
Why you can’t get a ticket to the NBA finals or other major events - ohjeez
https://theringer.com/ticket-industry-problem-solution-e4b3b71fdff6#.7u2vd9qv1
======
uremog
I recall NPR did a story about how Kid Rock tries to fight scalpers.

[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/27/196277836/kid-r...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/27/196277836/kid-
rock-takes-on-the-scalpers)

TLDR; The best seats are raffle-only. The next best seats are market priced,
all other seats are dirt cheap. Reselling dirt cheap seats is discouraged by
offering slightly more events than there is demand for.

In other words, that strategy will have less (maybe even no) success for high-
profile events which cannot offer more showings.

Bots COULD still kill you, but if everyone who wants a seat can get one, bots
will disappear because no one will buy them.

~~~
danieltillett
I just suggested this from first principles :)

Rather than raffle the best seats, sell a ticked that has an 50% chance of
being a good seat and a 50% chance of being a dirt cheap seat and then decide
on entry which seat you have. A true fan will be ok either way (they will of
course be happier with a good seat), but the scalper won't be able to charge a
premium for a good seat ticket.

~~~
eridius
A true fan would probably be pissed off that some random person who's going on
a lark gets awesome seats whereas the true fan is sitting in the worst area,
despite paying the same price and despite the true fan probably buying their
ticket first.

Also, this system completely breaks down when you consider that people often
go to venues in groups, which means they want to sit together, which means
they need to buy their seats in a batch. If you don't know where you're
actually sitting until you arrive, you won't end up sitting together.

~~~
danieltillett
A true fan is probably pissed off already that some rich bastard is in the
good seats that they couldn’t get. The idea is to give the true fan a chance
of getting a good seat while breaking the economics of scalping.

There is no reason the allocation has to be 50-50. It could be 90-10 where the
tickets are basically sold a little over the cheap price, but you have a
chance on the night of being in the front row. The true fan is going to dream
that they will be the lucky ones.

The group issue could be solved in a number of ways, but the simplest would be
to just sell the tickets in blocks and allocate the blocks to the good or to
the cheap seats.

Somewhat related to this topic the best concert I ever went to was the OK
Computer tour by Radiohead (in 1998 from memory). A couple of friends and I
decided at the last moment to go to the venue and hope that we could get some
tickets off a scalper. Just as we arrived Radiohead released about 50 extra
seats at rock bottom prices (less than $30) via the main ticket office. We end
up in the second row of what was one of the concerts of the decade :)

------
karzeem
The efficient solution is to price tickets at the market price in the first
place. Even if primary sales weren't dominated by resellers, "sign on at the
exact moment tickets go on sale, and hope you're one of the lucky few who snag
one" isn't a fair way of allocating tickets to the fans who want them most.

But why set a price at all? Just auction off tickets in the first place. For
popular events, don't set a price, just let the market decide. That gets
tickets to the fans who value them the most, gives the
venues/performers/athletes the money they should have been getting all along,
and cuts out the resellers completely.

~~~
DrScump
It's still supply and demand, and by withdrawing supply, brokers will drive
prices up _further_ regardless.

The solution is to go back to the old days:

1) have only _live, in-person purchases_ at authorized retailers and list all
sale locations clearly.

2) limit ticket quantities per-person and per-turn-in-line.

3) PDF ticketing _must end_. It is a HUGE vector for fraud. Not only does it
make duplication easy, it makes outright counterfeiting via modification easy.

4) (when needed) earmark the seats with buyer information and restrict entry
to the actual buyer (e.g. use the purchase credit card, or photo-ID if cash
purchase)

Now, brokers could still hire people to get in line, but there is insufficient
payoff with a per-turn limit: the broker would end up with a lot of scattered
pairs (assuming limit=2) of decreasing quality.

~~~
StavrosK
How does that system handle four-five people wanting to go see a concert
together?

~~~
DrScump
They get in line together to purchase?

Or, quantity limits per purchased are relaxed after the initial sale surge is
complete.

------
hackuser
Hmmm ... the former head of TicketMaster wants to,

1) Dramatically raise the price of tickets

2) Prevent their transferability, requiring all buyers to buy from
TicketMaster (or the equivalent)

3) Incidentally track the identities of all ticket buyers and event attendees.

It's for your own good, consumers.

~~~
tptacek
TicketMaster owns the largest secondary market, so this conspiracy theory
doesn't make much sense.

~~~
hackuser
I disagree. Controlling transferability could give their 'official' secondary
market more marketshare, denying other secondary markets access to the tickets
(EDIT: e.g., the NFL, for example, controlling transfers, could allow
transfers only through certain secondary markets and not others). Also, he's
the former CEO, so his interests might not be entirely aligned with
TicketMaster.

Finally, perhaps you can find a more respectful way to address other people's
ideas.

~~~
tptacek
A non-transferable ticket can't be sold on any secondary market. That's what
makes them non-transferable.

