An artist can demand no resale of tickets, and ID check at the door (TM tickets have the buyers name printed on them), LCD Soundsystem has done this when their fans got angry at a similar scenario.
Swift hasn't. And probably won't in the future, thats the gist of it.
TM claimed (and I have no reason to not believe them) they got 5 billion requests when tickets went live. So you break up the monopoly and Swift can now sign with a different ticket seller next tour. Which other website will handle the 5 billion requests properly? Without hours of queues or random raffles? Fans are lucky the TM website didn't completely shut down for 2 days because of the traffic
As long as the tickets are sellable, as long as people will pay more for a ticket than a new car, people (even diehard fans) will resell
She could fix all the problems but she doesn't want to.
No, she can't. At best, she can exchange one set of problems for a different set. When there are X tickets available and Y people want to attend and Y>>X, a lot of people are going to be disappointed and angry no matter what you do.
Thinking of solutions for this, couldn't you stagger when tickets go on sale at each venue? Seattle goes on sale at 10am, Portland on sale at 2pm, and Denver the following day? This spreads the demand over time and you don't have 5 billion requests all at once.
> TM claimed (and I have no reason to not believe them) they got 5 billion requests when tickets went live.
I absolutely have a reason to not believe them: that is 63% of the world's population. They are claiming that 63% of everyone on Earth was waiting to buy tickets to Taylor Swift's show? How do we not have reason to disbelieve them!?
Unless by "request" they mean individual HTTP requests and their site is such garbage that one person trying to grab some tickets induces thousands upon thousands of HTTP requests, which is still their fault.
The lure of being the competitor who can handle that traffic will bring some competition. In the meantime some entry level competitors who we could use for local scene ticketing and give a better share to the artists would open breathing room in the market for early career artists and smaller venues to put performances on in 3rd and 4th tier cities.
Also, some venues box office is operated by ticket master and you still get hit with the fee. I had that happen to me years a go. I haven't tried buying tickets in person in a long long time, but I'd imagine this is still a thing where you can buy them in person.
In the Bay Area, you can't even guarantee tickets at the box office! They start the sale online BEFORE the box office opens so when you show up, the show might have already sold out!
"Consumer harm" from monopolists is very much a trailing indicator. Organizations that have even a smidge of sense will put that off for a long time as they accumulate power. Having all your regulation set up to wait until that point is bad policy.
That said, Ticketmaster has been terrible forever. It's baffling how they've gotten this far while being so blatantly bad.
That said, Ticketmaster has been terrible forever.
That's not true. Granted, one would have to go back at least 35 years, but there was a time that TicketMaster was just the outsource vendor to sell tickets. They'd tack on a few bucks for the privilege, sorted. Don't like it? Go to the box office. I don't recall having any reason to complain.
But that's the trick: no one had reason to complain, and more and more venues used TM while TM gobbled up competitors. Now that there is reason to complain, it's apparently too late.
General comment on the "I don't see consumer harm because prices aren't that high" argument. It fails to capture the true danger of monopoly, namely:
-lack of competition leads to lack of innovation (Stoller's argument)
-lack of innovation results in less spending on R&D
-less innovation means the most efficient way to maximize profit is to find "efficiencies" in the business
-those "efficiencies" manifest as:
-less spending on R&D because
there is no need;
-lower salaries to employees;
-fewer employees overall;
-worse quality:
-Squeeze suppliers and
contractors, putting more
pressure across the board to
consolidate and reinforcing the Cycle across the entire chain
If left unchecked (as the "consumer harm" doctrine has for the past 40 years or so), the results are:
-overall concentration of power and wealth
-greater wealth disparities
-less investment and innovation
-fewer choices that provide worse consumer experience
This pattern has been pretty well documented across many industries, from shipping to cheerleading
The service Ticketmaster provides is largely to have people get angry at Ticketmaster, rather than at the musician involved. And there is simply no way to let 5 million Swift fans each buy one of a million tickets while keeping the tickets cheap. It is a recipe for disaster.
People claim it is “evil scalpers”, but if you got lucky and bought a $400 ticket you can flip for $3000, they probably would be doing so as well.
A lot of the Ticketmaster “fees” people hate are actually part of the ticket price, requested by and paid directly to the artist (or the venue), but charged separately to make the tickets seem cheaper. Don’t blame me, blame human psychology.
Following this whole brouhaha I read that Garth Brooks plays night after night in a city until the shows stop selling out. So there is a way to let all the Swifties buy a ticket.
I don't know how he keeps a venue booked for an indeterminate number of shows. How far ahead does his team plan? But for the road crews and performers it must be easier. They don't have to set up and tear down their gear every 3 days.
On the other hand, Taylor has more fans and more cities she has to visit than Garth. If she did that, it might turn into a perma-tour until her popularity crests.
It would be physically impossible for her to keep doing shows until they stop selling out. Here voice and body would give out way before her popularity did
The problem isn't the existence of the secondary market.
It's the prioritization of the secondary market.
Ticketmaster literally holds back a large number of tickets specifically to sell to scalpers.
