can't see any artists freely choosing a model with dynamic pricing where the ticketing company pockets the difference.

tylermenezes• 4 years ago

Ticketmaster has exclusive agreements with most large music venues, artists have no real choice. (I have booked large venues before.)

patmorgan23• 4 years ago

Tickets are usually sold by the venue through a vendor (ie Ticketmaster, seat geek,etc) not by the artist. This way the venue's box office/event staff only have to learn one ticketing system.(and they easily can sell venue specific add-ons like parking)

colinmhayes10• 4 years ago

This isn't better for the artists or venues because they're leaving money on the table. Dynamic pricing means artist and production share the money scalpers used to make.

nordsieck• 4 years ago

The article mentions that Garth brooks solved this by doing more concerts (e.g. 9 in a row in the same city!), but that's obviously not viable for everyone.

I think a big part of the problem is: it's challenging to estimate the demand for events. It's just less risky to consistently underestimate than over estimate. A sold out venue is annoying to fans who can't attend or who have to play a lot. But an under-attended event can be financially bad for the performer (depending on how deals are structured).

Combine that with the limited number of venues that can accommodate large audiences, and I think it's generally not surprising that this is a persistent problem.

I think there is a good solution; it just takes more work on the part of the performer: ticket pre-pre-sales. If the performer can "sell" all/most of their tickets before they even start talking to Ticketmaster, that should give better control over pricing since they can "rightsize" the number of performances they do in each place.

Kon-Peki• 4 years ago

You’re right. The strategy Brooks is taking (based on what the linked article in the linked article says) is that he announces a set of shows. If they sell out and the secondary market prices are very high, he adds another set of shows. And then keeps doing that over and over again.

The problem for his fanbase is that there is no reliable way of knowing whether another set of shows is going to be added. So you have to gamble on whether to wait for another show to be announced or to buy the tickets on the resale site.

Some factors affecting the situation include the fact that the band is scheduled to be in another city on some near-future date, as well as the fact that the venue is scheduled to host a different band/event on a near-future date.

The Garth Brooks solution isn’t really a solution but it does make things a little better.

Pre-pre sales are also something that will help, as you mention.

But ultimately, without some sort of legislation, there is almost certainly no solution to the “problem” of a band choosing not to maximize revenue.

bombcar12• 4 years ago

The absolute amount of logistics required for a show is tremendous, and if you look at a tour schedule you'll often see that it's absolutely packed - no time to add in extra shows if others sell out.

This is why the artists will have fan clubs and such, it can greatly help them determine what they could sell and how many shows. Sometimes you can switch to another venue in the same city, but that only works when they're both owned by the same company, usually. And it other cases you can open up more "seating" but that really only works when playing to stadiums.

datadata• 4 years ago

Dynamic pricing isn't the issue here, the issue is that the extra profits generated by dynamic pricing are going to ticketmaster rather than to artists.

If artists took home the extra profits, there would be more incentive for the market to provide more quality artists, more concerts, and cheaper prices, supply would meet demand.

But since the profits go to ticketmaster, ticketmaster might not even have higher total earnings if it increased supply, as prices might decrease faster. Higher supply of concerts would also give opportunities for competitors to ticketmaster to emerge, as it would have to control a bigger market.

ethagknight2• 4 years ago

Can you provide a source that Ticketmaster keeps extra money? I would find that unlikely.

olalonde3• 4 years ago

Dynamic pricing isn't the issue here, the issue is that the extra profits generated by dynamic pricing are going to ticketmaster rather than to artists.

If that's a problem for artists then why do artists chose to do business with ticketmaster? Selling tickets isn't exactly high tech...

forrestthewoods2• 4 years ago

extra profits generated by dynamic pricing are going to ticketmaster rather than to artists.

Yeah I don’t think that’s true?

My understanding is that even a portion of the “service fee” TM charges also goes to the artists.

One of the most important services that TM provides is they are a scape goat. Artists can charge crazy high prices and TM takes the blame. They’re willing to be the bad guy.

brentm• 4 years ago

A typical artist deal with a promoter would include an 85% (artist) / 15% split of profit after a pre-negotiated split point which covers the costs of producing & marketing a show for the promoter. I've never seen a full LiveNation tour agreement and perhaps they could have bought out Blink for each show with a different style deal but I'd be surprised if that still didn't include some upside for dynamic pricing otherwise why would the artist ever agree to do it? Everyone knows $600 tickets aren't exactly popular but this is a business and if that's what they're going for a secondaries anyway it's better for the artist to collect the cash in my opinion.

JumpCrisscross4• 4 years ago

issue is that the extra profits generated by dynamic pricing are going to ticketmaster rather than to artists

Ticketmaster claims "promoters and artist representatives set pricing strategy and price range parameters on all tickets, including dynamic and fixed price points" [1].

[1] https://www.ticketnews.com/2022/07/springsteen-manager-fires...

bin_bash2• 4 years ago

The article doesn't say this at all. In fact it says the artists are making a lot of money here (though I can't find any details on rev-share or anything).

Ticketmaster has done something that is very lucrative for itself and for artists, but also worse for the average fan: It has simply jacked up ticket prices for certain high-profile events to a level where all tickets are more-or-less priced at the maximum level that the secondary market would normally bear

pcarolan• 4 years ago

Ticketmaster's primary value prop is a heat shield for artists. The artists get to blame Ticketmaster while charging the highest market clearing price, and Ticketmaster gets to make a nice profit being the 'bad guys'.

If the status quo was really a problem for the big artists (not all) then alternatives would emerge.

If you want to learn all about it, this book does a good job: https://www.amazon.com/Ticket-Masters-Concert-Industry-Scalp...

mywittyname3• 4 years ago

extra profits generated by dynamic pricing are going to ticketmaster rather than to artists.

The artists get paid. Even back in the days "scalpers" were largely selling tickets that artists ear-marked to be sold at market prices. It gave them cover for high ticket prices by selling a few at "official" prices, while letting them earn market value on most tickets sold.

And anything the scalpers couldn't sell would be put back on ticketmaster at the official list price. And people would get an email about how they "found" more tickets to a show.

mixmastamyk5• 4 years ago

TM is smarter than that. They’ve always given kickbacks to the artists to keep (most of) them quiet.

rco8786• 4 years ago

the issue is that the extra profits generated by dynamic pricing are going to ticketmaster rather than to artists.

the article doesn't say anything about this

If artists took home the extra profits

Do you have any evidence to show that they do not? they definitely weren't under the previous model, because it was the secondary market where prices were getting set "dynamically". But now that it's happening in the primary market, aren't the artists paid out on a % basis?

wdr14• 4 years ago

Dynamic pricing isn't the issue here, the issue is that the extra profits generated by dynamic pricing are going to ticketmaster rather than to artists.

