It seems like a step in the right direction to combat scalpers.
I've wondered though... Why not have a non-transferrable ticket system? If you can't go then you return your tickets to the pool and if they sell you get your money back.
Honestly, this could turn out to be a really great thing.
When artists become popular, they often complain that the people they are making their music for, their biggest fans, tend to be the people least able to afford the concert tickets.
The artists are often totally willing to set aside a chunk of tickets at a much cheaper price, but they need to be able to guarantee that these tickets aren't just purchased by scalpers and resold at the market price.
So if you can actually tie ticket availability to genuine listening patterns of this artist over time, in a way that is very difficult to game, then this could be huge.
Obviously you can worry about scalpers that will now try to open 1000 different Spotify accounts so that they can buy up 1000 tickets. But it should be pretty easy for Spotify to look for signals that indicate real human listeners, I would think.
Actually the artists set aside tickets specifically for resale. At a company i worked at we did this on behalf of the artists and content-rightsholders directly to maximize their profit. Your favorite artist loves money and resale more than affordability
seems like it would just get botted like anything else and also make it harder for fans of an artist who don't use spotify to get tickets
"Stream fraud" is already a thing, so if anything this would make botting more profitable. Great synergy to be had here by fraudsters
Sounds like a good way to pump the numbers
Surely this will get arbitraged like anything else, where fans who get picks will onsell tickets
You can also make non-transferable tickets. If it’s a decent discount for a specific intended person it makes sense.
The majority of concerts lack sufficient demand for scalpers to make money. It's only the Taylor Swifts and Beyonces whose ticket values exceed the sticker price.
there's always a criticism, something has to give.
lest you desire verifiable gov based ID tracking?
Auction. Auction is the answer.
Or, when a tour is announced, start tickets at 10X the regular price and have it drop down to the regular price over the course of a couple of weeks in a simple time based mechanism. After that, if tickets are not sold out it continues to drop until sold or it hits a reserve price for Door tickets.
Good for artists, fair from a market perspective and gets rid of scalpers
You are overlooking the secondary effect — what happens if you, a musician, a person who lives off having a positive public image, becomes known as the kind of musician who uses free market forces to effectively price fans out? Fans will not like it. It is not rational but nothing in music is. You win the pricing battle but lose the PR war. It's bad for your business and the entire business of concerts in the long run.
And with your particular pricing scheme, there is arguably still nothing stopping scalpers from scooping up the tickets after the price drops to a level likely to be profitable for them but before fans had the time to react. In fact it would probably benefit the scalpers even more because they will have more time to track price drops than your average fan!
What about both? Artists want money, fans want entry, reserve a portion for hardcore fans and the remainder by auction. Artists get to sell their $10k seats to the rich while looking like they’re giving an amazing discount to their fans.
This is a better idea, but you run into the problem of determining who are the more deserving fans, and you circle back to what Spotify is planning to do.
If you're selling out venues at 5x a normal ticket price you will quickly be playing in much larger venues until you can't sell them out except at face value
The people whose tickets get scalped are already playing in sports stadiums. There aren’t bigger venues.
The average event either doesn’t sell out or takes a while to sell out.
[dead]
This is basically what is already happening with dynamic pricing. Tickets are now most expensive at the original sale and get cheaper over time until sold
Not good for fans. And happy fans are good for artist. So not good for artist.
Good for artist, bad for those fans who have shallow pocket.
Terrible idea. The venues would taking on all the risk and could even cancel a show if there are not enough ticket purchases because its steepest discount is only the day before the show.
A person purchasing a ticket a month or two in advance prior to the show off loads the risk from the venue. They purchase the ticket thinking they can make the show in two months because the event is a long ways away. People know what they are going to do a week advanced most of the time and therefore might just forego purchasing the ticket a that point in time, because there it has instant depreciating value at the point of sale.
The live music experience would be terrible if only the richest fans can get in. Every crowd would be old and square.
The answer to what question?
The fact there are more people want X than the total number of X.
That’s not a question, that’s just a situation.
The question is how to distribute X in this situation, and I (mistakenly) trusted the reader's intelligence to infer that.
There are a ton of ways to do that. For this to be “the answer,” the question must be more constrained than that.
[deleted]
Apple needs to get into this space QUICK. They just added concert dates in Apple Music. Let me buy tickets with Apple Pay from the app and it's over.
For those against this: I'm curious to hear your take on how you'd stop/mitigate scalping.
Livestream more things and sell digital tickets. Doesn’t do anything directly, but acts as a substitute to shift demand away. Not much point in scalping tickets to a livestream unless the supply is limited, either by an artificial cap or technical constraints.
There are many solutions.
For example - allow ticket resale only through the official platform and cap it at the original sale price.
Another approach - check IDs at the door and only let the original ticket purchaser through.
The real problem is that scalping is insanely profitable for Ticketmaster & co. They take a cut of the original sale and every subsequent transfer, most of them at highly inflated prices, from both buyer and seller. Why would they give that up?
I have some tickets to big gigs coming up and they cannot be resold. On Ticketmaster.
Because it's up to the event promoter if they want to enable it
FIFA’s solution seems reasonable. The tickets are auctioned. EDM festivals usually have an earlier round for people who attended previous iterations which is similar to this approach by Spotify.
One way is to run an auction and provide every attendee on site with a credit code they can apply to next year’s auction. That way you tip the scales slightly towards previous attendees in a way a scalper can’t reliably access.
Another way is to run separate auctions: one for previous attendees, one for fan club members, and one for GA.
The aversion to auctions transforms everything into a lottery but I can see why they do it. The event operator takes all the heat and the artist keeps much of the benefit.
Go back to the old way. Get in line physically and go get the tickets. This is one of those "technology should help here but actually makes the problem worse in weird ways" type of situations.
Nine Inch Nails/Trent Reznor did this in 2018 and it was infinitely better (I also met a lot of people just standing in line—we recognized each other at the show later and ended up throwing each other around in the mosh pit—a great time) [1].
If it can still be resold online, it won’t mitigate scalping much for on-demand shows. You can see that on any scalping-heavy items that require a person to be there physically to purchase the item (cards, collectibles from restaurants, and etc.).
Above-face-value ticket resale is illegal here and it helps a lot. But you need to make sure this gets prosecuted hard.
I like it. Your last bit is good marketing against those who think paying a linesitter / spot holder is all upside.
Also economics of paying linesitters make it relatively much less attractive than all-digital scalping. So I think you have a solid plan. Should greatly reduce scalping.
Reminds me of technologically-inclined woman who pointed out the flawed thinking behind a grocery store handing out first-gen iPads to their shelf stockers. “I love my iPad at home but this will cost them so much time compared to pen and paper.” (Gotta go find out whatever happened to putting an RFID tag in every product, maybe they needed to hit 1/10 of a cent instead of a penny or something)
That excludes all fans who don't live in big cities. A lot of people travel just to go to shows.
Some people drove in. A few hardcore fans came into town (Chicago) the night before and had tents set up. There were also people coordinating with friends who did live in/close to the city to get the tickets and pay them back later.
Overall, that was the last really "old world" experience I had that reminded me why technology isn't always the right solution to a problem. Since then it's felt like this [1].
Not really. In the past you could buy tickets in tonnes of places. Ticketmaster had physical 'stores' all over and most of the big music retailers also sold tickets. Admittedly these aren't widespread anymore which poses a problem. It's also a terrible solution because it excludes people with jobs.
There used to be a Ticketmaster counter at the grocery store. You could buy groceries for the week and pick up tickets for a show at the same time.
It was a far more sane (and exciting) experience.
> That excludes all fans who don't live in big cities. A lot of people travel just to go to shows.
Not really. The place that sells the tickets doesn't have to be the performance venue itself.
This sort of distribution was quite common pre-Internet. In theory it's even easier now, because so many of the venues have (unfortunately) consolidated under vertically integrated ownership (e.g. directly owned by Live Nation). Which incidentally, after scalping, is the biggest reason that ticket prices are so high in the first place.
Named tickets, like airplane seats?
Sorry, I only thought about this for 5 seconds, but there are markets where scalping doesn't cause issues. We could look at those.
This is the answer, Ive seen it in practice. You just have to show id at the door when your ticket/QR gets scanned as normal, and the names have to match. Obviously only works for over 18 events though, unless you purposely sell under and over 18 tickets seperately.
This is how all the big video game conventions do things to prevent it, it’s very effective.
Still have the issue of transferring tickets to friends or such if you can't make it. Axios and some providers handle this.
Anything requiring transferring "to friends" will be attempted to be used for scalping of course.
I suppose if we're requiring showing ID to attend anyway, it's not a lot worse to add an online ID verification step in order to be allowed to be a "sender" in the transfer system, and an identity is only allowed to have like 5 distinct "friends" in a rolling 12-month window.
Part of me thinks that Ticketmaster/Live Nation probably makes so much money from their own in-house scalping operation that they don't want to fix any kind of scalping problems for fear they would be somehow obligated to not participate themselves.
> Part of me thinks that Ticketmaster/Live Nation probably makes so much money from their own in-house scalping operation that they don't want to fix any kind of scalping problems for fear they would be somehow obligated to not participate themselves.
My dad used to joke about how many signs he'd say at baseball games saying scalping is against the rules but somehow hearing loads of StubHub ads whenever he would listen to a game on the radio.
Transferring tickets to friends is functionally indistinguishable from scalping
isn’t scalping selling at profit? if i sell to a friend at the same i paid it’s not really scalping …
The problem with scalping is scale. A single person reselling a single ticket is completely fine, because that is not a viable business model for enough people to distort the market. Just limit the number of tickets someone can buy to 3-5.
A scalper just pretends to be 200 different people. With 200 different emails and 200 different credit cards.
Limiting the number of tickets someone can buy doesn't protect against scalping.
[deleted]
Handle it the same way airlines do. If you think you might not be able to go, then pay extra for a refundable ticket.
Would need to provide a decent refund system alongside named tickets, offering quick and easy refunds for maybe 10% cancellation fee.
If you "can't make it", you just have to eat the loss. True fans will make it.
[deleted]
[dead]
On the other hand, airplane ticketing is also notorious for stuff like overbooking flights with the assumption people won't show up and then in the rare circumstances where too many do show up, forcing people to give up their seats (in some cases even by force). I don't disagree with your thinking, but I'm hesitant to consider "what airplane tickets do" a good model for just about anything.
Concertgoer Bill of Rights - get bumped? Massive stipend, hotel room, free VIP ticket in future, & transportation+entry to a partner venue in the city with other music.
They haven’t all universally built in overbooking as a critical part of their competitive price structure or whatever, and we can stop it before it starts.
Fair enough, I might just be extrapolating from a few of the larger American players in the industry.
Some festivals work just like that, you upload some ID when buying your ticket which they see when you enter the venue. Feels really nice and stress free.
The only real way is to pass a law against reselling tickets above face price, which is what many European countries have done
Have the tickets debut at a very high price and get cheaper towards event day. This encourages folks to wait and scalpers to lose money. Enables privacy, although other factors are working to eliminate it.
The only real solutions to scalping are to impact supply/demand by increasing supply (extra show in each city) or lower demand (raise prices). As a jazz fan I don’t know much about shows that sell out and attract scalpers, but I’m curious why the artists don’t double prices to cut out middlemen.
They would to multiple the prices multiple times to even discourage the middlemen, gentrifying at the same time the fan base, which is sad
It is, but it still feels better that the money goes toward the artist than it does to go to a middleman.
Reality is there is no good solution IMO, no matter what you do, someone is missing out. Just the reality of supply vs demand.
Not a direct answer to your question but go to see local bands. The ticket prices are way better and so is the crowd and the show.
I know this doesn't work for most subscribers to mass media culture, but I'm right there with you. Personally I kind of hate celebrity as a social phenomenon, and I love seeing an amazing talented set and then getting to talk with the musician afterward. I don't give Live Nation my money.
I recently bought tickets to a concert in France (I live in Germany) and ended up not being able to travel and had to resell my tickets. Apparently according to French law you are not allowed to resell a ticket above its face value and so I had to resell it through the same ticketing company I bought it. They allowed me to set a price with up to a maximum amount which was less than how much I bought it (by a Euro or two) to cover their fees. It was also possible to name a specific buyer who would then get be able to buy your ticket.
Maybe there’s still another way for scalpels to game this system, I don’t know, but I’ve been to a few concerts in Paris and I’ve never seen scalpels hanging outside the venue selling tickets, which would be the norm in Germany, so maybe the system does work.
I assume the scalpers demand their additional payment first and upon receipt, name the buyer who can buy the ticket "for face value".
It's trivially easy for scalpers to game that system.
Why should anything be done? If people are willing to pay five times the face value for a ticket, then it signals that tickets are priced too low. Let the market price itself.