This has a vicious cycle effect, making the secondary market more profitable and incentivizing more people to be scalpers. It also takes more tickets out of the hands of people who would otherwise buy them for retail price, meaning they have to buy from the scalpers.
And because Ticketmaster is the only game in town, that takes this from being a problem that could be dealt with by not doing business with them to being a problem that's just unavoidable.
Am I the only one who took it as a potential publicity stunt? Plenty of lukewarm fans on the bubble probably saw all this and are drawn into the whole vapid drama of it all.
Even if it was purely accidental, the incentives that ensuing PR brings when it happens mean there’s not going to be much concern about fixing things.
Sure you could argue that antitrust attention is bad for them, but what’s the realistic outcome there? Lip service punditry, maybe even a congressional hearing! And nothing. Not many politicians are going to wast limited political capital against a fleeting issue their base won’t care about in a month from now.
Eh, it's more of an unprecedented demand problem. You would think 50 shows would be enough. So you can't really blame Swift for the lack of shows. Maybe you can blame her for being so likable that millions of people are willing to spend hundreds of dollars for a ticket. Or blame those fans who can outspend the cash strapped fans. It is almost as if Swift has a monopoly on this genre. Who are her competitors? Maybe go see them? And if she has none, that would be a problem worth solving.
She's always going to have a monopoly on being Taylor Swift. Sure, you may also like some other musician, but it's not like you can just drop in replace her with a different singer.
Art is, somewhat by definition, a monopoly. There's no way around that, the only thing you can do is have more concerts/supply of it, but that's literally more work for the artist involved.
I think it's Garth Brooks that's notorious for planning his tours where he'll just keep adding more concert dates in a city until they stop selling out at $30 tickets and then move to the next town and repeat it. That works, but you also have to be willing to play the same town 10 days in a row or something, which isn't free for a musician to do in terms of exhaustion and effort.
It's better than playing 10 days in a row in 10 different cities. In fact it seems to me to be to be the best way to do it. Roll into town, set up once, do all your shows, and then pack up once. And everyone gets to sleep in a hotel bed instead of a tour bus rolling down the road to the next town.
I would have thought it would be unusual to have a venue with 10 dates in a row available though. I guess if you do this far enough in advance it would work in many places, but I would think most big arenas would have only a few consecutive dates at the most, working around the sports and other artists and conventions and whatever else is going on there.
That's a really interesting solution to the problem! I wonder why Swift keeps planning these giant "big bang" tours instead of trying something similar. Maybe some artists don't like being perpetually on tour? I'm sure living out of an RV or hotel in a random city and playing a concert every night or two feels pretty constraining.
Let's say if the tickets were priced at $200 that would be more than enough to cover all the costs and pay people fairly etc.
But because of "unprecedented demand" on a fixed item.. they might say:
"Hey why not charge $300, or $400, or $500! Sure, 90% of the population that doesn't make great money won't be able to afford them, but the top 5-10% of people will still pay because it doesn't matter to them.. and we get to double or triple our profits!"
That is simply greed outweighing.. public interest (for lack of a better word). The problem with this world is so many people want to make as much as they can even if it's not "fair". I know that's just horrible anti-capitalist talk...
Maximizing profits is literally inconsistent with the well being of the population. This situation is the perfect example. Most people go to their econ101 supply & demand bullshit to justify price gouging and wealth inequality.
They have only so many tickets, they need a way to determine who get them, so they use price to solve the scarcity problem. They could use other ways, but that would mean less profits and maybe unfairness somewhere else. It is not fair for everyone but it ranks on the low end of injustices.
But I think I see your larger point. Imagine if this was not concert tickets, but a sudden food shortage. We already see it with housing and medical care. Solving the scarcity problem by price alone can get really unfair and dehumanizing in a hurry.
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Swift hasn't. And probably won't in the future, thats the gist of it.
TM claimed (and I have no reason to not believe them) they got 5 billion requests when tickets went live. So you break up the monopoly and Swift can now sign with a different ticket seller next tour. Which other website will handle the 5 billion requests properly? Without hours of queues or random raffles? Fans are lucky the TM website didn't completely shut down for 2 days because of the traffic
As long as the tickets are sellable, as long as people will pay more for a ticket than a new car, people (even diehard fans) will resell
She probably made several hundred million on this tour. She could fix all the problems but she doesn't want to.
Its TM's job to take this bad press
No, she can't. At best, she can exchange one set of problems for a different set. When there are X tickets available and Y people want to attend and Y>>X, a lot of people are going to be disappointed and angry no matter what you do.
I absolutely have a reason to not believe them: that is 63% of the world's population. They are claiming that 63% of everyone on Earth was waiting to buy tickets to Taylor Swift's show? How do we not have reason to disbelieve them!?
Unless by "request" they mean individual HTTP requests and their site is such garbage that one person trying to grab some tickets induces thousands upon thousands of HTTP requests, which is still their fault.
Here's what the website for my local big venue says:
"Please note the TD Garden Box Office does not sell tickets at the public on sale. All tickets should be purchased via www.ticketmaster.com"
Truly annoying.