No.

This is just wrong. Pricing & fees are determined by the promoter and/or the artist. Ticketmaster takes a cut, but the tickets are owned by the promoter. The promoter has the final say in how revenue is shared with everyone -- including the artist & Ticketmaster.

dleather• 4 years ago

From an economic perspective, dynamic pricing maximizing total welfare. Those with the highest person values get to see the concert, without the middle-man making money.

foogazi2• 4 years ago

the issue is that the extra profits generated by dynamic pricing are going to ticketmaster rather than to artists.

Are you sure?

TFA: > Ticketmaster has done something that is very lucrative for itself and for artists

Scalpers can help clear tickets in advance of expected demand - but with all the data TM has why not capture the value themselves

The problem is alienating fans while trying to discourage scalpers

nazka• 4 years ago

I don’t see where is the problem with that. Artist jobs are to make great music and be great on the scene of concerts. And that’s where their value and money comes from. But their jobs is not to optimize prices and ticket sells or market them. That’s where Ticketmaster is good at and it’s normal for them to reap their own profit from their work.

Now what I don’t like is the monopoly however. That’s bad…

duxup3• 4 years ago

Yeah the whole monopoly aside. If $600 is the market / people will pay, that's the market.

Lets say the same band plays the same venue, but no ticket monopoly.

Everyone knows folks will pay $600, so they're going to charge it, fees or not.

raldi2• 4 years ago

If an artist wanted to allocate tickets by lottery at lower than market price, they would need a solution that would prevent ticket brokers from vacuuming them up and reselling them at market rate.

For instance, at time of sale (or signing up for a lottery ticket) they could ask for your name and then check everyone's ID at the door to make sure it's a match — just like airlines do. But this would introduce long delays.

Another option would be an app that used FaceID at time of lottery signup and then again to pull up a barcode to display at the gate, to make sure it's the same face.

redthrow• 4 years ago

allocate tickets by lottery at lower than market price

I think that's what Kid Rock does for the best seats in the first row, while selling the rest at market rate

Kid Rock Vs. The Scalpers

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/04/20/475023002/epis...

chimeracoder3• 4 years ago

The article mentions that Garth brooks solved this by doing more concerts (e.g. 9 in a row in the same city!), but that's obviously not viable for everyone. Is there a better solution? Even if there were 5 different companies selling concert tickets, wouldnt they inevitably move to dynamic pricing for the same reason?

It's a little more complicated when you realize that Ticketmaster is owned by Live Nation, a conglomerate which has bought out most of the major performance venues over the years. Many bands (including Blink 182, I believe) get contracted to Live Nation for the entirety of a tour, which means that they will only be performing in venues that Live Nation owns and operates, using Live Nation's ticketing system (Ticketmaster) and accepting all of the terms and issues that come along with that.

As a condition of the 2010 merger, Live Nation promised the US Justice Department not to retaliate against venues that partnered with other ticketing providers until 2020. Because they violated that agreement, it was extended until 2025. You can look at that as "Live Nation is legally prohibited from retaliating against other venues", or you can look at it as "Live Nation has already demonstrated that they will leverage monopoly power in flagrant violation of the law, and in 2 years they will be permitted to with no recourse". Both are true.

You can refuse to use Ticketmaster, but that means likely getting locked out of most of the venues you'd want to perform at - both the ones owned by Ticketmaster/Live Nation and the ones that have an exclusive contract with them (ie, de facto owned by Ticketmaster/Live Nation).

Look at how things went for Pearl Jam, and realize that Ticketmaster/Live Nation has even more of a vertically integrated monopoly now than they did 30 years ago.

AlexandrB• 4 years ago

I think some artists would prefer to have an audience of teenagers and megafans (usually people without a lot of money) to a bunch of MBAs and professionals who can actually afford the tickets at market rates. Pure supply and demand is great if you don't care about who is your clientele but audiences are not undifferentiated.

bee_rider• 4 years ago

Yeah, it seems to be a good strategy to build a following by offering tickets to kids for cheaper.

It also makes sense that as a band gets older, they might not be as incentivized to do so. How many new Blink-182 fans are there in 2022? I assume these guys are primarily worried about making sure they have enough cash in their kids' college funds and and making sure their retirement accounts are in really good shape (no shade intended, these are important concerns).

throw8274747372• 4 years ago

Not understanding how everything has to follow ultra-capitalism-free-market capitalism rules.. especially if the original artist/seller doesn't want it.

Fixed fair prices for such a thing and just first-come first-serve is imo the right thing. E.g. my soccer club has much more demand than places, you can sell your ticket, but selling for higher prices is forbidden. That's good, because it is for the people and not the riches.

Please just not shrug every problem off with "what's bad here, only riches now can have that"..

bombcar12• 4 years ago

But how do they prevent selling for higher prices?

Thing like "I'll give you $50 tomorrow if you sell me your ticket today for the sticker price"?

michaelt2• 4 years ago

Now the extra money that used to go to scalpers goes to TM instead, [...] Isnt this...not a bad thing?

The problem with setting your ticket prices too high is it stops young people joining your concert-attending fanbase, leading to your fanbase ageing. This is what happens to opera houses and similar institutions - they 'market price' the tickets to $150 then find all their customers are in their 60s.

Of course, for a band it might be less of a problem than for an institution - the band ages at the same rate the fans do, after all. And merely offering $50 tickets that get brought by scalpers and resold for $150 doesn't solve the problem.

petercooper• 4 years ago

The problem with setting your ticket prices too high is it stops young people joining your concert-attending fanbase, leading to your fanbase ageing

Totally a tangent, but I've noticed this with sports cars in recent years. The companies like to portray an image of glamorous professionals driving their cars and most times I see a Ferrari or a Porsche nowadays a more typical, older person is behind the wheel. I'm not judging if that's a good or bad thing, but I find it amusing versus the branding image. Could, too, all the fans at a highly priced Taylor Swift concert end up being 50+? :-)

mattgreenrocks2• 4 years ago

I've seen Muse at least 25 times and have paid face value for tickets when buying them direct through TM for almost all of those times. I saw them first in 2006 for about $25-$35 at Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC for the Black Holes tour. Since then, they've become more and more popular, causing ticket prices to go up. Totally fair. With their 2023 Will of the People tour, dynamic pricing essentially sets the floor of ticket prices much, much higher. I'm seeing 200-level seats starting at $150 per ticket at some venues. Apparently that was the point where I'm fine with just completely missing the tour. I suppose the system works in that regard.