Harry Styles is playing in my city, he's apparently very popular, but there's still plenty of tickets available for as low as 47€ for tomorrow.
>Why should anything be done?
For the same reason anything is ever done about anything -- because it upsets a large enough portion of your community.
> Why should anything be done?
Because there is demand for it. A lot of people like going to live music and theatre events and scalpers make it more difficult and more expensive for them.
Why shouldn't anything be done? Because capitalism is God?
A lot of people like going to live music and theatre events and scalpers make it more difficult and more expensive for them
Scalpers make it possible to get a ticket at market price, instead of maybe being able to get it for less and maybe not being able to get it at any price. It's not at all clear that the latter is better.
Scalpers are the primary reason it’s practically impossible to get a ticket at face price in the first place
I'm probably one of the least capitalism-minded commenters on HN, but this is a case where I'm happy to let the market sort itself out. It's not food, shelter, medicine, or housing.
I'm absolutely not convinced that the problem is as widespread as people make it out to be, outside of a few big names or events.
> Why shouldn't anything be done? Because capitalism is God?
Because it's just the system manifesting itself. There are winners and losers, and the winners are usually those with the most money.
I really find it odd to see people being this vocal for Taylor Swift tickets or Pokemon cards. If I use my capital to buy ten houses to rent, then I'm an investor. If I use it to outbid a city for electricity to feed my data center, then I'm a captain of industry. But the shiny charmander card is where people draw the line?
>But the shiny charmander card is where people draw the line?
this isn't just about trendy commercial items. Michael Sandel in 'The Moral Limits of Markets' called this 'Skyboxification'. These mechanisms like scalping affect sport events where people of different classes used to sit next to each other and where now low income earners are either priced out or delegated to the backrow. Cultural spaces that do not separate people into 'winners' or 'losers' but treat people equally are the basis of any civil society. It's where people from different walks of life come into contact.
I never understood the issue with scalping and reselling tickets for a higher price. At all. And I've read a bunch of opinions here and on other forums and articles. None make any sense to me. It's a good that's being resold for profit. Not an essential one like rare medicine during a pandemic.
I think some artists want to appeal to the poorer people so pricing their tickets higher or letting the free market work out the price would damage their reputation. So it doesn't seem to be a real problem we need to solve. It's a problem some artists feel they have. Let them figure it out.
If I was an artist and I expected a full venue with tickets that cost 10, I'd start selling them at 1000, then at 500, 200, 100, 50, 20 and finally 10. If someone buys all of them at 1000 and only that person shows up - awesome! Maybe there will be less drug sales because 1 person bought all tickets but that 100x per ticket could be used to pay the vendors.
If you want view ticket pricing as a pure economics problem (it is not), consider that live shows are also a way to build up and expand a fanbase. If only a handful of rich people (or people who bought tickets the second they went on sale) are at your show, you are not expanding your audience. Since streaming has decimated most artists' income from record sales, it makes sense to try and build a large fanbase who will regularly come to shows as well as buy merchandise. Tours often have exclusive merchandise than fans will want to buy, so all the more reason to attract more people.
As a side note, this notion that a phenomenon being the result of market forces means it is fair and has no issues seems to be a blinkered view of the world. Surely enjoying high quality art should be possible for a broad section of society?
Why would "only a handful" of rich people show up? If I'm a scalper, and demand is lower than expected, I'm incentivised to resell at any price, even at a 90% discount, because I can't just sit on my stock hoping for demand to pick up later.
If anything, as an artist, I'm incentivised to seek out the whales that can absorb ridiculous prices, because they are the ones that will buy the 25 limited editions of my album.
It's not necessarily a choice between the 1000 genuine fans vs the 10 posers. If the artist is popular enough, it's between the 1000 rich genuine fans, and the 1000 broke genuine fans, so might as well please the rich. It's a selection that already happens when picking the venues. It's always London, NYC, Paris, Tokyo, and never Skopje or Pine Bluff, AK.
I'd also like the news to talk about the show "so popular people are willing to pay a fortune to see" rather than the one with plenty of cheap seats still available.
I was reading an article earlier this week about "blue dot fever". Promoters like ticketmaster show the available seats as blue dots on a plan of the venue. The more blue dots, the more seats available, which seems to lower the demand even more, by signalling that the show is not popular, which drives the status-seekers away.
I understand what you're saying but it still mostly an issue for the artist - building a fan base. Otherwise if you have X amount of tickets to be distributed, you'll get X people at the venue, at most. Since the same number of people will show up, it's a matter of distribution. What should the distribution be? You, and many others, say it shouldn't be the richest people, or more accurately those who'd pay the highest price for the ticket. What about the poorest people, if we're talking about fairness? Should we have a quota for homeless people, too? For people of certain ethnicities, political views, sexualities, etc.? That's what I see when you talk about fairness outside of market forces - we should try to include "everyone", whatever that means. Maybe it's the most hardcore fans? So first allow people with tattoos of the artist on their chest? Yes, it's a ridiculous example, but what is fair to you? What makes a fan that will only be able to pay 10 $ not less worthy than a fan who will pay 1000 $? Will they be more worthy to attend than a fan who can only afford 0.01 $?
To me it seems it IS an economics problem - the artist needs to make money and they need to decide whether they want to optimize for the profit from ticket sales or for the profit from merch or from a broader fan base. But it's an economic problem for the artist, it's not really a societal problem or anything more major.
As a disclaimer, I'm not rich and I don't care for concerts anyway. It just doesn't make sense to single out tickets for concerts as some special thing. As an example, I'm OK with not being able to buy some fancy ethically sourced gourmet food yet I still support the company that makes it. Or maybe I won't buy it often, but I'll save up and buy it once in a while. Many parallels to be made, but of course not perfect. Still, it's not a necessity, so it's strictly an economic problem (not a moral one), mainly for the artist. Whether they want to solve it and how they want to solve it is their issue. Whether it's non-transferable tickets or ID-bound tickets with a strict policy on how they're transferred or an auction or a lottery or whatever.
People leave out that the first selection has already happened before the tickets are even on sale, by picking the cities where the tours will stop. The new trend is for artists to stay for longer, in fewer cities, which saves them a ton of money. Like mini-residencies.
Harry Styles is giving more than 20 concerts in Europe, but only in Wembley or Amsterdam.
Is that bad? It's economics. The artist likely decided they'll make more money that way. Hardcore or richer fans will be able to travel to Wembley or Amsterdam. Less enthusiastic and poorer fans won't.
I can't attend most of the concerts I would go to if they were in my city and cost nothing because they're far away from where I live org because they cost a lot. I still enjoy the recordings I can download. I treat concerts as a luxury, not a necessity or a right.
You're letting middlemen profit from providing zero value to society. Artists don't benefit. Fans don't benefit. Scalpers benefit.
It should be obvious we want a system that is optimally beneficial to artists and fans rather than middlemen.
This would make sense if they were an airline and only need to maximise profits. An artist – even one who really wants to make as much money as they can – still needs to think about other things, like atmosphere (that gig with one very rich person won't be much fun), and happy fans. If she sells all tickets at $10k each then maybe she'd clear the market, but she'd piss off a lot of fans, so maybe there won't be as much demand next time.
There's a very easy solution. Put the name of the owner on the ticket. Limit the number of tickets per person. Verify the identity before entering the premises. Allow the resale at face value via the organiser's platform. Allow to resell your ticket at face value to a specific person, for the case where the friend who bought the tickets six months ago is suddenly sick.
I don't know why this is being made to look like an insurmountable problem. We're talking about multi-billion dollar companies, organising billion dollar tours.
> If she sells all tickets at $10k each then maybe she'd clear the market, but she'd piss off a lot of fans
If I was conspiracy-minded, I'd say blaming "the scalpers" would be a very convenient way of dodging responsibilities while taking a cut.
so they're partnering with Live Nation, the same company that's part of the vertically integrated monopoly on ticketing, venues, and resale. Nobody is buying these tickets for cash from a scalper outside of the venue. My 2-min tought: tie use of the ticket to the payment method or id of the purchaser; allow limited transfers. If LN/TM actually cared they'd provide for risk-free transfer without charging ridiculous mark-up. Since they sell the orginial ticket 95% of the time they have almost complete control over the pricing and consumer's id.
New idea: You have to tie a valid credit card to a ticket in order to transfer it, if the card doesn't authorize for $500 at the gate, admission is denied, and the ticket can be used to charge unlimited concessions and merch to the original buyer's card. If a scalper sells a ticket to a stranger, the customer could bankrupt them at the show.
I'm a perfect world, artists would rent a facility and sell/resell their own tickets (or partner with a ticket processor that offers price caps on resales) thereby controlling the issuance and resale of tickets. In reality, the facilities often have their own deals with people like ticketmaster and the artist has no control. It works out for the artist because they lock in the msrp of every ticket and don't have to deal with demand. But it sucks for the fans. Capitalism.
I agree with the libertarians on this. Scalping isn't an issue. People who are willing to pay more for tickets should get them. Concert tickets are not basic needs like housing or food.
If there is room for arbitrage (which is what scalping really is) then the tickets are too cheap in the first place.
I agree with supply and demand dictating the price on scarce items. I don’t agree with letting middlemen butt in and drive the price up by exacerbating the scarcity, and making a profit with no value add to the market.
Spotify is another entity dipping into the limited pool of available tickets and further limiting supply. I don't pay for/use Spotify and don't want to, so as far as I'm concerned this is only worsening the problem by further constraining the supply of tickets available to me.
Same here.
Fan club lottery.
In the UK they're making it illegal to resell tickets for more than the original cost. That should deal with the majority of the problem.
Scalpers will just do two transactions, one high one for the privilege of being able to buy the ticket, and then the sale at the listed limit.
No, the real solution is to make tickets strictly id-bound and non-transferable in any way.
> Scalpers will just do two transactions, one high one for the privilege of being able to buy the ticket, and then the sale at the listed limit.
I don’t understand this. If you can’t resell for higher than ticket price, how do they make any profit? Are you saying they’d sell the cheaper ticket for the more expensive ticket’s price? Wouldn’t price stick to the ticket, since presumably different price tiers afford different location/etc?
First transaction would be outside the channel. e.g., scalper may require high-value Venmo or Zelle transaction, then enter buyer ID / name on ticket website at listed limit.
It's a bandaid and not a particularly good one. Spotify reserving a ticket allotment is really no different to American Express doing the exact same thing. Amex uses their allotment to attract premium members through concierge services. Spotify doesn't quite have this same upsell potential (yet?) but they're doing it to make money. We just don't know how that'll happen yet.
Defeating bot buyers, scalpers and resellers would actually be a noble goal but its' really the tip of the iceberg. If anyone was actually interested in tackling this (hint: they aren't) then you need to tackle a much bigger problem: the venue monopoly with Ticketmaster and Live Nation.
Many venus, particularly larger venues, have exclusive contracts with Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster also has an official platform for reselling tickets, of which they get a cut. In a more equitable world, you would only be able to resell tickets for their face value. It's alleged (and I believe this) that Ticketmaster only releases a tiny portion of tickets to the general public. The rest they have arrangements to sell through scalpers and resellers and their own platform because, hey, they make more profit that way.
There was a time when businesses were a tool to generate income. Small businesses still work this way. But any sufficiently sized company now is just a tool to speculate on and make a capital gain on. Ticketmaster doesn't need to grow into a trillion dollar company but they want to and, at a cewrtain point, the only way companies can continue to grow is by cutting costs and raising prices.
Back in the nascent days of Internet music piracy it was pointed out that almost no bands make enough money from selling music to live on. It's why the biggest anti-piracy advocates were huge bands like Metallica. Most bands make their living for performance fees ie playing concerts. And even then they might make barely enough to cover gas. What really gets them over the line is selling merch at the venues.
I'd say that music would be in a better state if bands could see more of the value of their labor from playing concerts. But even concerts aren't about bands or their fans anymore. They're about upselling premium services to high-net-worth clients. You ever notice that at sports venue, for example, general seating always gets mysteriously ripped out and replaced by suites? Same principle: venues make more per square foot from a corporate suite than they do from sports fans. There was a time when ordinary people would be fans of their home teams and just go to every home game. That's increasingly out of reach.
In short, the entire system is broken. Spotify participating in it won't change anything.
This is ultimately a supply and demand problem. If tickets sell out on the secondary market for 10 or 100x the face value, then that's the fair market price. Either artists should charge more, or perform more shows.
No, it‘s an audience/artist experience problem. I worked for one of Australia's biggest outdoor summer music festivals through the 2000s (I built a direct ticket selling platform for them). Their popularity grew each year, and, sure, they could have just raised their prices to try and match supply and demand. They 100% did not want to do that because they knew it would completely change the audience demographics and make a less fun event for everyone to attend and a less fun event for the artists to perform at, thus making it harder to attract audiences and artists in future years.
