
StubHub Sues Ticketmaster, Golden State Warriors, in Battle of Scalpers - gtCameron
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/03/30/stubhub-sues-ticketmaster-golden-state-warriors-in-war-of-scalpers/
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jedberg
Ticketmaster is a company designed to be the "evil middleman". There's lots of
info around the internet about how most of the money the collect goes to the
venue without you knowing it.

I'm pretty sure they are basically sending most of the money back to the
Warriors, which is why they are so adamant about people using Ticketmaster.

They don't want to set up their own marketplace because then they would be the
"greedy" sports franchise, so Ticketmaster sets it up and take the heat.

~~~
jsabo
For anyone else who is interested, I tried to find something about venues
getting a cut but only found this (which also references a now shut down blog
that I haven't checked for an archive of):
[http://www.laweekly.com/music/ticketmaster-and-servants-
band...](http://www.laweekly.com/music/ticketmaster-and-servants-bands-get-
cut-of-service-fee-2158605)

Apparently during congressional testimony they mentioned that venues, and
sometimes artists or promoters, get a cut of the service fee. They quote some
mid-level promoters that dispute the promoter/artist fee but it doesn't really
go into the venue statement. In my experience with small shows, the venue's
money is baked into the ticket price, not the additional fees.

~~~
pkteison
The quote in that article is fairly accurate, I don't see why you dismiss it.
It's congressional testimony so you can get it from the source:
[http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-111shrg54048/pdf/CHRG-111s...](http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-111shrg54048/pdf/CHRG-111shrg54048.pdf)

"...Ticketmaster’s service charge is, you know, Ticketmaster was set up as a
system where they took the heat for everybody. Ticketmaster frequently gets a
minority percentage of that service charge. In that service charge are the
credit card fees, the rebates to the buildings, rebates sometimes to artists,
some- times rebates to promoters. So Ticketmaster has been the—we are like the
IRS. We deliver bad news."

~~~
jsabo
I didn't mean to come across as totally dismissive, more that it was something
I was unaware of and was sad I couldn't find more detail about. Good looking
with the link though. I'm reading through that section now but it doesn't look
like there's any follow up on that claim unfortunately. Assuming generously
they're paying 4% of the ticket price to process CCs, it seems like there's
still a pretty good chunk money going back to the venue.

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bigbossman
I have Golden State Warriors season tickets, and use both StubHub and
Ticketmaster for ticket resales. Most of the secondary market liquidity is
still found at Stubhub, but I would actually prefer that more exchanges occur
through Ticketmaster.

Pricing: From a seller perspective, selling through the official Ticketmaster
channel provides significantly better pricing. For example, if a customer
spends $10 on a ticket through Ticketmaster, I will net $9.50 from the sale
(5% commission). On Stubhub, if a customer spends $10 on the same ticket, with
the way their fee structure works, I would only net $6.01 (an effective 40%
commission).

Security: Tickets sold via Stubhub provide a pdf ticket that shows my actual
name. Tickets sold via Ticketmaster reissue the original ticket in the
purchaser's name.

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sosuke
Out of curiosity, in case someone can explain this to me, I want to ask a
question. Tickets for an event went on sale at 10AM from a local venue. You
can buy tickets from the venue site, but not pick a location, just a price
point. Each time I select a ticket and price point they ask me to enter a
captcha. I try again and again to see a no seats message. I go over to StubHub
and BigStub only 7 minutes after 10AM and see they have thousands of tickets
available for sale at a 50% price increase. They also have better seats than
were available to me on the venue's site.

Is the venue just pre-selling tickets to StubHub or BigStub, or are there
scalpers buying that many tickets.

~~~
slg
Some scalpers will short sell tickets. They sell tickets they don't have on
the assumption that they can purchase tickets later at a lower price. This was
a large problem at this year's Superbowl. Tickets normally spike a couple
weeks before the game and drop in price as the game approaches. This pattern
didn't happen this year and prices actually went up drastically as the game
approached. Many of these short sellers that were depending on ticket price
dropping ended up having to refund the tickets they short sold at 2x or 3x the
original purchase price. That ended up being cheaper than taking the loss on
price they sold the tickets at minus the price they would have to buy the
tickets at to fulfill their order.

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jeffdavis
Is there any reason ticket sales happen like this, rather than just selling
directly from the venue? Why is scalping a crime, why not just sell at market
price to begin with?

~~~
mox1
I think on a macro level, teams don't always want to sell every single ticket
for maximum dollar. They really want to ensure a year over year constant
revenue stream. So they contract with ticketmaster to sell all of their
tickets at fairly set rates. The "Market Price" for an event for 6-8 months
from now is going to swing up and down a lot.

There's also the perceived unfairness (think what would happen if a popular
restaurant doubled its price on Friday and Saturday, people would flip out).

After a while, they realized that a pretty large secondary market had formed
for tickets (teams get hot, rival team in town on a Saturday night, etc, etc)
and the team / venue wants in on the action. So Ticketmaster created an
"official scalper" marketplace to compete with StubHub and friends.

~~~
stevesearer
Interestingly enough fine dining establishments are moving in the direction of
tickets with a variable price.

Long, but a worthwhile read on the subject:
[http://website.alinearestaurant.com/site/2014/06/tickets-
for...](http://website.alinearestaurant.com/site/2014/06/tickets-for-
restaurants/)

"Having either static or dynamically variably priced tables by day of week and
time – in a fully transparent manner – simply gives customers the option of
paying a bit more for a prime time table or saving a bit of money for an off-
prime table. It acknowledges the obvious. No one pays $ 275 for a good seat at
a Cubs game, looks up at the nose bleed seats and complains that it’s not fair
that those guys up there only paid $ 25. People accept the difference so long
as the choice to buy either was their own."

EDIT: There was also some discussion about this on HN a while back:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853786](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853786)