The specific implementation of it is also not great. TM has you wait in a queue to select seats; the position in which is randomly assigned. This is to protect the servers from the thundering herd. (Lousy but fair.) When you finally make it in, you need to choose your seats and book as fast as possible, because dynamic pricing can cause the seats you selected to move up in price while you are selecting them, and the implementation doesn't let you OK it and move on, you have to essentially hope you choose and confirm before the price you locked in goes up. If you don't, it says, "sorry, the prices have gone up since you started, please choose new seats." This is both a super crappy UX and it ensures that they milk every last cent from people, as you can't lock in a price by moving quickly.

The thing is, I'm not sure if the dynamic pricing floor ever gets dropped. Are they fine with not selling out venues because the people get priced out? Or do we wait on the secondary market to try to push prices back as demand recedes?

The previous system sucked quite a bit with scalpers. However, the new system seems like it brings a whole new set of problems with it and it has made me question whether I even like going to concerts at all. Maybe I just don't care much anymore and this is a bridge too far. I don't know.

bombcar12• 4 years ago

The "fair" method would be to reliably slice tickets into ticket classes (location, etc) and then let people select the tickets from the slice they want, and then basically do a reverse auction and set all the prices for that slice to whatever would sell them out exactly.

However, this leaves money on the table (if there are five seats, and ten people, and the fifth highest amount paid would be $10, then they get $50, even if one person would pay $500 for a ticket).

bryans• 4 years ago

Performers don't actually want to be bleeding dry their fans' bank accounts. They are forced to participate in that system if they want to play at any venue over a particular capacity, all of whom have strict partnerships with TM. In that system, the performers have virtually zero input or control over the ticket price, and often have tight restrictions on where and how often they can perform at these venues.

So, it's not a matter of scarcity, but a matter of one company hyper-maximizing profits based on an illusion of scarcity that they create. And the only intention is to con middle and low-income families into spending exorbitant sums to see their favorite performers, while the labels and marketing agencies spend millions to convince them the shows shouldn't be missed. It's all by design.

Seeing a concert should not be a once in a decade event, and for many families, it currently is. And the only people preventing them from seeing those shows are a handful of executives at a couple of companies, for the sake of absolutely absurd profit margins.

InitialLastName• 4 years ago

The other part is that the scale of large musicians has grown so big (the biggest 100+ artists in the US have selling-out-stadiums-anywhere-on-earth scale) that there is effectively unlimited demand for their shows at any price.

If you want to see Blink-182, Pearl Jam or Taylor Swift, yes it's difficult and expensive. On the other hand, tier 2 artists have nowhere near that difficulty. You could see the Violent Femmes tomorrow night in Red Bank, NJ for $50/ticket [0]. You could see Illuminati Hotties for $30 in Brooklyn [1]. You can find local bands and see them probably for the cost of a few drinks at a bar.

[0] https://www.ticketmaster.com/event/1D005CCDD5B03A72

[1] https://www.axs.com/events/432872/illuminati-hotties-tickets

ChrisMarshallNY• 4 years ago

Those of us "of a certain age," will remember when live performances were loss leaders, to drive record sales.

I am not old enough to have attended, but I am told that Woodstock (1) tickets were about $15.

colinmhayes10• 4 years ago

and now record sales are loss leaders for live performances for many artists

exhilaration2• 4 years ago

That's actually pretty expensive! This site https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ says $15 in 1969 is equivalent to $121 today.

duderific2• 4 years ago

That $15 would be about $121 in today's dollars, so I wouldn't be surprised if it were even less than that.

throwaway49274• 4 years ago

And the REAL real problem is that the market will bare a lot. I once sold tickets for a Die Antwoord concert I couldn't attend due to illness. I advertised the tickets on Craigslist for $100 for both, the retail cost being $50 each.

But when I arrived at the venue to sell the tickets, the buyer put $200 in front of my face assuming I had meant $100 EACH. My greed got to me and I took the money.

My conclusion was, ticket buying is not rational, and the ticket market is extremely liquid, so without tying tickets to an identity like airline tickets there isn't a good solution.

MichaelCollins2• 4 years ago

The article mentions that Garth brooks solved this by doing more concerts (e.g. 9 in a row in the same city!), but that's obviously not viable for everyone.

I don't understand why it wouldn't be. If a city has sufficient demand to sell out two or more concerts, aren't the later concerts still profitable? And it's less travel expense per concert. If there isn't enough demand to sell tickets for at least two concerts, then doesn't that mean most of the fans in that city have been satisfied by a single concert?

It makes sense to me that you'd schedule as many consecutive concerts in one city as you can as long as demand is high enough to make each additional concert profitable. That might be 9 concerts, or 2, or even a thousand concerts if you're talking about a city like Los Vegas.

ninth_ant• 4 years ago

This was my thought as well. We keep hearing about how artists are struggling to make money on album sales thanks to the rise of spotify and the demise of CD sales. Wouldn't playing the same venue for a week+ means less inter-city travel, less work tearing up/down the stages, and a lot of income from steady ticket sales?

mrWiz• 4 years ago

How do you decide that demand is high enough? Do you book the next stop in the tour a few days later assuming that demand is high enough for more shows, and then end up paying the roadies to sit around when the demand isn't high enough?

antihero• 4 years ago

It’s a bad thing because it makes music entirely unaffordable to poor people as opposed to having the initial offering as somewhat affordable and fair.

Electronic events, especially the more independent ones, release tickets in ever more expensive batches, eventually hitting them market rate.

Also systems that lock you to buying a fixed amount of tickets and then being only able to sell them for what you paid such as with RA Guide and STEP (for a burner event, Nowhere).

Allowing those with financial privilege access at the expense of those without us fundamentally antithetical to music and art.

seneca2• 4 years ago

Allowing those with financial privilege access at the expense of those without us fundamentally antithetical to music and art.

No, it's really not. There have never been many peasants going to the opera houses of the world. And it's not at the expense of the poor, it's quite literally at their own expense.

All that is happening here is that technology has allowed the market to directly determine prices, rather than artists and venues guessing at what the market will bare. It only means poor people will be priced out so long as artists as a group don't react to the increased demand. Likely "elite" performers will be able to always demand these premium prices but a lesser tier, and those past their prime, will perform at prices poorer consumers will be able to afford.