They ended up being acquired by a company that was much more into charging top dollar to big-spenders. The company was ultimately acquired by Live Nation and the ticket
prices kept increasing until suddenly ticket sales stopped, and that whole category of festivals is now largely dead in Australia.
It sounds like they found the price ceiling. Trying to pick your customers is a fools errand, particularly with a music festival where tastes change and people age out.
There is a physical limit to how many shows you can put on and the Economics 101 explanation of ticket pricing misses the part where the price of the ticket is a part of the whole image the musician is selling to the audiences.
Taylor Swift can probably still sell out if she raises the price ten fold, but what kind message does this send to her average listeners? What does it mean if the most popular popular musician of our times prices the populace out? You can of course dismiss the likely negative responses as emotional and irrational, but that's the whole deal with art and culture. You can't build a fan base without catering to their emotions.
And then on the other extreme of music you have people like Fugazi, whose low ticket pricing is very obviously a part of the band's entire artistic and ideological project.
If you want to see what happens when you apply supply and demand to ticket pricing, you can just look at your nearest big league sports team. The recent trend seems to be jacking up the prices as much as they can get away with and catering more and more to VIP guests who spend a fortune in one of those "hospitality" suites. Perhaps not a coincidence that less and less people, especially younger people, around me are casually into sports these days. They got told that they are not welcome in the corporate owned sports venue and they take their attention elsewhere, and all it's left are a dwindling set of diehard fans and C-suite people who are there not for sports but for overpriced steak dinners and are too nicely dressed to cheer for their home team.
The last/marginal ticket in the venue sells for 10x face value. The majority of tickets don’t sell for much more than face value.
Taylor Swift can’t realistically play more shows than she did during the Eras Tour, and it’s unlikely that she’d have sold a million seats in London if she were charging much more than she did.
It seems like you could sell tickets in tranches at tiered prices. It seems very tractable. I suspect artists don't want to look greedy by personally charging what fans are often willing to pay.
> The last/marginal ticket in the venue sells for 10x face value.
That's only if the event sells out. The ticket should have sold for a higher price such that the demand was exactly the number of seats available.
I think its more complicated than that. An artist is pretty constrained by how many shows they can play in a given area which makes the total market for any given show really small and trivially manipulated for profit.
Then she should charge more.
[deleted]
This may come as a shock to capitalists, but some artists don't want to charge their fans more. Fugazi famously capped their ticket prices at $5 because they wanted their shows to be affordable.
Make it illegal to sell tickets above face value.
I was a big fan of what the Cure did, they played our town and they did not allow any tickets to be resold for anything above what they originally went for.
Non-transferable I think? But you could resell them via ticketmaster maybe for facevalue?
It was amazing, we sat on the ticketmaster page, refreshed over the course of a day and we got 8th row for I believe $75 - it was an amazing concert, and being able to pay a reasonable price for tickets like that was amazing.
How does this not just bias who gets ticket to those with more time preference.
willingness to stand in line for a ticket probably correlates well with fandom
How does willingness to pay more money not correlate with fandom?
Standing in line is (today) a digital process that a scalper can trivially scale
It seems unlikely they'd continue to do do that if they weren't able to flip it at a higher price later
X$ for the ticket plus a convenience fee/service fee for standing in line.
It seems baked into the concept of "reselling can't be done at a higher value" that transfers would have to be limited to a platform where that sort of thing is prevented. For example, if the reselling market is just "add your ticket to the pool for people to buy, and if someone does, they get the ticket and you get the money", there's no way for the sellers to contact the buyers, so I'm not sure how you'd envision an out-of-band payment occurring.
Why bother if there’s no profit?
Two options, both of which seem to work well in venues near me:
1. When an event sells out you can join the 'waitlist' and people can offer their tickets back to the ticket company who give the person at the top of the waitlist the opportunity to purchase. All at face value. Good for the artist too as there is less chance of empty seats when people can't make it.
2. QR code tickets that rotate meaning they can't be screenshotted and sold.
I’m against it from these angles:
1. I like live concerts but I don’t spend my days listening to a lot of music. I would be considered “not a fan” by these metrics.
2 The monopolistic aspect. I subscribe to a much smaller Spotify competitor, now I’m at a disadvantage.
3. I don’t consider scalping a problem. The market price is determined by demand. It’s also been a problem that has been solved by artist presales and fan club gates.
I also think that as a recognized monopoly Ticketmaster should have more limitations on its business model. For example, their compassion on resale tickets should be limited. At present, they are encouraged to double dip on fees by finding ways to send more tickets to the secondary market.
You are just being punished for your poor judgement for not backing the winner. Not sure why you should be rewarded.
It's the same logic for de-googlers. You can't De-Google yourself and then bitch about some Google products work better on Google products.
If you are a proud edge-lord/hipster with your obscure choices, you should also learn to deal with consequences.
Scale brings advantages. You can't have it both ways
So your view is “accept a monopoly and become their bitch?”
I use a competitor to Spotify because I like the other product better overall. It’s a better value and better suited to my needs. I never said I’m using something else just to stick it to Spotify or become an edgelord.
I’m perfectly happy to be “punished” by missing some concerts. I think you misunderstand my comment as complaining about the situation. I really don’t care that much, I just am giving my opinion that this is a system that doesn’t seem ideal to me.
Many artists are struggling to fill seats right now. The industry can have fun trying silly schemes like this while they cancel tours in oversized venues.
I’ve almost entirely given up on managing music. Just done with it.
I listen to soma.fm and radioparadise.com .. I read one music magazine and listen to some of the music recommendations from there, but following any of it, over time, is a lost cause for me.
I was just remarking to someone how music apps are the least interesting, personal, and innovative of all the things I live with.
Examples: we still can’t manage playlists of albums, or down signal genres of music or even artists, or separate “calm” music for sleep from all the other generative playlist rankings they use.
Apple Music is entirely useless to me since the only “for me” stuff they’ll generate is music for sleeping. As if I don’t do other things.
How would you like to manage those things? I listen to a lot of music and I'm pretty happy with Spotify. When I want to discover new music, I pick an artist I like and start the artist radio. I always get good new recommendations
I gave up on Spotify after 3 months. I did not like how it just kept repeating the same songs. With a catalog as large as they supposedly have, it was not entertaining me hearing the same things so frequently.
Way back when, I had a very impressive iTunes catalog of actual media files that I had locally. I spent hours curating my CD rips and even the recordings from vinyl. I added id3 tags and artwork. It was glorious and was larger than my 80GB iPod could handle, so my iPod had curation as well.
Then iTunes went all streaming and wiped out my local library, not the media files, just the library. Gone. Poof. And just like that, I was done. I recently dug out the hdd with the media, and using iTunes now to find local stuff loaded onto my device is a constant fight with trying to avoid its clearly preferred Music+ nonsense.
I'm close to getting back to looking for a better music app to source my large local library. Just haven't quite gotten there yet.
"I'm close to getting back to looking for a better music app to source my large local library."
Well, I am close to finally build that better music app for my large local libary of music.
(I actually do already use my own written player since 15 years, but it was always just a quick hack and never the thing)
I also do use spotify for finding artists, but have the same complaints that they are just repeating. (Also I hate the spotify app)
Pandora is still around, but their library is a lot smaller
I’ve never really had good luck with the artist radio, but I’ve found a lot of music I like by starting at a band I like and going through the Related Artists. It’s a little strange because I’m sure the artist radio includes a lot of songs from the Related Artists. It’s probably a psychological thing, wanting to feel like I’m in control instead of the app choosing for me.
Artist radios almost inevitably become a mix of songs I’ve listened to the most that have even the faintest crossover with the artist genre. It’s very, very frustrating and my biggest peeve about Spotify. I now ask an LLM for an artist radio playlist and copy it over to spotify, which is kind of a pain.
That's really weird. I have heard of people having the same experience as you though. I'm not sure why my radio plays songs that I have never listened to
Hop on plex amp. Take control of your music.
I realize that sounds like an Ad but I’ve been using it for a few months and I feel like I’ve rediscovered my joy for music again.
Given that Plex just bumped their lifetime subscription price to $750, I can no longer recommend them. They are clearly more interested in becoming another streaming service, and are I think trying to push out their core users who probably make them very little money.
Interesting, their price bump announcement actually just went and made me upgrade to lifetime (at $250 while I could) instead of write them off completely.
Netflix will never allow you to pay a one time fee for life, neither will any other streaming service on the planet.
Meanwhile, plex is a company that has employees. If I like plex, use it heavily, and want to support them I can do so with money. There are alternatives that are completely free, but I don’t like them as much and the minimal cost for plex is totally worth the value for me.
Your very same link also has a huge yellow banner at the top of the page stating: "The price of a Lifetime Plex Pass is increasing on July 1, 2026."
Goes to show how inoculated I am against banner ads I suppose.
Either way part of me feels like it’s for the best. One off payment for lifetime membership of an app that has continual development isn’t a great business model.
It’s worth 750, which is about ten years worth of yearly subscriptions.
Plex is 16 years old and the Lindy effect applies.
There is so much good free software out there for playing music that I have a hard time believing PlexAmp is worth $750.
They know it's not worth it either, they just want to push more users to the monthly subscription for that sweet ARR.
As a long time Plex member, on Lifetime (originally purchased for <$100), PlexAmp is great although not worth anywhere close to $750.
If you're paying $750 you might as well use Roon like the rest of the audiophile freaks.
Jellyfin has a Music Server although a bit limited compared to Plexamp.
Navidrome is a Music Server with similar functionalities.
Symfonium is a Music Player which can connect to various Music Servers like Navidrome, Plexamp, or just files on the network.
Gonna echo this sentiment, its buy for life and a good license
is it?
vs a bit of ai slop to make my own music player?
the only things i care about is some essy enough to use upload process, basic serving, then that theres some smart enough local caching on whatever device im using
It's good, but you still have to pay monthly for it. Feels like it kind of defeats the point of having a local collection.
OrJellyfin or Navidrome if you want to use free open source that does a decent enough job.
iTunes Match. It's entirely your own stuff. You pay for it, or upload your own stuff you have from elsewhere. You own it. You stream it wherever.
Pandora still exists and is quite good.
I came back to Pandora recently and I think it has the best discovery out of any music platform. I don't pay extra to play what I want, I curate radio stations and it's been great. The only catch is you have to be diligent with your curation, because it starts to reach and while you may love song X from genre Y, the station is genre Z. If you're not careful every station will become a mix of everything.
Former Pandora employee. The music recommendation team was amazing when I worked there, and the use of global song frequency capping across seeds helps prevent too much repetition at a user level but I agree on the genre bleed. They may have changed it but the music recommender was an ensemble model that polled 30 or so distinct models that would provide their own next song recommendation. One of the last resort recommenders used only the music genome data for the song (no collaborative filtering).
My trick is to be liberal with downvotes and excruciatingly sparing with any thumbs up.
Youtube Music is quite good for what you're describing.
> Examples: we still can’t manage playlists of albums, or down signal genres of music or even artists, or separate “calm” music for sleep from all the other generative playlist rankings they use.
Youtube music thinks "videogame music" is a genre and lumps them all together, if you make the mistake of including even one song from a game OST any recommendations go out the window.
For example, a "chill" mix with videogame music in it will happily start including Doom Eternal tracks because "they're the same thing, right?"
It feels like the quality of the Youtube Music app took a dive when they fired the whole team and outsourced development around a year or so ago.
This happens with Spotify too TBF. Listen to one single genre, suddenly the only thing you hear is from that genre.
Whenever Spotify removed human curation from their recommendations to rely on more ML-algorithms was when it stopped being useful to me.
Went back to trackers myself, only place where musical discissions/recommendations are actually useful and wanted.
YouTube music’s recommendations suck hard compared to Spotify and all the people I know who use it (a dozen) say the same thing. The only reason any of us use it seems to be because we only want to pay for one music service and we all use YouTube premium anyways. It’s amazing how big a hole that is in the service, that everyone I know agrees with the same thing.
I gave up on recommendations and I just playlist my own music preferences over time. Like in the days of old.
I just never stopped downloading music. We have modern download stores selling CD-quality music completely DRM free. I like knowing that no matter what happens short of an actual apocalypse, I will never lose access to any of my music.
I recently learned that two tracks on one of my favorite recent albums are straight up missing on streaming services. This only strengthened my resolve to stay the hell away from them.
Same here, music is too important for me to give up this kind of control. I probably miss out on the discovery system of streaming services, but there are enough other sources (e.g. radio paradise).