~~~
tamana
Ticketmaster administers limited-transferability tickets, they control the
transfers

~~~
tptacek
The post doesn't advocate for "limited-transferability tickets", whatever that
might mean.

------
powera
The reason is because, for political reasons, large events can't charge the
"market-efficient" price.

Super Bowl tickets cost $850 to $1850 in face value, but resold for an average
of about $5000. If tickets cost $5000 minimum the game probably would still
sell out at some point (though not immediately), but people would be even more
angry about the ticket situation.

[http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/03/news/super-bowl-tickets-
pric...](http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/03/news/super-bowl-tickets-price/)

Blaming it on "insiders getting tickets first" and "bots" is just a way of
hiding the fact that it's very deliberately designed to be the best way of
handling things now, it's just that nobody likes scarcity.

~~~
gohrt
Super Bowl could charge $5000 for "box" seats (and put the entire lower deck
and some of the upper deck in the "box", and earmark a stable of cheaper
tickets for "must show ID" sales to fans selected by lottery or whatever.

------
pitt1980
[http://www.stubhub.com/nba-finals-
tickets/grouping/145491/](http://www.stubhub.com/nba-finals-
tickets/grouping/145491/)

Seems like there are tickets to be had if you want them

Not sure why I should be upset people can't get below market prices

~~~
zippergz
I'm upset that I have to go through StubHub, which exposes me to shady sellers
(who I have zero means to vet - I can't even see who is selling which
tickets). E.g.
[https://twitter.com/Jason/status/738489612075569152](https://twitter.com/Jason/status/738489612075569152)

I'd much more happily pay market price directly on Ticketmaster than to some
random seller on a secondary site.

Edited to add: I know that StubHub "guarantees" the tickets. But the
compensation is less than the hassle and disappointment of potentially missing
out on an event I want to see. Especially if it comes in the form of getting
to the door only to find out that the tickets are fake or duplicates (which
does happen).

~~~
jessaustin
ISTM StubHub could end this practice by keeping ticket payments in escrow
until a week after the event. Yeah that would be inconvenient for whoever has
a ticket to sell (as TFA suggests this is kept deliberately vague), but it
would be death for the fraud you describe.

~~~
DrScump
Few sellers would list tickets for far-in-advance sale, then. The strategy
seems to be to do huge volume and let fraud get lost in the noise. They fail
to see the risk of high-volume, planned fraud of well-in-advance sales for
pricey events that are guaranteed to happen (say, the Final Four or Indy 500):
sell bogus tickets a month out, collect payment, close accounts behind you,
profit.

~~~
jessaustin
TFA indicates that these sellers aren't selling on a whim, but rather because
that's part of the income they derive from services they provide to the music
industry. Added inconvenience will annoy them, but it won't inspire them to
leave this money on the table.

------
floatrock
Someone told me another trick not mentioned in this article [written by the
former CEO of ticketmaster]. Can't find a citation, though, so take it with a
grain of salt.

It seems odd at first that certain ticket sites are the exclusive ticket
dealers for some venues. It would seem that in a competitive market where you
can spin up a whole fleet of machines to handle the public sale onslaught that
used to be nothing short of a ddos against your ticketing site, there would be
competition across ticket vendors and that would drive down those service
fees.

It's not a competitive market though. Ticket vendors realize the difference
between face value and market value is uncaptured consumer surplus. To capture
some of it away from the second-hand dealers, they vary the service fees for
venue to venue and show to show.

That's the expected part.

The (admittedly I-don't-have-a-citation-for-it) interesting part is a portion
of that service fee is a direct kickback to the venue. Some of it may be to
cover the performer's higher-than-the-sum-of-face-value-tickets performance
fee mentioned in the article, but some of it is to make sure The Venue deals
exclusively with Large Ticket Site and ignores offers from small ticket.ly
startup armed with some EC2 autoscaling groups.

After all, why go for a more efficient operator when Large Ticket Site offers
you a guaranteed percentage of the uncaptured consumer surplus? That's a
service you would almost pay a fee for!

------
ams6110
If you in any way sell tickets for less than the true market value, people
will find a way to take advantage of that.

The only solution is to sell the tickets at market value from the start. Then
there is no profit to be made by resellers.

Edit: Well there might be still some "market making" business in buying and
selling, since inevitably there will be people who end up not being able to
use the tickets they bought but don't want to stand outside the venue trying
to sell them themselves. But the margins will be much smaller.

~~~
chongli
No, that's not the only solution. The other solution is to make the tickets
non-transferable. Require those at the gate to present their ticket along with
a piece of photo ID matching the name on the ticket. Problem solved.

~~~
karzeem
For underpriced tickets, that basically creates a lottery: everyone rushes to
buy a ticket the second they go on sale, and some lucky fraction get one. If
you're busy at that minute or your computer craps out or you're just part of
the vast unlucky majority, you don't get a ticket. That doesn't seem like a
fair way of getting tickets to the people who want them.

~~~
chongli
That problem is easily solved as well! Just let everybody put in a deposit for
a ticket ahead of time and select the lucky winners by lottery. Anybody who
doesn't win gets their money back.