What we see now is the result of extremely high demand (there are a lot more people in the US than there used to be) meeting limited supply, and new technology allowing for more market efficiency. The poor people who used to be able to get lucky and buy tickets well under market value are certainly going to be less happy, but that has nothing to do with some moral requirement for music.

mariebks• 4 years ago

This is why I think concerts might be a killer app in the Metaverse. Imagine you could attend a super immersive and compelling concert experience with your headset and a special audio setup for $5, and for that price, millions upon millions of people could attend. The artists could still make tons of money since so many people can go at a low price. The only problem I think would be that concerts could be VR “videos” that could easily be pirated and shared, since a digital livestream may not matter as much as going in person.

macNchz• 4 years ago

Since the topic here is Blink-182... I grew up listening to them and managed to go to a special show of theirs in a very small (for them) venue in NYC about 10 years ago. I'm optimistic about the future of VR, but the only aspect of that show that I think would benefit from it was the experience of getting to see the band members up close with just a general admission ticket, since they usually play giant arenas.

Everything else about it was a multi-sensory experience that I think would be totally flat in even the most advanced VR systems: the electric buzz running through the crowd at the opening notes to their biggest hit songs, the mass of people pressing together to get close to the stage, jumping up and down together to the beat, hundreds of others around you screaming along to the lyrics of their favorite songs, people crowd surfing, friends bringing over one too many rounds of beers, the band interacting with the crowd as a whole, feeding off the energy of the room...

Overall I'm not even a huge fan of live music, but it's hard for me to imagine a VR experience that captures all of the energy and human revelry of a great concert.

jiscariot• 4 years ago

I was always under the impression the innovative part of TM's "service" is taking the bad wrap/reputation hit that comes along with extracting more money for venues, artists and (or course) themselves. So essentially being paid to be the "evil Ticketmaster" we all know.

Artists, venues get to blame them while keeping the base cost of their tickets lower (for perception purposes), while still making money on the TM fees.

exhilaration2• 4 years ago

Good point! The percentage of the ticket price that the artists are getting is - conveniently - never revealed so fans are left to assume that it's evil Ticketmaster gouging them. I see a comment above yours https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33290468 that suggests the artists usually get 85% of the profits, and of course we have no way to know.

pbreit3• 4 years ago

And primary sale concerts tickets for even semi-popular artists are still way under-priced.

technoooooost• 4 years ago

Solution: become a death metalhead. Top bands are 20$

markandrewj• 4 years ago

Just fyi tickets still get scalped.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ticketmaster-resellers-las-...

pbreit3• 4 years ago

aka Supply & Demand

nagonago• 4 years ago

I don't know if it's "better", but one solution is to prevent resales. Here in Japan larger acts will sometimes try to prevent resales by tying tickets to a name and doing ID checks at the door (although they often don't bother checking in practice...) or by making the ticket tied to a smartphone app.

Whether this is better or not is up for debate. Personally I think it's good to give everyone equal opportunity to participate in culture, regardless of their financial status.

ianferrel• 4 years ago

Blink-182 tickets are expensive because a lot of people want to see Blink-182 and there are only so many concert seats.

dehrmann• 4 years ago

This is slightly surprising. They're one of the biggest bands of that era and genre, but I still don't see them as being in that much demand. They're not a Rolling Stones. That said, pop punk is having a moment again, Tom is back, Mark is cancer-free, and Mr. Kourtney Kardashian has been drumming it up all over the place.

MonkeyMalarky5• 4 years ago

I think its a function of time and demographic change as well. It's not just that they're popular, but the people they're popular with are now older, have better jobs and more disposable income. Look at the ticket prices for any popular bands that are still doing shows from the boomer's generation like grateful dead. Ultimately what I'm saying is their target market can bear higher cost tickets, so now they cost more. I don't get why millennials are still shocked by this.

jandrese11• 4 years ago

The fundamental issue is that entertainment venues are largely undersized for the local population these days. New ones don't open up very often. They have not kept up with population growth.

In the US it is hard to build a properly big venue anymore because the parking situation becomes untenable and public transit expansion has slowed to a crawl in the past 60 years. You can't build a massive venue because it would have to be surrounded by acres and acres of parking. So if you want to put it in the city there is no parcel of land big enough, and if you want to put it out in the country the roads can't handle it.

racl1013• 4 years ago

The millennials who loved them presumably now have money. Presumably.

tj-teej• 4 years ago

Supply and demand doesn't have to be how all pricing is set.

Why should those with the highest ability to pay be the ones who get to see the band? Doesn't seem very Punk Rock...

Taywee• 4 years ago

What's the alternative? A lottery? Sliding scale based on income? Sounds like more logistics for the purpose of intentionally losing money.

Maybe people should give up on seeing extremely popular bands and check out more local music instead.

jrmg• 4 years ago

Lots of comments here from people who haven’t read the article and don’t know about the scalper-eliminating on-demand pricing it’s actually about. Or that it addresses supply-and-demand near the end with some interesting comments on Garth Brooks:

Country superstar Garth Brooks—who has called out dynamic pricing as well as suggested that the secondary market should be “illegal,” has more or less solved the problem for his fans with one simple trick: He adds shows until they no longer sell out. In recent years, on single tours, Brooks has done the following: He played nine concerts in a row in Edmonton, Canada. He played a dozen shows in Chicago. He played six in Kansas, nine in Tulsa, and eight in Denver.

Indeed, the headline doesn’t seem particularly supported by the actual article to me.

jbellis• 4 years ago

My understanding is that it's absolutely normal for the headline to be written by an editor maximizing for clicks, rather than by the article author.

jahsome2• 4 years ago

Former reporter. Can confirm -- If you only knew...

cbsmith7• 4 years ago

Worth mentioning...

The platform Garth Brooks uses to sell tickets the way he does: Ticketmaster. So it's available to other artists/promoters, if they want to do it. The nickname for that approach is "Garth mode".

vlunkr• 4 years ago

There's lots of back-and-forth in these comments about whether Ticketmaster is the villain, or just the scapegoat for venues and artists to take more money. Without any insider information, I lean towards the latter.

This is a supply and demand issue where the limit on supply is how much Blink-182 wants to perform. Maybe there's a good logistical reason why they don't do "Garth mode", or maybe this tour is just a quick cash grab.

matwood3• 4 years ago

Garth increased supply to match whatever ticket price he wanted to hit.

haunter• 4 years ago

And that's why festivals are more popular. More tickets available and the price / band is significantly lower.

postalrat• 4 years ago

Non-transferable tickets seem to me to be a simple solution. But people want be able to sell their tickets.

So now we are stuck with high ticket prices.

Scoundreller2• 4 years ago

Cash at the door? Or physical tickets sold around town the day of?