That said, Ticketmaster has been terrible forever. It's baffling how they've gotten this far while being so blatantly bad.
That's not true. Granted, one would have to go back at least 35 years, but there was a time that TicketMaster was just the outsource vendor to sell tickets. They'd tack on a few bucks for the privilege, sorted. Don't like it? Go to the box office. I don't recall having any reason to complain.
But that's the trick: no one had reason to complain, and more and more venues used TM while TM gobbled up competitors. Now that there is reason to complain, it's apparently too late.
I think he is saying it is a tech problem whose root cause is a monopoly problem (leading to long-term underinvestment).
This one caught TM sideways, clearly, and something scaled badly. I'm hoping we get a good technical post-mortem at some point.
But nailing on-sales is one of Ticketmaster's main value props for clients.
As they say, nobody got fired for having Ticketmaster sell their tickets.
I've been on the inside for very successful high-demand on-sales run by the TM VerifiedFan team. They worked.
Even Google and Amazon struggle on huge black friday events. This is ridiculous.
-lack of competition leads to lack of innovation (Stoller's argument)
-lack of innovation results in less spending on R&D
-less innovation means the most efficient way to maximize profit is to find "efficiencies" in the business
-those "efficiencies" manifest as: -less spending on R&D because there is no need; -lower salaries to employees; -fewer employees overall; -worse quality: -Squeeze suppliers and contractors, putting more pressure across the board to consolidate and reinforcing the Cycle across the entire chain
If left unchecked (as the "consumer harm" doctrine has for the past 40 years or so), the results are:
-overall concentration of power and wealth
-greater wealth disparities
-less investment and innovation
-fewer choices that provide worse consumer experience
This pattern has been pretty well documented across many industries, from shipping to cheerleading
People claim it is “evil scalpers”, but if you got lucky and bought a $400 ticket you can flip for $3000, they probably would be doing so as well.
A lot of the Ticketmaster “fees” people hate are actually part of the ticket price, requested by and paid directly to the artist (or the venue), but charged separately to make the tickets seem cheaper. Don’t blame me, blame human psychology.
I don't know how he keeps a venue booked for an indeterminate number of shows. How far ahead does his team plan? But for the road crews and performers it must be easier. They don't have to set up and tear down their gear every 3 days.
On the other hand, Taylor has more fans and more cities she has to visit than Garth. If she did that, it might turn into a perma-tour until her popularity crests.
The Ticketing service itself should provide a channel to sell a ticket at its original price if someone wants it.
In Italy that's the method since a similar fiasco happened years ago and it works pretty well
It's the prioritization of the secondary market.
Ticketmaster literally holds back a large number of tickets specifically to sell to scalpers.
This has a vicious cycle effect, making the secondary market more profitable and incentivizing more people to be scalpers. It also takes more tickets out of the hands of people who would otherwise buy them for retail price, meaning they have to buy from the scalpers.
And because Ticketmaster is the only game in town, that takes this from being a problem that could be dealt with by not doing business with them to being a problem that's just unavoidable.
Even if it was purely accidental, the incentives that ensuing PR brings when it happens mean there’s not going to be much concern about fixing things.
Sure you could argue that antitrust attention is bad for them, but what’s the realistic outcome there? Lip service punditry, maybe even a congressional hearing! And nothing. Not many politicians are going to wast limited political capital against a fleeting issue their base won’t care about in a month from now.
Deleted Comment
Art is, somewhat by definition, a monopoly. There's no way around that, the only thing you can do is have more concerts/supply of it, but that's literally more work for the artist involved.
I think it's Garth Brooks that's notorious for planning his tours where he'll just keep adding more concert dates in a city until they stop selling out at $30 tickets and then move to the next town and repeat it. That works, but you also have to be willing to play the same town 10 days in a row or something, which isn't free for a musician to do in terms of exhaustion and effort.
I would have thought it would be unusual to have a venue with 10 dates in a row available though. I guess if you do this far enough in advance it would work in many places, but I would think most big arenas would have only a few consecutive dates at the most, working around the sports and other artists and conventions and whatever else is going on there.
You say unprecedented demand... ok.
Let's say if the tickets were priced at $200 that would be more than enough to cover all the costs and pay people fairly etc.
But because of "unprecedented demand" on a fixed item.. they might say:
"Hey why not charge $300, or $400, or $500! Sure, 90% of the population that doesn't make great money won't be able to afford them, but the top 5-10% of people will still pay because it doesn't matter to them.. and we get to double or triple our profits!"
That is simply greed outweighing.. public interest (for lack of a better word). The problem with this world is so many people want to make as much as they can even if it's not "fair". I know that's just horrible anti-capitalist talk...
Maximizing profits is literally inconsistent with the well being of the population. This situation is the perfect example. Most people go to their econ101 supply & demand bullshit to justify price gouging and wealth inequality.
But I think I see your larger point. Imagine if this was not concert tickets, but a sudden food shortage. We already see it with housing and medical care. Solving the scarcity problem by price alone can get really unfair and dehumanizing in a hurry.