I have a collection of flacs which contains the albums that matters deeply to me. I don’t mind not having access to unlimited music (I do have a spotify account but I rarely use it). I much prefer to do mindful listening, spending an hour or two, playing a full album at a time, or quickly composing a mood queue. I don’t even shuffle.
This is the problem with public listed companies that need to "maximize shareholder values" and look for infinite growth.
I just want Spotify for music (playlist, recommendation, lossless audio). I don't need their podcast, audiobook, ChatGPT, concert tickets etc. This just makes their app bloated for features I will never use.
I disagree; Spotify is good at serving up sound, so it makes sense for them to also serve audiobooks and podcasts; just like it makes sense for video streaming services to have both movies and tv shows. Similarly for concerts; people who listen to a lot of music are probably interested in going to see their favorite band live.
Mind you, I definitely have complaints about the app (like notifications interrupting music, their abysmal lock screen widget, and their "randomization" that always ends up playing the same few songs from a list of thousands); but I also understand why they want to expand.
> I also understand why they want to expand
I'd have fewer complaints if I could hide the sections I'm not interested in (new releases, audiobooks, podcasts, concerts, etc...).
it's in their interest for them to show you more things that they don't need to pay record labels royalties for.
I have definitely become informed of concerts I’ve then gone to by way of Spotify. They know everyone I listen to and are well suited to advertise the artists I’d actually like to see to me.
Glad I made a true(r) random playlist before they shut their API, which I figure killed those tools
Expand to all Google Play Music features pls Spotify (play counts & the impossible upload-your-own-music to Spotify’s cloud)
Unbelievable that spotify's shuffle is still broken a decade later. No chance the people working there dont know about this as everyone with large playlists runs into it, but for whatever reason they refuse to fix it.
Another reason to use Bandcamp and just buy music. Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it, make it available to your devices, etc etc. I dunno, Spotify certainly isn't going to get better at this point. Best we can hope is that they die and something better takes their place.
> Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it, make it available to your devices, etc etc.
I have avoided building my own stack by uploading everything into Youtube Music (which used to be Google Music, which ... whatever.)
It gets a little worse every day, and one day it'll get bad enough where the pain of sysadmining something new will be preferable to them.
I haven't set up my own stack for music, so I'm just guessing tbh, but administering Jellyfin has been completely painless. Let Claude write a docker compose file, toss it on the server, haven't had to think about it again. I bet there's something equally good out there for music management.
navidrome is pretty good.
My impression from the selfhosted sub is that most people looking to replace spotify are not into albums, and want a lot of popular music not available on BC.
Cloud storage (I use Dropbox) and an app to sync it with my phone automatically. It doesn't take a long time to set up.
And if I want to listen to a random song I don't have while I'm outside... I just don't.
>Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it, make it available to your devices, etc etc.
Uhh, no you don't? Nearly all of my Bandcamp purchases, except the literal one or two physical-only purchases that didn't also come with a digital copy, are all available to stream to my heart's content via the Bandcamp app and their website.
I mean, I also download it all because I DJ, but yeah... having access to it whenever I want is entirely effortless and doesn't require anything beyond Bandcamp itself.
> Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it
No you do not. Just use an external drive and an MP3 player like some kind of caveman. There are plenty of high quality models out there. Additionally smart phones will let you store music on them to listen to using the player app of your choice (VLC or something).
For the last 20 years, my "stack" has been a NFS-mounted hard drive full of MP3s, and the occasional rsync mirror to a USB stick if I need to listen to something without a network connection.
Well to elaborate on what I meant - Spotify makes it extremely easy to have access to your music everywhere. Once you get into (or back into) storing MP3s you have to solve that for whatever level of convenience you want. I have Plexamp and things setup myself but it does require some work.
If you're on Apple devices it's $25 a year for iTunes Match. You can throw all your Bandcamp purchases into the Music app and they'll be available across your devices.
I understand not wanting them to expand into playlists and audiobooks.
But concert tickets, notifications, etc., seems like a no-brainer. That is firmly within the category of music.
It also likely makes it harder for people ho are not users of Spotify to get tickets - which is almost certainly the goal.
Less than 10 years ago I could stroll into a local record store in my city and buy paper tickets to concerts directly from them, zero markup, zero "processing fees". And the ticket itself would be a souvenir because it often had a unique design or typeface. Now it's just a hideous barcode.
You may need to move on to other services like Apple Music
Apple’s prioritization of Apple Music on their HomePod turns me off it a bit. Could help guide users more to alternatives but would reduce services sales.
Meh, I’m being kinda unfair b/c the experience is gonna be better. Shame Spotify forces streaming from phone (YouTube Music can run on HomePod itself like Apple Music). YouTube Music via HomePod might play the audio from a music video instead of playing the real song, so does make sense to shuttle normies to the Apple service, but guess I don’t find the situation perfect.
At least concert tickets are somewhat aligned with listening to music, unlike autoplaying video podcasts on the homepage rather than showing my playlists.
So just use it for music. Who cares if the app bundle is bloated? If that's really your main criteria, just use the web player
I'm sorry what? Artists do not make money on streaming, they make it in touring. Spotify integrating concerts into the same product surface is the MOST logical thing they could do.
Touring costs a fortune for bands. They don't even keep most of the money, the record label takes a big cut and there's Ticketmaster after that, and now Spotify I guess. Selling paper-thin T-shirts, vinyl and lapel pins for absurd markups at the merch booth is how they make money.
i get a lot of value from these other features (podcast, audiobook, concert suggestions) and would appreciate some livenation disruption
It's the newest version of Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment:
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
music listening has been falling for a while now. no company public or not will choose to commit suicide out of purity principle
Spotify is welcome to go into all those other businesses, but why do they have to destroy their one valuable resource in an attempt to leverage it for all this other garbage? Doing one thing really good - so good that people will pay you for it - is not a "purity principle". It used to be the fundamental reason for existence for many companies.
its not garbage. podcasts is now major chunk of listening. so why not give ppl what they want. "one thing" is not just music. My own listening habits have shifted from music into podcasts.
Hmm, see I don’t agree. I use Spotify extensively for music, but also for podcasts and audiobooks. Great for a long car journey, or background listening whilst doing DIY.
I have plenty of frustrations with the app, but not with the core offer as a delivery mechanism for various types of audio entertainment and information.
The music industry works the way it does because a large amount of people involved are effectively working for free. Promoters, photographers, DJs, interns, writers, assistants, even some artists early on accept low or unpaid work because the industry offers networking, access, drugs, etc
The music industry got rid of all that years ago when the big labels swallowed the small indies and imposed their corporate culture everywhere. There are no A&R men skulking through dive bars using drugs and girls to sign bands. The bands are now supposed to approach the labels with their Spotify listen counts and social media follower numbers ready.
Rick Beato has a good video on why so many new generation superstars like Gracie Abrams are nepo babies who all the time and money in the world to chase music as a career.
So scalpers will use bots to generate listens and shares, boosting listens for Spotify, in order to gain access to premium tickets. They are just adding a “barrier” that only inflates their listen counts while probably making it worse on actual valid ticket purchasers.
I don’t see how this works out as planned
Spotify is actively incentivized to mitigate that, because they're forced to pay royalties on every stream. This is, at least, a better situation than with Ticketmaster, who is actively incentivized to get scalpers as many tickets as they can.
[deleted]
They'll trade off the inflated numbers for the royalties.
They'd probably make this a feature for paying customers. I don't think the economics of scalping this at scale would make sense you're spending money for months and risk Spotify banning you if you get caught.
the next ticketmaster... I really loathe what spotify has become
Competition in that space would be kinda good
This is my shocked face when Ticketmaster aka LiveNation aka StubHub aka Spotify’s ticket reserve system is again a monopoly.
._.
but of course! why wouldn't you encourage bot accounts listening every kind of artist to scalp tickets?
look at the monthly active users chart after this deal! promoted.
I was thinking the same thing. If there are very many seats available, it will probably be gamed by scalpers. If they are doing this, they should really do the math to try to make the expected ROI of an additional bot account doing 24/7 streaming, slightly below the cheapest Spotify subscription price.
How is this not just a "Spotify tax" on tickets? I don't use Spotify, and I don't want to, because it's obnoxious crippleware. Now Spotify will reserve tickets, forcing me to prove my loyalty to their platform for some reason, before attending a concert? This doesn't make any sense. And if Live Nation cares about selling to authentic people, why do they not just take the proplem into their own hands and go after the scrapers?
Great, ticketmaster antitrust lawsuit round two.
This is a nice feature to have, it already tells you if an artist you like is coming to your city, and redirects to Ticketmaster for tickets, but it doesn't have the data to know if you already bought a ticket, so it keeps pestering you. Also, some competition against Ticketmaster is welcomed.
I listen to all of my music via Navidrome. It sits in an S3 bucket that I rclone new albums to.
For concerts, I built a PWA that pulls my Navidrome artists and queries the Ticketmaster API for shows that match within a 75 mile radius once a day. It displays them in a list with their name, the venue/location and a link to buy tickets.
[deleted]
Soon, you will have to justify hours of Spotify usage to be allowed to buy tickets for shows.
I have a shirt from nine inch nails offered too the top % of listeners with a bunch of streaming stats on the back so we're almost there.
So now we need to run farms of spotify accounts playing songs to get our concert tickets?
This is good to know. If they roll it out it like their other "features", it's going to reserve the tickets for you even if you don't want them.
Or they're going to put it as a drop down from the "Repeat" button, or something stupid like that, to cause people to click it by accident.
And when you disable it in the settings they'll stop, but only for 6 months when they cram it down your throat again in a new place in the UI.
I secretly wish Spotify would fire their entire product and dev teams, allow third party clients again, and just focus their energy on increasing their catalog and paying artists more.
I don't want to see lyrics, I don't want AI shuffling, I don't want videos, I don't want concert tickets.
I only listen to Global Electronic Music. All underground stuff, so im safe from the capitalists.
What a braindead move. If you see people post their "wrapped" you notice quite a lot of people basically streaming a single artist 24 hours a day. So now you're encouraging people to become streaming bots. And you're taking tickets from fans who don't happen to use Spotify. Fuck Spotify.
Why is scalping a problem?
Fewer people go to concerts, fans can’t afford the tickets, less connection with the artists, less interest in music overall.
Artists lose, even if they get paid and all the tickets technically are sold out. Fans lose. The only people who win are scalpers who just abuse the system.
> Fewer people go to concerts
Scalpers don't buy tickets and not sell them. The most scalped concerts are obviously the most attended
> fans can’t afford the tickets
See above. I assume what you are upset about is that rich fans are the ones going.
> less connection with the artists, less interest in music overall
I think you need to explain your logic here.
If I bought 100 tickets, sold 20 of them at 10x the value I paid for them, and then ate the rest as a loss, I'm still making a tidy profit, and the artist/venue/etc. still make the same amount of money as if 100 individuals bought them and attended, but there are now 80 fewer people in the audience (edited to add: and potentially 80 people who could have afforded the original price but not the absurd upsell).
I don't have the data to say whether this happens or not (edited to add: and the numbers are obviously made up), but the logic is perfectly sound; nothing would stop it from happening today.
> See above. I assume what you are upset about is that rich fans are the ones going.
I'm upset that artists make the tickets affordable for different groups, and their fans want to see the concert. You have 2 sides that are in agreement. Then there's a 3rd, independent side that decides to abuse the system to make profit, hurting 2 other sides.
Imagine that you pay road tax and the government builds highway. Everyone's happy. Now there's a militia that sets up checkpoints and takes a toll for driving on the highway. Unrelated 3rd party tries to benefit by abusing the system.
> Scalpers don't buy tickets and not sell them. The most scalped concerts are obviously the most attended
If you buy 100 tickets for $100 and sell them for $300 you need to sell only 34 tickets to break even. The concert hall could be sold out and half empty at the same time. Of course there are concerts where scalpers will sell 100% of what they got, but they don't need to.
Not OP but - I think one could make the case that if tickets were sold via a lottery and non-transferable, the average lottery participant would be a bigger fan of $ARTIST than the average person who can afford the scalped price for a ticket today.
Arguably if rich people are just buying the $1000 concert tickets just to flex and take pictures for IG, that's a seat that could be going to a 17-year-old who loves the band's music but can't afford more than $100. The 17-year-old meanwhile may never get to go to a show of any of their favorite bands due to this situation, meaning they miss out on this meaningful chance to connect with the music in a personal, in-person way.
Basically the case hinges on the assertion that the richest fans are not the same as the most serious fans.
It seems like a step in the right direction to combat scalpers.
I've wondered though... Why not have a non-transferrable ticket system? If you can't go then you return your tickets to the pool and if they sell you get your money back.
Honestly, this could turn out to be a really great thing.