People have a love/hate relationship with the frenzy I guess.

raldi2• 4 years ago

Cash at the door would just mean endless lines — people paying with their time instead of their money, and the value of that time is just wasted rather than captured by the seller.

michaelt2• 4 years ago

Concert tickets sold like flight tickets - provide a full name for every ticket booked, at booking time. Queue up at the venue to have your ticket checked against your passport.

dagw• 4 years ago

That's great for locals, but doesn't really work for people who have to travel several hours and book a hotel to get to somewhere where many of the bands I want to see play. For people like us having a guaranteed ticket far in advance is important.

svachalek2• 4 years ago

Yup, I think if any act was really passionate about selling cheap tickets this is the way. But it is intentionally defying the way markets work, the current problem is not because bands or TicketMaster are charging too much, it's that people are willing to pay these prices.

cwmma• 4 years ago

What radiohead did with Ticket Trust is probably the right balance, they made it so you could resell the paperless tickets, but only through Ticket Trust which didn't allow you to resell them for above face value.

tommek40772• 4 years ago

Make it like Rammstein. Scalpers and resellers are out, prices are low. Of course it is still hard to get Tickets.

gaws2• 4 years ago

Scalpers and resellers are out

How do you even track that?

wombat-man2• 4 years ago

It's possible to make tickets non-transferrable. I think MCR did that for a show near me, for the floor section anyway. Never saw any for sale on resellers. People on reddit were saying they were digital only and non transferrable, so you'd have to give someone your ticketmaster login to use it. that plus 2fa could be effective.

Can't confirm. It's possible the tickets were just plain sold out.

tommek40772• 4 years ago

Tickets are personalized and can only be transferred via one platform, that does NOT allow to take higher prices. It might be a bit to socialist for american hearts, but not everyone is living in Amerika.

LatteLazy2• 4 years ago

Ticketmaster exists as a blame absorber. Their business model is to charge huge fees, pass 80% plus of the cash back to bands and managers, but absorb 100% of the blame for tickets being expensive. This is why bands and their managers keep using them despite them being universally hated. You are being tricked, and not (just) by ticketmaster...

jandrese11• 4 years ago

Yeah, if the bands didn't like the situation they would just switch to one of the competitors like...um...

LatteLazy2• 4 years ago

Or they could just sell their own tickets? eBay lets you sell things, they could start there. There is nothing magic about Ticketmaster.

Or they could insist on set prices. Bruce Springsteen did this decades ago. He even insisted on beers at the venue costing no more than a certain amount.

garamgatha• 4 years ago

nice information

sn0w_crash• 4 years ago

As long as people are willing to pay these prices, this will continue.

If a ticket is priced at $200 and someone is willing to pay as much as $500, you can be certain that it will be priced that way.

Stop buying overpriced tickets.

roflyear• 4 years ago

The issue is there are a lot of rich people. Shows like this used to be <$100 not that long ago.

trident50002• 4 years ago

More like people slowly finding out their quality of life is going down in the US. You get to do less fun things now and going forward.

olivermarks• 4 years ago

If you want to see a band locally and are appalled by the ticket costs it's often better just to show up on site. The dynamics change a lot once a show starts if it's not sold out.

Separately last century I had a plastic wallet containing a photo booth picture of me with the word 'press' Letrasetted over it. I was able to hang around by the stage taking photos with a camera that had no film in it sometimes, saw some pretty big name acts doing that but it wouldn't work these days. I also used to sneak in back stage a couple of songs into sets.

More seriously the touts need to sell tickets once the music has started...and will negotiate down a lot...

MonkeyMalarky5• 4 years ago

Slightly tangential but I just recently went to my first concert since COVID hit and ticket master is using digital tickets now? Before you could print a paper copy and get it scanned at the door but now the barcode in the app/webpage is changing every 60 seconds, like the code on an RSA fob. Seems like that on its own is enough to block scalpers.

skellera2• 4 years ago

You can usually transfer or resell those tickets on TM.

It just requires you to stay in their system instead of selling (taking a screenshot of the code) elsewhere.

If they locked the ticket to your name, that would actually block the scalpers but they don’t.

MonkeyMalarky5• 4 years ago

By forcing you to stay in their system it makes it easy to identify scalpers by account behaviour. No need to pin tickets to your name, just bring down the banhammer on accounts with suspicious activity.

scrumbledober• 4 years ago

there's also a feature in the ticket master app to just send the tickets to someone digitally so you can still sell them other ways. /i just got rid of a spare ticket i had on cash or trade.

edit to add: my friend couldn't make the concert, I'm not a scalper!

soverance• 4 years ago

Yeah I hated Ticketmaster for many years, but this is the primary reason I didn't care too much, because I could just print the ticket and not deal with any of their tech gimmicks. Printing concert tickets was basically the only thing I still used a printer for, because a printed ticket was still the most reliable means of getting into the show.

Ever got down to a venue and had shitty mobile service? Ever had your phone die or crash at an inconvenient time? Ever lost data?

Even worse, turns out if you don't have Chrome set as the default browser app on your mobile device then the app is completely worthless and loads no pages (tested on Surface Duo 2). The same problem exists with their website when viewed from Edge on Android: you can't load your account page or tickets at all. Chrome only. Don't worry, there's zero mention of this anywhere on the app store so if you're trying to figure this out while in line at a venue, well fuck you.

So now we have to deal with all this bullshit simply because we can no longer print my tickets.

jacamera• 4 years ago

Really terrible headline for a totally decent article.

The Garth Brooks solution is super interesting.

He adds shows until they no longer sell out. In recent years, on single tours, Brooks has done the following: He played nine concerts in a row in Edmonton, Canada. He played a dozen shows in Chicago. He played six in Kansas, nine in Tulsa, and eight in Denver.

I'm wondering how many shows he does in total per tour compared to other artists. It seems likely to me that he wouldn't be able to visit as many locations which still results in some fans not being able to see him.

luplex• 4 years ago

The problem with dynamic pricing and scalping is that it further divides people by income. Music and culture should be something that brings people together.

I'd like to see a progressive pricing system that somehow forces richer people to subsidize cheaper tickets for poor people.

hemloc_io2• 4 years ago

Does that already exist with shitty vs better seats/areas in concert venues?

Really the place where this happens, much to the hatred of everyone is things like VIP tables at Clubs/Music festivals. The ppl leaving a 50k tab for 1000$ worth of stuff eg.

ascagnel_• 4 years ago

There will always be some level of division. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band used to reserve the space front & center as standing-room-only, and sold it cheaply ($30, I think) on a first-come, first-served basis on the day of the show. But even if you do that, you're self-selecting the people who have the financial ability to take a day (or even multiple days) off from work to maybe get a ticket.

colinmhayes10• 4 years ago

As opposed to dividing people by income and ability to build a scalping bot. Some people get lucky spam refreshing but that's still dividing by ability to drop everything for 15 minutes at the exact right time which usually means rich-ish.

wkdneidbwf• 4 years ago

go see local or smaller acts at smaller venues. don’t go see boring stadium shows. problem solved.

nluken• 4 years ago

You've got the right idea. Large stadium bands are almost always a poor value proposition, and that was the case even before dynamic pricing. Some of these shows are definitely cool, but the price relative to smaller touring acts (who are often just as if not more talented) is so astronomical that it never made sense to me

bsder• 4 years ago

Absolutely this. Hand $100 to a local band that isn't having anybody show up and they're going to treat you like a damn VIP.

