When tickets for a hotly anticipated show go on sale, set your alarm. Queue for hours online. When the floodgates open, watch out: A chunk of tickets are already being sold at marked-up prices, as artists try to undercut scalpers and reclaim revenue. Careful! Bots and bad actors appear, hoarding tickets to resell for a profit on websites like StubHub and SeatGeek.
Failed on the primary market? Start over: Avoid fraudulent sites. Fend off bots that swarm social media sites. Remember: Fees will cost you.
Fans are fed up.
Michelle Sterioff, of Kirkland, is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed against Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment in California in December.
Sterioff accuses the companies of “anticompetitive and misleading conduct” in their handling of pre- and general sales for the Eras Tour, criticizing exorbitant ticket prices, excessive service fees and a failure to block bots and scalpers from depleting inventories.
The suit alleges the company has a tight grip on the secondary market, and has eliminated competition on the primary by “coercing major concert venue operators to enter into long-term exclusive contracts.” (...)
Though the AG’s office pushed legislation to ban the use of ticket bots in 2015, it has only enforced the law once, against two Massachusetts-based companies. Similar federal legislation, the 2016 BOTS Act, also has rarely been enforced.
Enforcement is challenging, said the AG’s office. In order to bring cases forward, ticket sellers need to provide evidence of bots. If ticket scams are committed by entities or individuals abroad, prosecution is even more difficult. (...)
The country’s largest events promoter and venue operator, Live Nation, merged with ticketing giant Ticketmaster in 2010. As one company, it controls over 70% of the market for ticketing and live events. Though the company posted a record $3.1 billion in revenue in 2023’s first quarter, Ticketmaster maintains it has lost market share since the merger as the secondary ticket market exploded.
Enforcement is challenging, said the AG’s office. In order to bring cases forward, ticket sellers need to provide evidence of bots. If ticket scams are committed by entities or individuals abroad, prosecution is even more difficult. (...)
The country’s largest events promoter and venue operator, Live Nation, merged with ticketing giant Ticketmaster in 2010. As one company, it controls over 70% of the market for ticketing and live events. Though the company posted a record $3.1 billion in revenue in 2023’s first quarter, Ticketmaster maintains it has lost market share since the merger as the secondary ticket market exploded.
In the mid-1990s, Seattle’s Pearl Jam claimed Ticketmaster threw its weight around to scoop up astronomical service fees and demand exclusivity from venues and artists. The hubbub triggered a federal investigation. But the band’s Ticketmaster-boycotting Vs. Tour was a logistical nightmare, the antitrust criticism died down, and the investigation was closed. By 1998, the band agreed to play some Ticketmaster venues.
Seattle booking agent Ali Hedrick doesn’t think Live Nation is “the evil enemy that the general public thinks they are.” The real culprits, she said, are the unscrupulous resellers, who can make more money than artists or promoters on a ticket resold for double or triple face value.
And it’s not just about revenue.
Promoters and the prominent indie acts represented by Hedrick and her agency, Arrival Artists, have limited ways of combating resellers who snag tickets and can’t flip them, leaving “sold-out” shows 17-20% under capacity. No-shows hurt the artists and clubs, who depend on merchandise and bar sales, while fans miss their favorite bands.
Even efforts to beat back resellers can shut fans out.
One of Hedrick’s artists has an upcoming two-night stand at a 5,500-capacity room in Boston. After a “scalper scrub,” an analysis of ticket buyers designed to weed out resellers, she and the artist found more than 425 tickets went to likely resellers who made multiple purchases.
They used to automatically void the tickets, which is still the most likely recourse. But even then, it’s fans who bought on the secondary market who may be left without tickets.
Hedrick said trying to tamp down on resales is “a huge pain in the ass.” For a tour on which she has a supporting act, Hedrick said a “huge portion” of the total ticket count went to brokers — with set limits on ticket prices, in an attempt to control the secondary market.
Speculative ticketing is another issue.
Jim Brunberg, a Portland venue owner based in Washington, said “a million” of these tickets were listed online for an upcoming Devo concert before real tickets went on sale. “Seats” at the show were selling for $140-$415. Face-value tickets were $89.
Brunberg said his employees turn away patrons with speculative tickets at nearly every show. Beyond lost profits at the bar and merch tables, fans scream at security when they realize they don’t have tickets. That erodes trust, said Brunberg, a musician himself, making “the entire industry feel like an unsafe place to spend money.” (...)
Onetime Washingtonian Zach Bryan has emerged as a vocal critic. Naming his recent live album “All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster,” the Navy-man-turned-country/folk-rock-star plotted a tour avoiding all Ticketmaster-affiliated stages. He’s working with AXS to establish a face-value ticket-exchange similar to one Pearl Jam has with Ticketmaster, capping ticket prices and pledging to invalidate tickets sold by third-party resellers.
“I have met kids at my shows who have paid upwards of 400 bucks to be there and I’m done with it,” Bryan wrote on Instagram last year. “I believe working class people should still be able to afford tickets to shows. … I am so tired of people saying things can’t be done about this massive issue while huge monopolies sit there stealing money from working class people.” (...)
Ticketmaster and indie venues agree: The multibillion-dollar resale market is out of control. A recent watershed moment was the COVID-19 pandemic, when cybersquatters and bots sharpened their methods as the live music scene was silent.
Indie music halls are fighting back. Some use systems that weed out bots by selling a maximum of four to six tickets per buyer. But it’s like cutting the heads off a Hydra.
The bots are too sophisticated. Mimicry websites use the logo, name and photo of real venues — cybersquatting — to sell fake or secondary market tickets.
by Margo Vansynghel and Michael Rietmulder, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Luke Johnson/Taylor Swift
Image: Luke Johnson/Taylor Swift
[ed. I recently checked out the process for buying some Olivia Rodrigo tickets for an upcoming concert in Seattle. You have to apply to a lottery (which quickly closed) and be selected there before even being eligible to jump into the scrum of actual ticket sales the minute they're available. What a screwed up process.]