When artists become popular, they often complain that the people they are making their music for, their biggest fans, tend to be the people least able to afford the concert tickets.
The artists are often totally willing to set aside a chunk of tickets at a much cheaper price, but they need to be able to guarantee that these tickets aren't just purchased by scalpers and resold at the market price.
So if you can actually tie ticket availability to genuine listening patterns of this artist over time, in a way that is very difficult to game, then this could be huge.
Obviously you can worry about scalpers that will now try to open 1000 different Spotify accounts so that they can buy up 1000 tickets. But it should be pretty easy for Spotify to look for signals that indicate real human listeners, I would think.
Actually the artists set aside tickets specifically for resale. At a company i worked at we did this on behalf of the artists and content-rightsholders directly to maximize their profit. Your favorite artist loves money and resale more than affordability
seems like it would just get botted like anything else and also make it harder for fans of an artist who don't use spotify to get tickets
"Stream fraud" is already a thing, so if anything this would make botting more profitable. Great synergy to be had here by fraudsters
Sounds like a good way to pump the numbers
Surely this will get arbitraged like anything else, where fans who get picks will onsell tickets
You can also make non-transferable tickets. If it’s a decent discount for a specific intended person it makes sense.
The majority of concerts lack sufficient demand for scalpers to make money. It's only the Taylor Swifts and Beyonces whose ticket values exceed the sticker price.
there's always a criticism, something has to give.
lest you desire verifiable gov based ID tracking?
Auction. Auction is the answer.
Or, when a tour is announced, start tickets at 10X the regular price and have it drop down to the regular price over the course of a couple of weeks in a simple time based mechanism. After that, if tickets are not sold out it continues to drop until sold or it hits a reserve price for Door tickets.
Good for artists, fair from a market perspective and gets rid of scalpers
You are overlooking the secondary effect — what happens if you, a musician, a person who lives off having a positive public image, becomes known as the kind of musician who uses free market forces to effectively price fans out? Fans will not like it. It is not rational but nothing in music is. You win the pricing battle but lose the PR war. It's bad for your business and the entire business of concerts in the long run.
And with your particular pricing scheme, there is arguably still nothing stopping scalpers from scooping up the tickets after the price drops to a level likely to be profitable for them but before fans had the time to react. In fact it would probably benefit the scalpers even more because they will have more time to track price drops than your average fan!
What about both? Artists want money, fans want entry, reserve a portion for hardcore fans and the remainder by auction. Artists get to sell their $10k seats to the rich while looking like they’re giving an amazing discount to their fans.
This is a better idea, but you run into the problem of determining who are the more deserving fans, and you circle back to what Spotify is planning to do.
If you're selling out venues at 5x a normal ticket price you will quickly be playing in much larger venues until you can't sell them out except at face value
The people whose tickets get scalped are already playing in sports stadiums. There aren’t bigger venues.
The average event either doesn’t sell out or takes a while to sell out.
[dead]
This is basically what is already happening with dynamic pricing. Tickets are now most expensive at the original sale and get cheaper over time until sold
Not good for fans. And happy fans are good for artist. So not good for artist.
Good for artist, bad for those fans who have shallow pocket.
Terrible idea. The venues would taking on all the risk and could even cancel a show if there are not enough ticket purchases because its steepest discount is only the day before the show.
A person purchasing a ticket a month or two in advance prior to the show off loads the risk from the venue. They purchase the ticket thinking they can make the show in two months because the event is a long ways away. People know what they are going to do a week advanced most of the time and therefore might just forego purchasing the ticket a that point in time, because there it has instant depreciating value at the point of sale.
The live music experience would be terrible if only the richest fans can get in. Every crowd would be old and square.
The answer to what question?
The fact there are more people want X than the total number of X.
That’s not a question, that’s just a situation.
The question is how to distribute X in this situation, and I (mistakenly) trusted the reader's intelligence to infer that.
There are a ton of ways to do that. For this to be “the answer,” the question must be more constrained than that.
Apple needs to get into this space QUICK. They just added concert dates in Apple Music. Let me buy tickets with Apple Pay from the app and it's over.
For those against this: I'm curious to hear your take on how you'd stop/mitigate scalping.
Livestream more things and sell digital tickets. Doesn’t do anything directly, but acts as a substitute to shift demand away. Not much point in scalping tickets to a livestream unless the supply is limited, either by an artificial cap or technical constraints.
There are many solutions.
For example - allow ticket resale only through the official platform and cap it at the original sale price.
Another approach - check IDs at the door and only let the original ticket purchaser through.
The real problem is that scalping is insanely profitable for Ticketmaster & co. They take a cut of the original sale and every subsequent transfer, most of them at highly inflated prices, from both buyer and seller. Why would they give that up?
I have some tickets to big gigs coming up and they cannot be resold. On Ticketmaster.
Because it's up to the event promoter if they want to enable it
FIFA’s solution seems reasonable. The tickets are auctioned. EDM festivals usually have an earlier round for people who attended previous iterations which is similar to this approach by Spotify.
One way is to run an auction and provide every attendee on site with a credit code they can apply to next year’s auction. That way you tip the scales slightly towards previous attendees in a way a scalper can’t reliably access.
Another way is to run separate auctions: one for previous attendees, one for fan club members, and one for GA.
The aversion to auctions transforms everything into a lottery but I can see why they do it. The event operator takes all the heat and the artist keeps much of the benefit.
Go back to the old way. Get in line physically and go get the tickets. This is one of those "technology should help here but actually makes the problem worse in weird ways" type of situations.
Nine Inch Nails/Trent Reznor did this in 2018 and it was infinitely better (I also met a lot of people just standing in line—we recognized each other at the show later and ended up throwing each other around in the mosh pit—a great time) [1].
[1] https://www.nin.com/tickets2018/
If it can still be resold online, it won’t mitigate scalping much for on-demand shows. You can see that on any scalping-heavy items that require a person to be there physically to purchase the item (cards, collectibles from restaurants, and etc.).
Above-face-value ticket resale is illegal here and it helps a lot. But you need to make sure this gets prosecuted hard.
I like it. Your last bit is good marketing against those who think paying a linesitter / spot holder is all upside.
Also economics of paying linesitters make it relatively much less attractive than all-digital scalping. So I think you have a solid plan. Should greatly reduce scalping.
Reminds me of technologically-inclined woman who pointed out the flawed thinking behind a grocery store handing out first-gen iPads to their shelf stockers. “I love my iPad at home but this will cost them so much time compared to pen and paper.” (Gotta go find out whatever happened to putting an RFID tag in every product, maybe they needed to hit 1/10 of a cent instead of a penny or something)
That excludes all fans who don't live in big cities. A lot of people travel just to go to shows.
Some people drove in. A few hardcore fans came into town (Chicago) the night before and had tents set up. There were also people coordinating with friends who did live in/close to the city to get the tickets and pay them back later.
Overall, that was the last really "old world" experience I had that reminded me why technology isn't always the right solution to a problem. Since then it's felt like this [1].
[1] https://youtu.be/fnVQlwKAuLk?si=hVr30353SlKfnyRz&t=106
Not really. In the past you could buy tickets in tonnes of places. Ticketmaster had physical 'stores' all over and most of the big music retailers also sold tickets. Admittedly these aren't widespread anymore which poses a problem. It's also a terrible solution because it excludes people with jobs.
There used to be a Ticketmaster counter at the grocery store. You could buy groceries for the week and pick up tickets for a show at the same time.
It was a far more sane (and exciting) experience.
> That excludes all fans who don't live in big cities. A lot of people travel just to go to shows.
Not really. The place that sells the tickets doesn't have to be the performance venue itself.
This sort of distribution was quite common pre-Internet. In theory it's even easier now, because so many of the venues have (unfortunately) consolidated under vertically integrated ownership (e.g. directly owned by Live Nation). Which incidentally, after scalping, is the biggest reason that ticket prices are so high in the first place.
Named tickets, like airplane seats?
Sorry, I only thought about this for 5 seconds, but there are markets where scalping doesn't cause issues. We could look at those.
This is the answer, Ive seen it in practice. You just have to show id at the door when your ticket/QR gets scanned as normal, and the names have to match. Obviously only works for over 18 events though, unless you purposely sell under and over 18 tickets seperately.
This is how all the big video game conventions do things to prevent it, it’s very effective.
Still have the issue of transferring tickets to friends or such if you can't make it. Axios and some providers handle this.
Anything requiring transferring "to friends" will be attempted to be used for scalping of course.
I suppose if we're requiring showing ID to attend anyway, it's not a lot worse to add an online ID verification step in order to be allowed to be a "sender" in the transfer system, and an identity is only allowed to have like 5 distinct "friends" in a rolling 12-month window.
Part of me thinks that Ticketmaster/Live Nation probably makes so much money from their own in-house scalping operation that they don't want to fix any kind of scalping problems for fear they would be somehow obligated to not participate themselves.
> Part of me thinks that Ticketmaster/Live Nation probably makes so much money from their own in-house scalping operation that they don't want to fix any kind of scalping problems for fear they would be somehow obligated to not participate themselves.
My dad used to joke about how many signs he'd say at baseball games saying scalping is against the rules but somehow hearing loads of StubHub ads whenever he would listen to a game on the radio.
Transferring tickets to friends is functionally indistinguishable from scalping
isn’t scalping selling at profit? if i sell to a friend at the same i paid it’s not really scalping …
The problem with scalping is scale. A single person reselling a single ticket is completely fine, because that is not a viable business model for enough people to distort the market. Just limit the number of tickets someone can buy to 3-5.
A scalper just pretends to be 200 different people. With 200 different emails and 200 different credit cards.
Limiting the number of tickets someone can buy doesn't protect against scalping.
Handle it the same way airlines do. If you think you might not be able to go, then pay extra for a refundable ticket.
Would need to provide a decent refund system alongside named tickets, offering quick and easy refunds for maybe 10% cancellation fee.
If you "can't make it", you just have to eat the loss. True fans will make it.
[dead]
On the other hand, airplane ticketing is also notorious for stuff like overbooking flights with the assumption people won't show up and then in the rare circumstances where too many do show up, forcing people to give up their seats (in some cases even by force). I don't disagree with your thinking, but I'm hesitant to consider "what airplane tickets do" a good model for just about anything.
Concertgoer Bill of Rights - get bumped? Massive stipend, hotel room, free VIP ticket in future, & transportation+entry to a partner venue in the city with other music.
They haven’t all universally built in overbooking as a critical part of their competitive price structure or whatever, and we can stop it before it starts.
EU version for flights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Passengers_Rights_Regulati...
Fair enough, I might just be extrapolating from a few of the larger American players in the industry.
Some festivals work just like that, you upload some ID when buying your ticket which they see when you enter the venue. Feels really nice and stress free.
The only real way is to pass a law against reselling tickets above face price, which is what many European countries have done
Have the tickets debut at a very high price and get cheaper towards event day. This encourages folks to wait and scalpers to lose money. Enables privacy, although other factors are working to eliminate it.
The only real solutions to scalping are to impact supply/demand by increasing supply (extra show in each city) or lower demand (raise prices). As a jazz fan I don’t know much about shows that sell out and attract scalpers, but I’m curious why the artists don’t double prices to cut out middlemen.
They would to multiple the prices multiple times to even discourage the middlemen, gentrifying at the same time the fan base, which is sad
It is, but it still feels better that the money goes toward the artist than it does to go to a middleman.
Reality is there is no good solution IMO, no matter what you do, someone is missing out. Just the reality of supply vs demand.
Not a direct answer to your question but go to see local bands. The ticket prices are way better and so is the crowd and the show.
I know this doesn't work for most subscribers to mass media culture, but I'm right there with you. Personally I kind of hate celebrity as a social phenomenon, and I love seeing an amazing talented set and then getting to talk with the musician afterward. I don't give Live Nation my money.
I recently bought tickets to a concert in France (I live in Germany) and ended up not being able to travel and had to resell my tickets. Apparently according to French law you are not allowed to resell a ticket above its face value and so I had to resell it through the same ticketing company I bought it. They allowed me to set a price with up to a maximum amount which was less than how much I bought it (by a Euro or two) to cover their fees. It was also possible to name a specific buyer who would then get be able to buy your ticket.
Maybe there’s still another way for scalpels to game this system, I don’t know, but I’ve been to a few concerts in Paris and I’ve never seen scalpels hanging outside the venue selling tickets, which would be the norm in Germany, so maybe the system does work.
I assume the scalpers demand their additional payment first and upon receipt, name the buyer who can buy the ticket "for face value".
It's trivially easy for scalpers to game that system.
Why should anything be done? If people are willing to pay five times the face value for a ticket, then it signals that tickets are priced too low. Let the market price itself.