I find this whole kerfuffle especially ironic given that the band in question is Blink 182.

Blink 182, a band absolutely known for treating their fans shittily and putting on shitty concerts, are being berated by fans because they treated the fans shittily. I can't wait for the complaints about the shitty concerts to start.

Jeeze people. Take the hint and vote with your wallet.

mixmastamyk5• 4 years ago

Our local 6k seater is subject to this too.

TYPE_FASTER4• 4 years ago

My wife has been a member of the Pearl Jam Ten Club for years. Pearl Jam reserves seats for club members. Members put in requests for tickets to shows, including credit card information. These requests are filled following the process detailed here: https://pearljam.com/news/ten-club-ticket-presale-info. If your ticket request was filled, your credit card is charged, and you now have a valid ticket (or multiple tickets, depending on the request).

You can sell tickets for face value, but not above or they'll be invalid and you might be kicked out of the club.

I'm going to guess that not all artists have the ability to make this happen, but it's helped us avoid the Ticketmaster and scalping craziness.

MengerSponge• 4 years ago

Every artist has the moral ability to do that, but not every artist has the financial ability to do that. Ticketmaster draws a lot of (well-earned) hate for their scuzzy practices, but those same practices make artists a lot of money.

TYPE_FASTER4• 4 years ago

not every artist has the financial ability to do that

Yes. I went to see a band maybe six to eight years ago. The lead singer asked the crowd to buy some merchandise a few times, and went on to explain that since the shift to streaming happened, they don't make nearly as much from radio play and album sales, so depend on touring income much more than they used to.

At least dynamic pricing gets money to the artist that would have just gone to the scalper before. Ticketmaster also has a "Verified Fan" feature where you can request tickets (https://blog.ticketmaster.com/verifiedfan-faq/), with the goal of preventing bots from buying them in the first few seconds when they are made available. While tickets can be sold/transferred for Verified Fan events, I'm not sure if there's an option to prevent sales over face value.

cbsmith7• 4 years ago

It's hard to believe, but maybe, just maybe, scalpers might sign up for artist clubs?

Also Pearl Jam uses Ticketmaster now: https://www.barrons.com/articles/ticketmaster-pearl-jam-good...

TYPE_FASTER4• 4 years ago

scalpers might sign up for artist clubs?

Yes, which is why selling tickets for more than face value can get you kicked out of the club.

kelnos3• 4 years ago

scalpers might sign up for artist clubs?

Sure, but there are probably limits on the number of tickets a member can buy, and club membership isn't free, so that would cut into scalping profits (ok, I guess it's only $20/yr).

Also Pearl Jam uses Ticketmaster

Sure, but the band probably gets an allocation of tickets specifically for their fan club, so they don't have to fight with non-member fans to get tickets at regular prices.

ramesh31• 4 years ago

Moreso it’s because Blink 182 is essentially classic rock at this point. And classic rock tours have always been absurdly expensive. Nobody is going to see them because they just really love what Blink 182 is doing. They are paying a premium for a shot of nostalgia that can’t be had anywhere else, and they can charge these prices because the entire fanbase is over the age of 30.

racl1013• 4 years ago

Pretty much. Late '90s / early 2000s rock is now thee Dad Rock and its demo, presumably has more disposable income, than they did 20 years ago.

toastercat3• 4 years ago

Ahh paying $600 for a ticket. Now that's PUNK ROCK.

gaws2• 4 years ago

Ahh paying $600 for a ticket.

lol really? snagged a bunch of decent seats for <$100.

TrackerFF• 4 years ago

Must be some VIP tickets.

I paid $300 in festival tickets this summer to see Metallica, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Kiss, and 60 other bands.

Now, festivals can either suck or be fun as far as sound, weather, etc. goes - but anything over 100 bucks to see a headliner + warmup gig better be top shelf stuff.

jahsome2• 4 years ago

I was looking at GA floor tickets for this blink show, and the price was $800 at the time.

edit: just checked again. They're much more affordable now at $692 each.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan4• 4 years ago

Standard GA floor, standing-only, were $950 in San Diego (their hometown), BEFORE taxes and fees. [1]

We've started calling them Blink $1082 here.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/KtXnJbe.png

colinmhayes10• 4 years ago

blink-182 isn't punk rock for what it's worth. $600 tickets seem pretty normal for a pop artist.

toastercat3• 4 years ago

For what it's worth, music genre definitions are murky, and blink-182 were bred from a punk scene, and, to a lot of folk, blink-182 is a punk band (even if they are pop-punk, they are related). I was simply ironically pointing out the juxtaposition of $600 tickets with the DIY, keep-costs-low ethic made popular by punk bands.

theGnuMe• 4 years ago

I thought the whole deal with ticketmaster was that they can charge hidden fees on behalf of the band and take the blame?

rjmunro• 4 years ago

Surely if the prices are dynamic and too expensive, just wait until nearer the date of the show and the prices will come down. An artist can make prices cheaper by just adding more dates until everyone who wants to see them can see them.

When the prices are dynamic, the game is no longer about getting to the site the moment the tickets go on sale and buying them as soon as possible, as it used to be, the game is wait as long as you dare while the price decreases until just before it sells out. I think once fans get used to this new game, everyone will be happier (except scalpers).

If Live Nation-TicketMaster are screwing over bands by not paying them their fair share of ticket revenue, they can go to AXS or other venue owners instead and the Live Nation venues will lie empty. They might have to go to smaller venues, so it's a case of balancing the loss of revenue from that with the increase from getting a fairer share.

colinmhayes10• 4 years ago

The prices are high because there aren't any tickets available right before the show starts. They sell every ticket for the most they think they can get. Blink-182 doesn't play enough shows, so they have to filter some of the fans out.

hemloc_io2• 4 years ago

I think dynamic pricing systems are going to come across a lot of scrutiny (even if they don't deserve it.)

Between this and the rental pricing thing, lots of bad press about them.

scohesc• 4 years ago

More and more our culture and arts become exclusively for the upper classes.

Less and less people will be able to see their favorite bands perform live.

