Am I being cynical if I wonder if Ticketmaster just cancelled a number of tickets randomly, just so they can resell those at its new "market price." Normally I would just assume incompetence or a mistake, but this is Ticketmaster.
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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If there’s a financial incentive for them to do it, then that’s why they did it. Follow the money. There are no ramifications for Ticketmaster to do this sort of abhorrent behavior. They just don’t care.
Well, you are, but not as cynical as ticketmaster who might have done exactly that.
This is almost certainly the case. I also know Airbnb hosts do that all the time.
You are, and you’re probably right.
Maybe you are, but it's what I thought too.
She initially thought the email was fake, but after realising it was from Ticketmaster she said she does not intend to buy tickets from the company in the future, despite being a loyal customer.
Loyal customer pretty much means the same as regular concert goer.
I go to quite a few concerts and all of my tickets are bought from Ticketmaster in some form. I wouldn’t call myself loyal to them as I’m forced to choose between Ticketmaster or no concert.
I have a season MLS ticket to my local team directly through the team, and everything is controlled and processed through Ticketmaster anyways. Have to log in to ticket Master through a special portal to access anything
Exactly. Is it really loyalty when you only have one option?
It sounds better than monopoly. Image is everything.
100% right and I don't doubt the woman from the article feels the same but if you want to add weight to informing a company they fucking suck you use terms like loyal or committed or something similar that adds the red flag to corporate that their actions are affecting their customer retention bottom line.
Edit: I feel I need to add, "in most cases." Kinda hard for this to affect companies who are aloud to have monopolies over an industry because it throws customer retention concerns out the window. But I stand by my comment because I still think the verbiage used in the email is just the standard way of addressing corporate ran entities.
How can be legal? Bot detection should apply almost immediately, not after six months.
It smells like "we sold too many tickets, we need a plausible excuse to refund people"
And there's a simple trick to stop bots: make tickets non transferable. But that would hurt their secondary sales on that other reselling site operated by themselves, and shows wouldn't be sold out immediately due to FOMO (if tickets can be resold even at a higher price, people would buy them even if they're not 100% sure they can attend the show)
make tickets non transferable
This sounds sensible, but in practice ID checking however many tens of thousands of people on their way into a venue would take forever. (Not to mention now having to deal with the portion of genuine customers who've forgotten to bring Id etc)
It would be easier to not allow resales above the original purchase price.
Without ID on the ticket you don't know it's been resold. All a venue sees is someone presenting a valid QR code (or whatever)
Could they just allow the account holder to void the old ticket code and issue a new one? Then you'd have to trust resellers to not yoink your ticket after they walk away with your money.
It doesn’t matter if it’s resold. If tickets can’t be resold with markup prices, scalpers won’t have any incentive to hoard and resell (assuming there are no fees for reselling, in an ideal scenario), therefore reducing the resale market to people who actually have a legit reason to sell their tickets.
Oh I see, you mean ban legit reselling?.. could do. no chance of stopping unofficial reselling though (gumtree whatever). It's a terms of service thing not a legal thing. So gumtree, eBay etc are not obliged to take down such things. And of course they would never stop touts doing it in person on approaches to a venue..
Ticketmaster can easily prevent out-of-band reselling by only allowing resales on their site. So anyone selling their tickets on ebay or wherever will still have to transfer the tickets and get paid through ticketmaster, which should only allow you to sell at original purchase price with no extra fees. This would also help prevent scams and fraud because all transactions would be via their system and they already implement that rotating code technology to prevent screenshots from working.
Of course ticketmaster doesn’t do that because they charge a fee on resales, which gets them more money.
How could it actually work though? Without checking ID at the gate you have no idea if the ticketholder is the original or has bought from a scalper?
Like I said, reselling is not the issue, scalping is. People can have many legit reasons for selling their tickets (sick, accident, emergency, etc.), and there should be a way for them to offload those tickets for someone else to enjoy and at the same time get their money back. If tickets aren’t allowed to be sold above their original price, scalpers won’t be able to profit from them, so they’ll stop doing it. Then people who want to sell just to get their money back are able to, while the people who weren’t able to buy during the initial sale period get another chance to buy tickets without getting scalped or scammed. It won’t matter if the ticket you present wasn’t originally yours, as long as you got it for the same price.
It’s a win-win for everyone except ticketmaster who doesn’t get to profit off of the resale market, that’s why they don’t do it. I can’t remember who it was, but there was an artist who demanded resales to be done that way and it worked out well.
I mean, Ticketmaster are greedy bastards, that's why they do what they do. But I think a part of a the veneer of respectability they present is based on the truth that you'll never really be able to stop scalpers, so Ticketmaster might as well be the legal scalper of choice. There will always be a blackmarket for popular tickets (so the reasoning goes). Since reselling isn't illegal then it's hard to force eBay and gumtree to disallow it. And there's nothing to stop touts in person. So Ticketmaster says "fine, we'll host the reselling at whatever the bidding goes up to". They get to make some more money on it and disallowing isn't going to much improve things for the average concert goer..
I think probably one actual solution is to sell tickets linked to your mobile device (somehow). That's probably still vulnerable to being hacked / faked so maybe that's why they haven't done it (aside from them losing out on that resale margin, obvs).
you'll never really be able to stop scalpers
Sure you can, or at least bring them down to a very tiny fraction. But like we both agree on, ticketmaster earns a lot of money from enabling scalpers, so they let it happen. It’s not that they can’t, they just won’t.
If they applied what I mentioned, scalpers will cease to exist:
- Tickets can only be bought on the ticketmaster site/app.
- Resales can only be done via ticketmaster, therefore no one can resell their tickets on ebay or any other site. You don’t have to force ebay to ban resellers, it just won’t work because they’ll have to sell and transfer the ticket via ticketmaster anyway. They can advertise on ebay all they want, at the end of the day they’ll have to transfer the ticket and get paid (the same price) on ticketmaster.
- Buyer logs on to ticketmaster and buys the resale ticket there, and the ticket with the rotating barcode is transferred to their account. Seller gets paid via their ticketmaster account.
- Tickets can only be sold for the same purchase price or lower (if you want to get rid of it faster), and ticketmaster can’t charge a fee for resales.
Scalpers literally won’t waste their time buying up all the tickets because they can only sell them for the same price. The only way they can do it is to sell to some desperate fan who’s willing to pay more (directly to the scalper outside the app), but they’ll have to figure out how to accompany the buyer through security because they can’t transfer the ticket barcode to the buyer’s phone if they don’t sell through the app. A scalper won’t go through that for every resale.
The only problem with that is ticket transfers on the app won’t be allowed unless it’s a re-sale, so sharing tickets that you bought for your family/friends will no longer be possible and you’ll all have to enter the venue together as a group because all the tickets are on your account/phone only. But that’s a small price to pay to get rid of scalpers.
Rotating barcode is the key here. Ties the purchase to a ticketmaster account and requires a phone be presented at the gate. All perfectly doable, if they were so inclined.
It should say "bots not approved and distributed by Ticketmaster to scalpers".
Former touring musician here. The larger acts are contractually bound to whatever their label decides on venues and ticketing in most cases. But there's no reason to roll over and accept these assholes at Ticketmaster as our defacto option to have live music. Support local artists and local venues if possible. I'm out in the fucking sticks, but I will drive an hour to catch a show from time to time.
Some venues can also only be booked if you use Ticketmaster. So like at. A certain scale it's impossible for even the labels to avoid it if they wanted.
Good point. I'm an eternal optimist for an artist first movement where parasitic corps fuck right off. One day... one day...