Harry Styles is playing in my city, he's apparently very popular, but there's still plenty of tickets available for as low as 47€ for tomorrow.
>Why should anything be done?
For the same reason anything is ever done about anything -- because it upsets a large enough portion of your community.
> Why should anything be done?
Because there is demand for it. A lot of people like going to live music and theatre events and scalpers make it more difficult and more expensive for them.
Why shouldn't anything be done? Because capitalism is God?
A lot of people like going to live music and theatre events and scalpers make it more difficult and more expensive for them
Scalpers make it possible to get a ticket at market price, instead of maybe being able to get it for less and maybe not being able to get it at any price. It's not at all clear that the latter is better.
Scalpers are the primary reason it’s practically impossible to get a ticket at face price in the first place
I'm probably one of the least capitalism-minded commenters on HN, but this is a case where I'm happy to let the market sort itself out. It's not food, shelter, medicine, or housing.
I'm absolutely not convinced that the problem is as widespread as people make it out to be, outside of a few big names or events.
> Why shouldn't anything be done? Because capitalism is God?
Because it's just the system manifesting itself. There are winners and losers, and the winners are usually those with the most money.
I really find it odd to see people being this vocal for Taylor Swift tickets or Pokemon cards. If I use my capital to buy ten houses to rent, then I'm an investor. If I use it to outbid a city for electricity to feed my data center, then I'm a captain of industry. But the shiny charmander card is where people draw the line?
>But the shiny charmander card is where people draw the line?
this isn't just about trendy commercial items. Michael Sandel in 'The Moral Limits of Markets' called this 'Skyboxification'. These mechanisms like scalping affect sport events where people of different classes used to sit next to each other and where now low income earners are either priced out or delegated to the backrow. Cultural spaces that do not separate people into 'winners' or 'losers' but treat people equally are the basis of any civil society. It's where people from different walks of life come into contact.
One guy driving a nicer car or having a nicer watch than another person is fine but when you start tearing apart culture, sports, art, music you end up with well, the US of today https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-money-cant-buy_b_1442128
I never understood the issue with scalping and reselling tickets for a higher price. At all. And I've read a bunch of opinions here and on other forums and articles. None make any sense to me. It's a good that's being resold for profit. Not an essential one like rare medicine during a pandemic.
I think some artists want to appeal to the poorer people so pricing their tickets higher or letting the free market work out the price would damage their reputation. So it doesn't seem to be a real problem we need to solve. It's a problem some artists feel they have. Let them figure it out.
If I was an artist and I expected a full venue with tickets that cost 10, I'd start selling them at 1000, then at 500, 200, 100, 50, 20 and finally 10. If someone buys all of them at 1000 and only that person shows up - awesome! Maybe there will be less drug sales because 1 person bought all tickets but that 100x per ticket could be used to pay the vendors.
If you want view ticket pricing as a pure economics problem (it is not), consider that live shows are also a way to build up and expand a fanbase. If only a handful of rich people (or people who bought tickets the second they went on sale) are at your show, you are not expanding your audience. Since streaming has decimated most artists' income from record sales, it makes sense to try and build a large fanbase who will regularly come to shows as well as buy merchandise. Tours often have exclusive merchandise than fans will want to buy, so all the more reason to attract more people.
As a side note, this notion that a phenomenon being the result of market forces means it is fair and has no issues seems to be a blinkered view of the world. Surely enjoying high quality art should be possible for a broad section of society?
Why would "only a handful" of rich people show up? If I'm a scalper, and demand is lower than expected, I'm incentivised to resell at any price, even at a 90% discount, because I can't just sit on my stock hoping for demand to pick up later.
If anything, as an artist, I'm incentivised to seek out the whales that can absorb ridiculous prices, because they are the ones that will buy the 25 limited editions of my album.
It's not necessarily a choice between the 1000 genuine fans vs the 10 posers. If the artist is popular enough, it's between the 1000 rich genuine fans, and the 1000 broke genuine fans, so might as well please the rich. It's a selection that already happens when picking the venues. It's always London, NYC, Paris, Tokyo, and never Skopje or Pine Bluff, AK.
I'd also like the news to talk about the show "so popular people are willing to pay a fortune to see" rather than the one with plenty of cheap seats still available.
I was reading an article earlier this week about "blue dot fever". Promoters like ticketmaster show the available seats as blue dots on a plan of the venue. The more blue dots, the more seats available, which seems to lower the demand even more, by signalling that the show is not popular, which drives the status-seekers away.
I understand what you're saying but it still mostly an issue for the artist - building a fan base. Otherwise if you have X amount of tickets to be distributed, you'll get X people at the venue, at most. Since the same number of people will show up, it's a matter of distribution. What should the distribution be? You, and many others, say it shouldn't be the richest people, or more accurately those who'd pay the highest price for the ticket. What about the poorest people, if we're talking about fairness? Should we have a quota for homeless people, too? For people of certain ethnicities, political views, sexualities, etc.? That's what I see when you talk about fairness outside of market forces - we should try to include "everyone", whatever that means. Maybe it's the most hardcore fans? So first allow people with tattoos of the artist on their chest? Yes, it's a ridiculous example, but what is fair to you? What makes a fan that will only be able to pay 10 $ not less worthy than a fan who will pay 1000 $? Will they be more worthy to attend than a fan who can only afford 0.01 $?
To me it seems it IS an economics problem - the artist needs to make money and they need to decide whether they want to optimize for the profit from ticket sales or for the profit from merch or from a broader fan base. But it's an economic problem for the artist, it's not really a societal problem or anything more major.
As a disclaimer, I'm not rich and I don't care for concerts anyway. It just doesn't make sense to single out tickets for concerts as some special thing. As an example, I'm OK with not being able to buy some fancy ethically sourced gourmet food yet I still support the company that makes it. Or maybe I won't buy it often, but I'll save up and buy it once in a while. Many parallels to be made, but of course not perfect. Still, it's not a necessity, so it's strictly an economic problem (not a moral one), mainly for the artist. Whether they want to solve it and how they want to solve it is their issue. Whether it's non-transferable tickets or ID-bound tickets with a strict policy on how they're transferred or an auction or a lottery or whatever.
People leave out that the first selection has already happened before the tickets are even on sale, by picking the cities where the tours will stop. The new trend is for artists to stay for longer, in fewer cities, which saves them a ton of money. Like mini-residencies.
Harry Styles is giving more than 20 concerts in Europe, but only in Wembley or Amsterdam.
Is that bad? It's economics. The artist likely decided they'll make more money that way. Hardcore or richer fans will be able to travel to Wembley or Amsterdam. Less enthusiastic and poorer fans won't.
I can't attend most of the concerts I would go to if they were in my city and cost nothing because they're far away from where I live org because they cost a lot. I still enjoy the recordings I can download. I treat concerts as a luxury, not a necessity or a right.
You're letting middlemen profit from providing zero value to society. Artists don't benefit. Fans don't benefit. Scalpers benefit.
It should be obvious we want a system that is optimally beneficial to artists and fans rather than middlemen.
This would make sense if they were an airline and only need to maximise profits. An artist – even one who really wants to make as much money as they can – still needs to think about other things, like atmosphere (that gig with one very rich person won't be much fun), and happy fans. If she sells all tickets at $10k each then maybe she'd clear the market, but she'd piss off a lot of fans, so maybe there won't be as much demand next time.
There's a very easy solution. Put the name of the owner on the ticket. Limit the number of tickets per person. Verify the identity before entering the premises. Allow the resale at face value via the organiser's platform. Allow to resell your ticket at face value to a specific person, for the case where the friend who bought the tickets six months ago is suddenly sick.
I don't know why this is being made to look like an insurmountable problem. We're talking about multi-billion dollar companies, organising billion dollar tours.
> If she sells all tickets at $10k each then maybe she'd clear the market, but she'd piss off a lot of fans
If I was conspiracy-minded, I'd say blaming "the scalpers" would be a very convenient way of dodging responsibilities while taking a cut.
so they're partnering with Live Nation, the same company that's part of the vertically integrated monopoly on ticketing, venues, and resale. Nobody is buying these tickets for cash from a scalper outside of the venue. My 2-min tought: tie use of the ticket to the payment method or id of the purchaser; allow limited transfers. If LN/TM actually cared they'd provide for risk-free transfer without charging ridiculous mark-up. Since they sell the orginial ticket 95% of the time they have almost complete control over the pricing and consumer's id.
New idea: You have to tie a valid credit card to a ticket in order to transfer it, if the card doesn't authorize for $500 at the gate, admission is denied, and the ticket can be used to charge unlimited concessions and merch to the original buyer's card. If a scalper sells a ticket to a stranger, the customer could bankrupt them at the show.
I'm a perfect world, artists would rent a facility and sell/resell their own tickets (or partner with a ticket processor that offers price caps on resales) thereby controlling the issuance and resale of tickets. In reality, the facilities often have their own deals with people like ticketmaster and the artist has no control. It works out for the artist because they lock in the msrp of every ticket and don't have to deal with demand. But it sucks for the fans. Capitalism.
I agree with the libertarians on this. Scalping isn't an issue. People who are willing to pay more for tickets should get them. Concert tickets are not basic needs like housing or food.
If there is room for arbitrage (which is what scalping really is) then the tickets are too cheap in the first place.
I agree with supply and demand dictating the price on scarce items. I don’t agree with letting middlemen butt in and drive the price up by exacerbating the scarcity, and making a profit with no value add to the market.
Spotify is another entity dipping into the limited pool of available tickets and further limiting supply. I don't pay for/use Spotify and don't want to, so as far as I'm concerned this is only worsening the problem by further constraining the supply of tickets available to me.
Same here.
Fan club lottery.
In the UK they're making it illegal to resell tickets for more than the original cost. That should deal with the majority of the problem.
Scalpers will just do two transactions, one high one for the privilege of being able to buy the ticket, and then the sale at the listed limit.
No, the real solution is to make tickets strictly id-bound and non-transferable in any way.
> Scalpers will just do two transactions, one high one for the privilege of being able to buy the ticket, and then the sale at the listed limit.
I don’t understand this. If you can’t resell for higher than ticket price, how do they make any profit? Are you saying they’d sell the cheaper ticket for the more expensive ticket’s price? Wouldn’t price stick to the ticket, since presumably different price tiers afford different location/etc?
First transaction would be outside the channel. e.g., scalper may require high-value Venmo or Zelle transaction, then enter buyer ID / name on ticket website at listed limit.
It's a bandaid and not a particularly good one. Spotify reserving a ticket allotment is really no different to American Express doing the exact same thing. Amex uses their allotment to attract premium members through concierge services. Spotify doesn't quite have this same upsell potential (yet?) but they're doing it to make money. We just don't know how that'll happen yet.
Defeating bot buyers, scalpers and resellers would actually be a noble goal but its' really the tip of the iceberg. If anyone was actually interested in tackling this (hint: they aren't) then you need to tackle a much bigger problem: the venue monopoly with Ticketmaster and Live Nation.
Many venus, particularly larger venues, have exclusive contracts with Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster also has an official platform for reselling tickets, of which they get a cut. In a more equitable world, you would only be able to resell tickets for their face value. It's alleged (and I believe this) that Ticketmaster only releases a tiny portion of tickets to the general public. The rest they have arrangements to sell through scalpers and resellers and their own platform because, hey, they make more profit that way.
There was a time when businesses were a tool to generate income. Small businesses still work this way. But any sufficiently sized company now is just a tool to speculate on and make a capital gain on. Ticketmaster doesn't need to grow into a trillion dollar company but they want to and, at a cewrtain point, the only way companies can continue to grow is by cutting costs and raising prices.
Back in the nascent days of Internet music piracy it was pointed out that almost no bands make enough money from selling music to live on. It's why the biggest anti-piracy advocates were huge bands like Metallica. Most bands make their living for performance fees ie playing concerts. And even then they might make barely enough to cover gas. What really gets them over the line is selling merch at the venues.
I'd say that music would be in a better state if bands could see more of the value of their labor from playing concerts. But even concerts aren't about bands or their fans anymore. They're about upselling premium services to high-net-worth clients. You ever notice that at sports venue, for example, general seating always gets mysteriously ripped out and replaced by suites? Same principle: venues make more per square foot from a corporate suite than they do from sports fans. There was a time when ordinary people would be fans of their home teams and just go to every home game. That's increasingly out of reach.
In short, the entire system is broken. Spotify participating in it won't change anything.
This is ultimately a supply and demand problem. If tickets sell out on the secondary market for 10 or 100x the face value, then that's the fair market price. Either artists should charge more, or perform more shows.