Less and less people will be able to travel to see pieces of art/culture/history.

Less and less people will be able to afford tickets to sports games - Hockey, Football, Soccer, etc. - all reserved for the wealthy who can afford $200 a ticket, $15 a beer, and $12 for a slice of pizza.

Society is breaking down and nobody seems to notice or care.

Only the rich and the lucky will be able to experience real in-person concerts, events, shows, history. Leaving the poor and downtrodden left to experience their favorite band through a 7" phone screen and a tinny speaker.

fakethenews2022• 4 years ago

Create your own culture.

racl1013• 4 years ago

Then sell out.

scrame• 4 years ago

Im surprised no one has mentioned Pearl Jam going to court with Ticketmaster almost 30 years ago.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taki...

It's been a lousy monopoly for decades and has only gotten worse.

b0ner_t0ner• 4 years ago

Also surprised only a single mention of Clear Channel in this thread.

r2sk5t• 4 years ago

In many cases TM pays venues to be their exclusive ticketing company. Before TM, venues purchased hardware and software. One of the most genius business moves of all time was this business model innovation.

TM does not keep all the fees they collect, but since the market views them as predatory they are providing "hated company" as a service for their customers.

With respect to dynamic pricing or pricing in general, TM is going to charge a percentage of the transaction as a fee and thus make more when demand is high along with their customer (the venue) and the producer/talent (the venue's customer). It's a complex supply chain.

jandrese11• 4 years ago

Ticketmaster often puts out that "we're just pretending to be the bad guys so people can still love their bands" story and I don't buy it. They are unregulated monopolists so one must never give them the benefit of the doubt. It's pretty clear that the bands themselves are under strict NDAs about the relationship so the only word we only ever get Ticketmaster's side the story.

hnburnsy• 4 years ago

Rest assured that Ticketmaster is doing all this pricing, fees, and ticket availability at the discretion of the artists and artist's management. Ticketmaster is happy to play the bad guy. Many tickets are never sold at the original face price but go directly to the 'verified resale' market with TM sharing the profits with the teams\artists.

Example, The Black Keys were scalping their own tickets for 20x and ordered Ticketmaster to revoke tickets resold on the secondary market.

https://www.ticketnews.com/2019/09/black-keys-wiltern-premiu...

mawise• 4 years ago

Cory Doctorow wrote about this a little while ago[1], he's been using the term "Chokepoint Capitalism"

[1] https://doctorow.medium.com/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism-b8...

tinalumfoil• 4 years ago

Recently, I accidentally spent $100 on tickets that should've cost $40 because I didn't realize ticketmaster was only reselling tickets, they weren't selling originals. No indication cheaper original tickets were available directly from the venue. Ticketmaster made it look sold out.

Really makes me not trust ticketmaster.

NovemberWhiskey• 4 years ago

How does "selling at the market price" constitute abuse of monopoly power?

tablarasa2• 4 years ago

You can usually still go down to the venue during business hours and buy tickets without TM fees, right?

What's hilarious is when I get mad at ticketmaster for charging me convenience fees when I am actively choosing not to walk, bike, or drive down to the venue and circumvent those fees since doing so would be inconvenient. I still make that choice while shaking my fist, and bask in my irony.

jandrese11• 4 years ago

Nope. If the venue even has a box office any more, the person working is just filling out the Ticketmaster webpage for you and getting all of the fees added on.

tablarasa2• 4 years ago

Ooof yeah that's brutal. My friends and I held onto that for a long time though because we liked avoiding the fees but also having the hard copy classic tickets to put in scrap books and what not. I know you can still do it some places but I believe you that their numbers are dwindling.

francisofascii• 4 years ago

Concerts are in huge demand now, post-Covid. I paid way more than I should have this past year. Fans are desperate to be back. I am part of the problem. The number of top tier, establish bands still touring is very small. And they don't want to kill themselves touring every night.

Some less than ideal unorthodox solutions. 1) Go to 2nd and 3rd tier bands. Maybe not at enjoyable as Blink-182, but still good. 2) Go see cover bands. They don't need to. Support the lower tier bands, who are also very talented, enjoy the show, and pay a lot less. You will also find new music. 3) Wait a few years for the post-Covid boom to end and the recession to kick in.

bombcar12• 4 years ago

Live Nation's market cap is only 19 billion, so it's not even half a twitter.

gojomo• 4 years ago

Ticketmaster has monopolistic dominance here, yes. However, the strongest monopoly involved is Blink-182 themselves, with absolute control over how they sell "Blink-182" live performances.

They may be quite happy with some other big, bad corporation taking the hit for policies which manage to capture more of the full willingness-to-pay for the band and official partners, rather than secondary sellers (scalpers).

colinmhayes10• 4 years ago

Right. If they want lower prices the solution is obvious. Play more shows or larger venues if available.

sunjester• 4 years ago

You know it's funny, pricing, if everyone refuses to buy something at a certain price the owner simply abandons the items or makes them cheaper in cost, true? Stop paying these people outrageous prices and the prices will fall.

julienb_sea• 4 years ago

It's a fair argument that Ticketmaster's monopoly position could lead to extortionary fees with small artists. This is unlikely to be a factor with larger artists, and its wholly unrelated to the practice of dynamic pricing.

A monopoly is not required to do dynamic pricing. Airlines have no problem using dynamic pricing on all of their tickets, regardless how competitive the route is. Every major ticket seller is going to dynamic price. If anything, Ticketmaster is consistently undercutting resellers like Gametime in my experience.

mixmastamyk5• 4 years ago

TM finally cornered the aftermarket, probably been dreaming of it for decades.

More evil in my opinion, they have enforced a KYC policy around tickets, where attending without a smartphone and app installed is increasingly impossible. Thanks to Covid making it acceptable. TM has dynamic barcodes now, a printout is no longer sufficient.

I loved live music for a long time and we have a concert location locally but this looks like the end of the line for me. I want to attend anonymously, pay cash, and have a paper ticket as a souvenir.

jmacd• 4 years ago

This is not dynamic pricing. This is a price ratchet based on diminishing inventory. There may be an algorithm at work here, but it would be superfluous. All they need to do is set thresholds that increase the price over a known quantity of tickets.

Dynamic pricing works as a mechanism to bring more supply to bear. You can't do that with concert tickets. The only way it would work with concert tickets would be that as an individual concert's seats started to sell at a certain velocity, then another concert would be added for the following night. That would bring new capacity online, which would bring the market back in to "balance". This would go until there was no more demand. Their result would be the maximum number of total tickets would be sold at the maximum price possible. That is different from "15,000 tickets sold at the highest price possible".