~~~
karzeem
I meant that a lottery is an unfair way of allocating tickets.

~~~
fmihaila
If the price is below market value, there will be more willing buyers than
tickets. A lottery seems the fairest way to address this imbalance. (I mean a
true lottery like the grandparent suggests, not one of which TCP connections
will time out.)

~~~
karzeem
The underpricing is the core problem. We're trying to assign tickets to
people, so the question is what rules to use to do the assignment. A typical
price system is one set of rules (and IMO the best one). Some kind of contest
where people show off how badly they want a ticket would be another option. Or
maybe you could base it on how frequently someone's bought tickets in the
past. There are of course lots of other options too.

The point is to get the tickets to the people who want them the most. I think
a lottery does a poor job of that.

~~~
tamana
Auction pricing gives tickets to people who have highest paying jobs. Unless
pricing is a progressive %of income, it isn't indicating who wants to go the
most.

~~~
karzeem
Do you have a system in mind that would be more fair?

------
erikb
Okay, so there are more seats than interested people. Someone _will_ end up
pissed because they didn't get a seat. That's a given, or am I wrong?

In that case you can't have a happy, fair solution. There is always a
competition. That is how sharing too limited ressources works. Think about you
and your brother sitting in front of the dinner table and there is one piece
of the cheese left that you both love. Competition is fair!

And honestly I like the competition about relationships, about money, about
speed, and about smarts (=who writes the best bots). There are different
options. If you are not good at relationships maybe you can find a way to earn
more money, for instance. And none of the given options includes opening the
head of a competitor with a broadsword, or barbequing him with a flamethrower.
Sounds like a good and healthy competition to me.

------
pbreit
Former CEO of Ticketmaster (and the now defunct Twitter commerce group) so you
gotta take him seriously. But the article is a little ridiculous.

First, the converse is that very few events actually sell-out. Just the hit
ones.

Second, you've got a million Warriors fans from the bay area alone. Yes, it's
going to be hard (but hardly impossible) to get 1 of the 20,000 tickets.

------
danieltillett
I would have thought the solution would be to put the general public (true
fans) allocation into a lottery that was drawn a limited time from the day of
the show. If you wanted to be clever about it you could charge a small fee to
enter the lottery that would in aggregate amount to the true market value of
the tickets on offer.

------
fredophile
Why not do a dutch auction? Tickets go on sale on day 1 at price $x. Every day
the price drops until they reach price $y. If you have plenty of money and
want the absolute best tickets then you can pay extra to buy earlier in the
sales window. As long as $x is high enough, scalpers don't have an incentive
to buy tickets because the market has already shown there aren't more buyers
for tickets priced higher than the current value.

If necessary you could stagger your sales so the cheap seats don't go on sale
at all until the price for the expensive seats drops below some threshold.

------
xivzgrev
"If artists are willing to boycott streaming music services to protect the 20
percent of their income that comes from recorded music, why wouldn’t they fix
live music, where they make 80 percent of their income?"

Because as you yourself pointed out, theyre maximizing income by taking
guarantee pay days above face value of all tickets. And by performing fewer
shows they drive up value per show.

With streaming they actually think there is money left on table. Thus boycott
temper tantrum to try to force spotify to cough up more money.

------
dclowd9901
Here's a way to win: don't play. I see all the live music I want to see (and
for cheap!) because I've expanded my horizons past the radio and pop fare. I
guarantee you for every Kanye or Kendrick, there's a Chester Watson or Isaiah
Rashad or Joey Bada$$ that will just as handily blow your mind.

I get the sense that most people go to popular music acts to check in on
Facebook. That's not a crowd you wanna fight for tickets. Support small
artists.

~~~
fma
And sporting events...the only ones I go to are tennis. I can walk around all
day and watch many players...people come and go so you have a good chance of
getting great seats if you wait long enough.

I hate baseball, football games...you sit in one spot, probably in nosebleeds
unless you have a lot of money. You watch one single game, pay out the nose
for food. For those other sports I much prefer to watch at home where there
are commentators, instant replay, friends and family, and eat and drink to my
hearts content. Oh, don't need to fight the crowds!

------
realdlee
You could get Finals Game 1 tickets for less than face value in the days
leading up to Game 1. Same for Game 2 to a lesser extent. This doesn't apply
for every seat level, but it's definitely possible.

The Warriors' solution seems to have been to set face value to be as high as
possible since this year's finals tickets are notably higher than last year.

~~~
DrScump
Heck, for Game 5 in last year's Finals, there were tickets in the Lower Bowl
for < $200 and in Club for < $350 by game time. That turned out to be the last
home game. Prices collapsed after the Game 3 loss.

~~~
jessaustin
_Prices collapsed after the Game 3 loss._

That's surprising. They only lost by 5 on the road!

~~~
DrScump
The psychology seems to be: "since we can't see them win out this game, we'll
save our money for a possible game 7".

Same results for the World Series and NHL Finals. Resale prices for Game 3 in
San Jose have dropped significantly. Resale prices for the 2012 NLCS Game 6
dropped a lot after the Giants fell behind 3 games to 1. etc. etc.