No, it‘s an audience/artist experience problem. I worked for one of Australia's biggest outdoor summer music festivals through the 2000s (I built a direct ticket selling platform for them). Their popularity grew each year, and, sure, they could have just raised their prices to try and match supply and demand. They 100% did not want to do that because they knew it would completely change the audience demographics and make a less fun event for everyone to attend and a less fun event for the artists to perform at, thus making it harder to attract audiences and artists in future years.
They ended up being acquired by a company that was much more into charging top dollar to big-spenders. The company was ultimately acquired by Live Nation and the ticket prices kept increasing until suddenly ticket sales stopped, and that whole category of festivals is now largely dead in Australia.
It sounds like they found the price ceiling. Trying to pick your customers is a fools errand, particularly with a music festival where tastes change and people age out.
There is a physical limit to how many shows you can put on and the Economics 101 explanation of ticket pricing misses the part where the price of the ticket is a part of the whole image the musician is selling to the audiences.
Taylor Swift can probably still sell out if she raises the price ten fold, but what kind message does this send to her average listeners? What does it mean if the most popular popular musician of our times prices the populace out? You can of course dismiss the likely negative responses as emotional and irrational, but that's the whole deal with art and culture. You can't build a fan base without catering to their emotions.
And then on the other extreme of music you have people like Fugazi, whose low ticket pricing is very obviously a part of the band's entire artistic and ideological project.
If you want to see what happens when you apply supply and demand to ticket pricing, you can just look at your nearest big league sports team. The recent trend seems to be jacking up the prices as much as they can get away with and catering more and more to VIP guests who spend a fortune in one of those "hospitality" suites. Perhaps not a coincidence that less and less people, especially younger people, around me are casually into sports these days. They got told that they are not welcome in the corporate owned sports venue and they take their attention elsewhere, and all it's left are a dwindling set of diehard fans and C-suite people who are there not for sports but for overpriced steak dinners and are too nicely dressed to cheer for their home team.
The last/marginal ticket in the venue sells for 10x face value. The majority of tickets don’t sell for much more than face value.
Taylor Swift can’t realistically play more shows than she did during the Eras Tour, and it’s unlikely that she’d have sold a million seats in London if she were charging much more than she did.
It seems like you could sell tickets in tranches at tiered prices. It seems very tractable. I suspect artists don't want to look greedy by personally charging what fans are often willing to pay.
> The last/marginal ticket in the venue sells for 10x face value.
That's only if the event sells out. The ticket should have sold for a higher price such that the demand was exactly the number of seats available.
I think its more complicated than that. An artist is pretty constrained by how many shows they can play in a given area which makes the total market for any given show really small and trivially manipulated for profit.
Then she should charge more.
This may come as a shock to capitalists, but some artists don't want to charge their fans more. Fugazi famously capped their ticket prices at $5 because they wanted their shows to be affordable.
Make it illegal to sell tickets above face value.
I was a big fan of what the Cure did, they played our town and they did not allow any tickets to be resold for anything above what they originally went for.
Non-transferable I think? But you could resell them via ticketmaster maybe for facevalue?
It was amazing, we sat on the ticketmaster page, refreshed over the course of a day and we got 8th row for I believe $75 - it was an amazing concert, and being able to pay a reasonable price for tickets like that was amazing.
How does this not just bias who gets ticket to those with more time preference.
willingness to stand in line for a ticket probably correlates well with fandom
How does willingness to pay more money not correlate with fandom?
Standing in line is (today) a digital process that a scalper can trivially scale
It seems unlikely they'd continue to do do that if they weren't able to flip it at a higher price later
X$ for the ticket plus a convenience fee/service fee for standing in line.
It seems baked into the concept of "reselling can't be done at a higher value" that transfers would have to be limited to a platform where that sort of thing is prevented. For example, if the reselling market is just "add your ticket to the pool for people to buy, and if someone does, they get the ticket and you get the money", there's no way for the sellers to contact the buyers, so I'm not sure how you'd envision an out-of-band payment occurring.
Why bother if there’s no profit?
Two options, both of which seem to work well in venues near me:
1. When an event sells out you can join the 'waitlist' and people can offer their tickets back to the ticket company who give the person at the top of the waitlist the opportunity to purchase. All at face value. Good for the artist too as there is less chance of empty seats when people can't make it.
2. QR code tickets that rotate meaning they can't be screenshotted and sold.
I’m against it from these angles:
1. I like live concerts but I don’t spend my days listening to a lot of music. I would be considered “not a fan” by these metrics.
2 The monopolistic aspect. I subscribe to a much smaller Spotify competitor, now I’m at a disadvantage.
3. I don’t consider scalping a problem. The market price is determined by demand. It’s also been a problem that has been solved by artist presales and fan club gates.
I also think that as a recognized monopoly Ticketmaster should have more limitations on its business model. For example, their compassion on resale tickets should be limited. At present, they are encouraged to double dip on fees by finding ways to send more tickets to the secondary market.
You are just being punished for your poor judgement for not backing the winner. Not sure why you should be rewarded.
It's the same logic for de-googlers. You can't De-Google yourself and then bitch about some Google products work better on Google products.
If you are a proud edge-lord/hipster with your obscure choices, you should also learn to deal with consequences.
Scale brings advantages. You can't have it both ways
So your view is “accept a monopoly and become their bitch?”
I use a competitor to Spotify because I like the other product better overall. It’s a better value and better suited to my needs. I never said I’m using something else just to stick it to Spotify or become an edgelord.
I’m perfectly happy to be “punished” by missing some concerts. I think you misunderstand my comment as complaining about the situation. I really don’t care that much, I just am giving my opinion that this is a system that doesn’t seem ideal to me.
Many artists are struggling to fill seats right now. The industry can have fun trying silly schemes like this while they cancel tours in oversized venues.
I’ve almost entirely given up on managing music. Just done with it.
I listen to soma.fm and radioparadise.com .. I read one music magazine and listen to some of the music recommendations from there, but following any of it, over time, is a lost cause for me.
I was just remarking to someone how music apps are the least interesting, personal, and innovative of all the things I live with.
Examples: we still can’t manage playlists of albums, or down signal genres of music or even artists, or separate “calm” music for sleep from all the other generative playlist rankings they use.
Apple Music is entirely useless to me since the only “for me” stuff they’ll generate is music for sleeping. As if I don’t do other things.
How would you like to manage those things? I listen to a lot of music and I'm pretty happy with Spotify. When I want to discover new music, I pick an artist I like and start the artist radio. I always get good new recommendations
I gave up on Spotify after 3 months. I did not like how it just kept repeating the same songs. With a catalog as large as they supposedly have, it was not entertaining me hearing the same things so frequently.
Way back when, I had a very impressive iTunes catalog of actual media files that I had locally. I spent hours curating my CD rips and even the recordings from vinyl. I added id3 tags and artwork. It was glorious and was larger than my 80GB iPod could handle, so my iPod had curation as well.
Then iTunes went all streaming and wiped out my local library, not the media files, just the library. Gone. Poof. And just like that, I was done. I recently dug out the hdd with the media, and using iTunes now to find local stuff loaded onto my device is a constant fight with trying to avoid its clearly preferred Music+ nonsense.
I'm close to getting back to looking for a better music app to source my large local library. Just haven't quite gotten there yet.
"I'm close to getting back to looking for a better music app to source my large local library."
Well, I am close to finally build that better music app for my large local libary of music.
(I actually do already use my own written player since 15 years, but it was always just a quick hack and never the thing)
I also do use spotify for finding artists, but have the same complaints that they are just repeating. (Also I hate the spotify app)
Pandora is still around, but their library is a lot smaller
I’ve never really had good luck with the artist radio, but I’ve found a lot of music I like by starting at a band I like and going through the Related Artists. It’s a little strange because I’m sure the artist radio includes a lot of songs from the Related Artists. It’s probably a psychological thing, wanting to feel like I’m in control instead of the app choosing for me.
Artist radios almost inevitably become a mix of songs I’ve listened to the most that have even the faintest crossover with the artist genre. It’s very, very frustrating and my biggest peeve about Spotify. I now ask an LLM for an artist radio playlist and copy it over to spotify, which is kind of a pain.
That's really weird. I have heard of people having the same experience as you though. I'm not sure why my radio plays songs that I have never listened to
Hop on plex amp. Take control of your music.
I realize that sounds like an Ad but I’ve been using it for a few months and I feel like I’ve rediscovered my joy for music again.
Given that Plex just bumped their lifetime subscription price to $750, I can no longer recommend them. They are clearly more interested in becoming another streaming service, and are I think trying to push out their core users who probably make them very little money.
Interesting, their price bump announcement actually just went and made me upgrade to lifetime (at $250 while I could) instead of write them off completely.
Netflix will never allow you to pay a one time fee for life, neither will any other streaming service on the planet.
Meanwhile, plex is a company that has employees. If I like plex, use it heavily, and want to support them I can do so with money. There are alternatives that are completely free, but I don’t like them as much and the minimal cost for plex is totally worth the value for me.
To each their own!
Their site says $250? https://www.plex.tv/plans/
Your very same link also has a huge yellow banner at the top of the page stating: "The price of a Lifetime Plex Pass is increasing on July 1, 2026."
Goes to show how inoculated I am against banner ads I suppose.
Either way part of me feels like it’s for the best. One off payment for lifetime membership of an app that has continual development isn’t a great business model.
It’s worth 750, which is about ten years worth of yearly subscriptions.
Plex is 16 years old and the Lindy effect applies.
There is so much good free software out there for playing music that I have a hard time believing PlexAmp is worth $750.
They know it's not worth it either, they just want to push more users to the monthly subscription for that sweet ARR.
As a long time Plex member, on Lifetime (originally purchased for <$100), PlexAmp is great although not worth anywhere close to $750.
If you're paying $750 you might as well use Roon like the rest of the audiophile freaks.
Jellyfin has a Music Server although a bit limited compared to Plexamp.
Navidrome is a Music Server with similar functionalities.
Symfonium is a Music Player which can connect to various Music Servers like Navidrome, Plexamp, or just files on the network.
Gonna echo this sentiment, its buy for life and a good license
is it?
vs a bit of ai slop to make my own music player?
the only things i care about is some essy enough to use upload process, basic serving, then that theres some smart enough local caching on whatever device im using
It's good, but you still have to pay monthly for it. Feels like it kind of defeats the point of having a local collection.
OrJellyfin or Navidrome if you want to use free open source that does a decent enough job.
iTunes Match. It's entirely your own stuff. You pay for it, or upload your own stuff you have from elsewhere. You own it. You stream it wherever.
Pandora still exists and is quite good.
I came back to Pandora recently and I think it has the best discovery out of any music platform. I don't pay extra to play what I want, I curate radio stations and it's been great. The only catch is you have to be diligent with your curation, because it starts to reach and while you may love song X from genre Y, the station is genre Z. If you're not careful every station will become a mix of everything.
Former Pandora employee. The music recommendation team was amazing when I worked there, and the use of global song frequency capping across seeds helps prevent too much repetition at a user level but I agree on the genre bleed. They may have changed it but the music recommender was an ensemble model that polled 30 or so distinct models that would provide their own next song recommendation. One of the last resort recommenders used only the music genome data for the song (no collaborative filtering).
My trick is to be liberal with downvotes and excruciatingly sparing with any thumbs up.
Youtube Music is quite good for what you're describing.
> Examples: we still can’t manage playlists of albums, or down signal genres of music or even artists, or separate “calm” music for sleep from all the other generative playlist rankings they use.
Youtube music thinks "videogame music" is a genre and lumps them all together, if you make the mistake of including even one song from a game OST any recommendations go out the window.
For example, a "chill" mix with videogame music in it will happily start including Doom Eternal tracks because "they're the same thing, right?"
It feels like the quality of the Youtube Music app took a dive when they fired the whole team and outsourced development around a year or so ago.
This happens with Spotify too TBF. Listen to one single genre, suddenly the only thing you hear is from that genre.
Whenever Spotify removed human curation from their recommendations to rely on more ML-algorithms was when it stopped being useful to me.
Went back to trackers myself, only place where musical discissions/recommendations are actually useful and wanted.
YouTube music’s recommendations suck hard compared to Spotify and all the people I know who use it (a dozen) say the same thing. The only reason any of us use it seems to be because we only want to pay for one music service and we all use YouTube premium anyways. It’s amazing how big a hole that is in the service, that everyone I know agrees with the same thing.
I gave up on recommendations and I just playlist my own music preferences over time. Like in the days of old.
I just never stopped downloading music. We have modern download stores selling CD-quality music completely DRM free. I like knowing that no matter what happens short of an actual apocalypse, I will never lose access to any of my music.
I recently learned that two tracks on one of my favorite recent albums are straight up missing on streaming services. This only strengthened my resolve to stay the hell away from them.