This is nothing more than a way to disguise a significant price increase.

rib3ye• 4 years ago

Did the tickets ever get cheaper as excess inventory showed up? THAT would be dynamic pricing.

comprev• 4 years ago

There was a UK comedian (can't remember their name) who was so outraged at the markup the ticket sales middleman took he refunded all of those who paid and refused to do any more gigs at venues who only sold through that platform.

rowls662• 4 years ago

Not sure if it has been mentioned, but the increase in ticket prices is probably directly related to the collapse of record and CD sales over that past 20 year. Back in the day when live concerts were "cheap" it was partially because live concerts were used as a way to promote the sale of vinyl and CD's where artists made most of their money.

Today with streaming and considerably less revenue coming from record sales, artists have turned to live concerts as their primary revenue source, and to make a "living", they need to maximize revenue from that source.

As a result, in exchange for a nearly unlimited supply of recorded music at low prices, we need to pay significantly higher prices for live performances. It's a tradeoff. Not sure if it was worth it, but there is not going back.

seneca2• 4 years ago

Back in the day when live concerts were "cheap" it was partially because live concerts were used as a way to promote the sale of vinyl and CD's where artists made most of their money.

This is backward. Albums were where the record company made their money. Only mega-stars made their money on albums. Modern musicians have always made their money from live performances, and especially from merchandise. Albums were essentially marketing to bring fans in to concerts. This is why so many artists live on the road.

Artists, and record labels, are certainly making less on albums now though, and I wouldn't be surprised if the labels are now nosing in more on concert profits to make up for it.

rowls662• 4 years ago

Isn't this article talking about "mega-stars"? Only mega-stars can charge $600 for a concert ticket.

nimih• 4 years ago

While this is an interesting theory, my personal anecdotal experience doesn't really seem to support it. Some particular bands seem to have gotten more expensive over time (e.g., if I want to see Modest Mouse in Oakland this December, it'll run about 3.5x what I paid to see them in 2007, not including fees), but I'm still able to go see local and smaller touring bands play at smaller venues for similar prices to when I was a teenager in the mid 00s (maybe $5 more on the face value of the ticket, and probably a lot more in terms of service fees).

Merch, on the other hand, is definitely much more expensive than it used to be, and I imagine that probably is reflecting the dynamic you're hypothesizing, at least to some extent.

anecdotal1• 4 years ago

I wanted tickets to see Adam Sandler in the near future. Tickets are like $5000 because of this.

duderific2• 4 years ago

It might come down though. If it's in the near future, maybe the tickets are priced "aspirationally" at the moment. I have a very hard time believing a large number of people would pay $5000 to see Adam Sandler.

VikingCoder2• 4 years ago

I'd like a mix, please...

20% of the tickets are sold in an auction or some ridiculous market like that.

And 80% of the tickets are sold on a non-transferable basis, in a lottery. (Where maybe you can buy a +1 ticket, but the first one is non-transferable.)

If a band wants a different mix of money vs luck, or the number of +1s you can bring, they can set it differently.

theragra• 4 years ago

Finally, i scrolled to exact my thoughts. Don't understand why people above discuss obvious things, and not this approach.

lukew32• 4 years ago

How do you make a non-transferable ticket?

lukew32• 4 years ago

Answering my own question here, but maybe release tickets the day of the concert. That way, scalpers will be taking a bigger risk since people want to be sure they can get tickets before the day of.

VikingCoder2• 4 years ago

You show your driver's license or state issued ID, and your ticket is tied to that.

I've done that before. It was a bit more inconvenient, honestly, but it got me tickets to something I was happy to see, and it cut out scalpers.

I could also sell my tickets back to the venue, if I needed to cancel.

screye• 4 years ago

Sounds harsh..... but stop seeing the same big artists ?

Most small artists have concerts that cost under 100$ while you can stand within touching distance from them and even meet them later for autographs.

I wonder how much all of these tickets would sell on a truly free market, with real bidding ? I am guessing that Blink-182, with 100x as many fans as my local $100/ticket artist, would at least warrant that sort of linear increase in price.

miki123211• 4 years ago

There's a simple way to solve this.

Companies could just require everybody to enter a name and surname of the person the ticket is bought for. There's the issue of people who later discover that they can't go to a show they have a ticket for, but that can be solved by allowing them to return their tickets to the general pool and giving them (some of) their money back.

mixmastamyk5• 4 years ago

TM already does KYC on every customer now, as if you’re boarding an international flight.

bogomipz• 4 years ago

"“I understand that the ticketing can be frustrating. I bought tickets for two of our shows myself just to see what the experience was like,” Hoppus said. “I had tickets yoinked from my cart and the whole thing crash out. Dynamic pricing. I’m not in charge of it. It’s meant to discourage scalpers. We’re trying to bring you the best possible show for the best price. This is a tour celebrating new music and the band getting back together. Thank you for your enthusiasm and I hope to see all of you at the shows.”

This is the kind of vapid "non-statement" statement usually reserved for politicians. The "best price" for who? Certainly not the fans.

Then further down in the article:

"Country superstar Garth Brooks—who has called out dynamic pricing as well as suggested that the secondary market should be “illegal,” has more or less solved the problem for his fans with one simple trick: He adds shows until they no longer sell out"

It's worth noting that the artist doing the most "punk rock" thing here is actually the Country singer.

Gasp0de• 4 years ago

There is a solution here, and Rammstein is one Band that uses it: Don't sell via Ticketmaster and sell personalized tickets only that are not allowed to be resold.

mike5032• 4 years ago

https://mashable.com/video/john-oliver-ticketmaster

qeternity• 4 years ago

TFA mentions the word "monopoly" 4 times but doesn't actually provide any evidence or even make an argument.

Blink 182 tickets are so expensive because people are willing to pay a lot for them. This is the only reason.

foogazi2• 4 years ago

Haha the author:

I know it is different now, because, in 2009, while I was in college, I bought and sold tickets for the Bruce Springsteen tour that pissed everyone off

Fuck off

hrbf• 4 years ago

I’ve observed this for quite some time now. I’m not exactly affluent. The maximum amount I’m willing and able to spend on any ticket is $50 – and that would have to be an artist I really want to see. The market price is closer to $500. As those two extremes are unlikely to meet any time soon, I’m simply not going and will spend my time (and whatever money there is) on more affordable, more reasonable diversions.

This is another area that will eventually have its bubble popped because it's unsustainable.

adfm• 4 years ago

Blink-182 is a pop band.

I went to a $10 punk show just last week and had a blast.

Who’s enslaved by Ticketmaster?

Blink-182 tickets are so expensive because Ticketmaster is a monopoly

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