Same here, music is too important for me to give up this kind of control. I probably miss out on the discovery system of streaming services, but there are enough other sources (e.g. radio paradise).
I have a collection of flacs which contains the albums that matters deeply to me. I don’t mind not having access to unlimited music (I do have a spotify account but I rarely use it). I much prefer to do mindful listening, spending an hour or two, playing a full album at a time, or quickly composing a mood queue. I don’t even shuffle.
This is the problem with public listed companies that need to "maximize shareholder values" and look for infinite growth.
I just want Spotify for music (playlist, recommendation, lossless audio). I don't need their podcast, audiobook, ChatGPT, concert tickets etc. This just makes their app bloated for features I will never use.
I disagree; Spotify is good at serving up sound, so it makes sense for them to also serve audiobooks and podcasts; just like it makes sense for video streaming services to have both movies and tv shows. Similarly for concerts; people who listen to a lot of music are probably interested in going to see their favorite band live.
Mind you, I definitely have complaints about the app (like notifications interrupting music, their abysmal lock screen widget, and their "randomization" that always ends up playing the same few songs from a list of thousands); but I also understand why they want to expand.
> I also understand why they want to expand
I'd have fewer complaints if I could hide the sections I'm not interested in (new releases, audiobooks, podcasts, concerts, etc...).
it's in their interest for them to show you more things that they don't need to pay record labels royalties for.
I have definitely become informed of concerts I’ve then gone to by way of Spotify. They know everyone I listen to and are well suited to advertise the artists I’d actually like to see to me.
Glad I made a true(r) random playlist before they shut their API, which I figure killed those tools
Expand to all Google Play Music features pls Spotify (play counts & the impossible upload-your-own-music to Spotify’s cloud)
Unbelievable that spotify's shuffle is still broken a decade later. No chance the people working there dont know about this as everyone with large playlists runs into it, but for whatever reason they refuse to fix it.
Another reason to use Bandcamp and just buy music. Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it, make it available to your devices, etc etc. I dunno, Spotify certainly isn't going to get better at this point. Best we can hope is that they die and something better takes their place.
> Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it, make it available to your devices, etc etc.
I have avoided building my own stack by uploading everything into Youtube Music (which used to be Google Music, which ... whatever.)
It gets a little worse every day, and one day it'll get bad enough where the pain of sysadmining something new will be preferable to them.
I haven't set up my own stack for music, so I'm just guessing tbh, but administering Jellyfin has been completely painless. Let Claude write a docker compose file, toss it on the server, haven't had to think about it again. I bet there's something equally good out there for music management.
navidrome is pretty good.
My impression from the selfhosted sub is that most people looking to replace spotify are not into albums, and want a lot of popular music not available on BC.
Cloud storage (I use Dropbox) and an app to sync it with my phone automatically. It doesn't take a long time to set up.
And if I want to listen to a random song I don't have while I'm outside... I just don't.
>Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it, make it available to your devices, etc etc.
Uhh, no you don't? Nearly all of my Bandcamp purchases, except the literal one or two physical-only purchases that didn't also come with a digital copy, are all available to stream to my heart's content via the Bandcamp app and their website.
I mean, I also download it all because I DJ, but yeah... having access to it whenever I want is entirely effortless and doesn't require anything beyond Bandcamp itself.
> Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it
No you do not. Just use an external drive and an MP3 player like some kind of caveman. There are plenty of high quality models out there. Additionally smart phones will let you store music on them to listen to using the player app of your choice (VLC or something).
For the last 20 years, my "stack" has been a NFS-mounted hard drive full of MP3s, and the occasional rsync mirror to a USB stick if I need to listen to something without a network connection.
Well to elaborate on what I meant - Spotify makes it extremely easy to have access to your music everywhere. Once you get into (or back into) storing MP3s you have to solve that for whatever level of convenience you want. I have Plexamp and things setup myself but it does require some work.
If you're on Apple devices it's $25 a year for iTunes Match. You can throw all your Bandcamp purchases into the Music app and they'll be available across your devices.
I understand not wanting them to expand into playlists and audiobooks.
But concert tickets, notifications, etc., seems like a no-brainer. That is firmly within the category of music.
It also likely makes it harder for people ho are not users of Spotify to get tickets - which is almost certainly the goal.
Less than 10 years ago I could stroll into a local record store in my city and buy paper tickets to concerts directly from them, zero markup, zero "processing fees". And the ticket itself would be a souvenir because it often had a unique design or typeface. Now it's just a hideous barcode.
You may need to move on to other services like Apple Music
Apple’s prioritization of Apple Music on their HomePod turns me off it a bit. Could help guide users more to alternatives but would reduce services sales.
Meh, I’m being kinda unfair b/c the experience is gonna be better. Shame Spotify forces streaming from phone (YouTube Music can run on HomePod itself like Apple Music). YouTube Music via HomePod might play the audio from a music video instead of playing the real song, so does make sense to shuttle normies to the Apple service, but guess I don’t find the situation perfect.
At least concert tickets are somewhat aligned with listening to music, unlike autoplaying video podcasts on the homepage rather than showing my playlists.
So just use it for music. Who cares if the app bundle is bloated? If that's really your main criteria, just use the web player
I'm sorry what? Artists do not make money on streaming, they make it in touring. Spotify integrating concerts into the same product surface is the MOST logical thing they could do.
Touring costs a fortune for bands. They don't even keep most of the money, the record label takes a big cut and there's Ticketmaster after that, and now Spotify I guess. Selling paper-thin T-shirts, vinyl and lapel pins for absurd markups at the merch booth is how they make money.
i get a lot of value from these other features (podcast, audiobook, concert suggestions) and would appreciate some livenation disruption
It's the newest version of Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment:
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
music listening has been falling for a while now. no company public or not will choose to commit suicide out of purity principle
Spotify is welcome to go into all those other businesses, but why do they have to destroy their one valuable resource in an attempt to leverage it for all this other garbage? Doing one thing really good - so good that people will pay you for it - is not a "purity principle". It used to be the fundamental reason for existence for many companies.
its not garbage. podcasts is now major chunk of listening. so why not give ppl what they want. "one thing" is not just music. My own listening habits have shifted from music into podcasts.
Hmm, see I don’t agree. I use Spotify extensively for music, but also for podcasts and audiobooks. Great for a long car journey, or background listening whilst doing DIY.
I have plenty of frustrations with the app, but not with the core offer as a delivery mechanism for various types of audio entertainment and information.
The music industry works the way it does because a large amount of people involved are effectively working for free. Promoters, photographers, DJs, interns, writers, assistants, even some artists early on accept low or unpaid work because the industry offers networking, access, drugs, etc
The music industry got rid of all that years ago when the big labels swallowed the small indies and imposed their corporate culture everywhere. There are no A&R men skulking through dive bars using drugs and girls to sign bands. The bands are now supposed to approach the labels with their Spotify listen counts and social media follower numbers ready.
Rick Beato has a good video on why so many new generation superstars like Gracie Abrams are nepo babies who all the time and money in the world to chase music as a career.
So scalpers will use bots to generate listens and shares, boosting listens for Spotify, in order to gain access to premium tickets. They are just adding a “barrier” that only inflates their listen counts while probably making it worse on actual valid ticket purchasers. I don’t see how this works out as planned
Spotify is actively incentivized to mitigate that, because they're forced to pay royalties on every stream. This is, at least, a better situation than with Ticketmaster, who is actively incentivized to get scalpers as many tickets as they can.
They'll trade off the inflated numbers for the royalties.
They'd probably make this a feature for paying customers. I don't think the economics of scalping this at scale would make sense you're spending money for months and risk Spotify banning you if you get caught.
the next ticketmaster... I really loathe what spotify has become
Competition in that space would be kinda good
This is my shocked face when Ticketmaster aka LiveNation aka StubHub aka Spotify’s ticket reserve system is again a monopoly.
._.
but of course! why wouldn't you encourage bot accounts listening every kind of artist to scalp tickets?
look at the monthly active users chart after this deal! promoted.
I was thinking the same thing. If there are very many seats available, it will probably be gamed by scalpers. If they are doing this, they should really do the math to try to make the expected ROI of an additional bot account doing 24/7 streaming, slightly below the cheapest Spotify subscription price.
How is this not just a "Spotify tax" on tickets? I don't use Spotify, and I don't want to, because it's obnoxious crippleware. Now Spotify will reserve tickets, forcing me to prove my loyalty to their platform for some reason, before attending a concert? This doesn't make any sense. And if Live Nation cares about selling to authentic people, why do they not just take the proplem into their own hands and go after the scrapers?
Great, ticketmaster antitrust lawsuit round two.
This is a nice feature to have, it already tells you if an artist you like is coming to your city, and redirects to Ticketmaster for tickets, but it doesn't have the data to know if you already bought a ticket, so it keeps pestering you. Also, some competition against Ticketmaster is welcomed.
I listen to all of my music via Navidrome. It sits in an S3 bucket that I rclone new albums to.
For concerts, I built a PWA that pulls my Navidrome artists and queries the Ticketmaster API for shows that match within a 75 mile radius once a day. It displays them in a list with their name, the venue/location and a link to buy tickets.
Soon, you will have to justify hours of Spotify usage to be allowed to buy tickets for shows.
I have a shirt from nine inch nails offered too the top % of listeners with a bunch of streaming stats on the back so we're almost there.
So now we need to run farms of spotify accounts playing songs to get our concert tickets?
This is good to know. If they roll it out it like their other "features", it's going to reserve the tickets for you even if you don't want them.
Or they're going to put it as a drop down from the "Repeat" button, or something stupid like that, to cause people to click it by accident.
And when you disable it in the settings they'll stop, but only for 6 months when they cram it down your throat again in a new place in the UI.
I secretly wish Spotify would fire their entire product and dev teams, allow third party clients again, and just focus their energy on increasing their catalog and paying artists more.
I don't want to see lyrics, I don't want AI shuffling, I don't want videos, I don't want concert tickets.
I only listen to Global Electronic Music. All underground stuff, so im safe from the capitalists.
https://www.bassdrive.com/pop-up/
What a braindead move. If you see people post their "wrapped" you notice quite a lot of people basically streaming a single artist 24 hours a day. So now you're encouraging people to become streaming bots. And you're taking tickets from fans who don't happen to use Spotify. Fuck Spotify.
Why is scalping a problem?
Fewer people go to concerts, fans can’t afford the tickets, less connection with the artists, less interest in music overall.
Artists lose, even if they get paid and all the tickets technically are sold out. Fans lose. The only people who win are scalpers who just abuse the system.
> Fewer people go to concerts
Scalpers don't buy tickets and not sell them. The most scalped concerts are obviously the most attended
> fans can’t afford the tickets
See above. I assume what you are upset about is that rich fans are the ones going.
> less connection with the artists, less interest in music overall
I think you need to explain your logic here.
If I bought 100 tickets, sold 20 of them at 10x the value I paid for them, and then ate the rest as a loss, I'm still making a tidy profit, and the artist/venue/etc. still make the same amount of money as if 100 individuals bought them and attended, but there are now 80 fewer people in the audience (edited to add: and potentially 80 people who could have afforded the original price but not the absurd upsell).
I don't have the data to say whether this happens or not (edited to add: and the numbers are obviously made up), but the logic is perfectly sound; nothing would stop it from happening today.
> See above. I assume what you are upset about is that rich fans are the ones going.
I'm upset that artists make the tickets affordable for different groups, and their fans want to see the concert. You have 2 sides that are in agreement. Then there's a 3rd, independent side that decides to abuse the system to make profit, hurting 2 other sides.
Imagine that you pay road tax and the government builds highway. Everyone's happy. Now there's a militia that sets up checkpoints and takes a toll for driving on the highway. Unrelated 3rd party tries to benefit by abusing the system.
> Scalpers don't buy tickets and not sell them. The most scalped concerts are obviously the most attended
If you buy 100 tickets for $100 and sell them for $300 you need to sell only 34 tickets to break even. The concert hall could be sold out and half empty at the same time. Of course there are concerts where scalpers will sell 100% of what they got, but they don't need to.
Not OP but - I think one could make the case that if tickets were sold via a lottery and non-transferable, the average lottery participant would be a bigger fan of $ARTIST than the average person who can afford the scalped price for a ticket today.
Arguably if rich people are just buying the $1000 concert tickets just to flex and take pictures for IG, that's a seat that could be going to a 17-year-old who loves the band's music but can't afford more than $100. The 17-year-old meanwhile may never get to go to a show of any of their favorite bands due to this situation, meaning they miss out on this meaningful chance to connect with the music in a personal, in-person way.
Basically the case hinges on the assertion that the richest fans are not the same as the most serious fans.
[dead]
Streams and share won't be fair metric
i think its totally fair.