<p>I just bought tickets to a big-name act for a concert this summer. I don’t attend a lot of concerts so this is a big deal to me.
The way it worked was that there were apparently 2 pre-sales:
One for those who had signed up on this artist’s website (which I had already done);
Then a day later, American Express cardholder pre-sales;
Then a few days later, open to the general public (as of this writing, not opened up yet).</p>
<p>Since I was in the first camp, at the appointed time that the pre-sale opened, I went on the website to get tickets (with thousands of my BFF’s). Of course, the system couldn’t “find” 2 seats together (really??). It took me about 20 minutes of refreshing my browser every 5 seconds and I was seriously about to give up and call it a day when 2 tickets suddenly appeared and I just grabbed them and paid - I wasn’t going to “abandon” them and take the risk of getting shut out.</p>
<p>But there are people all over this artist’s social media complaining that they got shut out, and that the ticket resellers snap up all the tickets and that the average person really can’t get them, and it made me realize - I really have no idea how the system works. I went on a few other sites and comparable tickets to mine are selling for double / triple what I paid in face value (not that I’m selling). And of course who knows who is trustworthy and who isn’t? </p>
<p>Is there someone who is more knowledgeable than I am who can give me a primer on how this system works and how the average person can indeed get tickets or is it really just all rigged? And why it isn’t just as simple as “go buy your tickets” and why these crushes occur, and what other systems might or should there be? Just curious. </p>
<p>I don’t now how it works, but it occurs to me that one of the problems is with buying the tickets on-line. Back in the olden days, you’d have to line up at the box office to buy them, so it would truly be first come, first served.</p>
<p>I don’t really understand it either.
I belong to the TenClub which is supposed to get me access to tickets before public sale. Doesn’t always work, which is why for some tours I am flying across the country.</p>
<p>The servers seem to be under capacity for the amount of users. I have had tickets in my cart, that then vanished.
Often the site will say there aren’t tickets available, but the fact is they are just not all released yet, and if you keep trying you can get them.</p>
<p>Last tour, the ten club had a lottery, you put in for the dates you wanted but if you won them, you bought them and they can’t be transferred (& have to be picked up in person)
I won all my dates, but ultimately decided one date was inconvenient and had to eat the fee.( the club gave the tickets to someone else)
You can buy tickets through stubhub, which I think is trustworthy but may be higher than face.
( TenClub members may trade or sell tickets, but never for above face or they lose membership, however, it appears that some tickets do end up on eBay)
Fans also connect on Facebook and trade tickets that way. </p>
<p>Right. So my question is - OK, I get that X number of seats go to VIP’s that have some connection with the artist or his or her promotion company or the venue. And X number of seats go to radio stations and the like for their own use or for giveaways. But I assume those seats aren’t even offered for sale in the first place. How is it that when the remaining tickets go on sale, that they’re only offered in dribs and drabs to people like me (I tried to get 4 and could only get 2) and that these resellers wind up with hundreds of tickets that they re-sell? I assume this is all legal - how do Ticketmaster and StubHub fit in all of this? </p>
<p>Well, ok, I wasn’t looking for people who don’t understand it to commiserate with me; I was looking for people who DO understand it to explain it to me!</p>
<p>So let’s say Big-Name Artist plays at a venue that seats 20,000, for the sake of discussion.
And let’s assume that the tickets vary in price from, say, $50 to $200.</p>
<p>Generally speaking, what number of those tickets are already “held back” for VIP’s, radio stations, etc. and are NEVER available to the general public? Should I assume the first (say) 10 rows are always “gone” unless you have a connection?</p>
<p>Of the ones that are available, how do they determine which blocks are released to the fan-club people, the Amex-people, and the general public? Would the general public EVER have the chance to buy, say, the $200 seats, or is that just not happening if you’re not in a pre-sale?</p>
<p>And how do these resellers get a hold of these tickets - what are they doing on their computers that enables them to snap up 100’s when I can only get 2? Obviously they are doing something different from what I’m doing. </p>
<p>I recognize that this is different artist-by-artist and venue by venue but I’m looking for a general understanding of a system I am not familiar with. Small words, please, I’m a little slow :-)</p>
<p>You have to have a strong constitution, lol. I have “thrown back” the exact same, not so hot tickets multiple times on Ticketmaster, and then, magically, better seats appear. If you live near enough to the venue, and can spare the time, good seats usually “drop” the day of or night before the show and if you go to the box office, you can often score that way. Back when Miley Cyrus was still Hannah Montana, her show near us had been sold out for months. The night before, around 7PM I went online just for the heck of it and got 4 tickets for myself, a friend, and our two then tweenage girls. I was the rockstar mom that night! I have a retired friend who went to Madison Square Garden the morning of a Bruce Springsteen show and wound up in the front row. Not the pit, but the front row of seats right next to the stage. She was by herself, so didn’t need to worry about getting seats together, which I’m sure helped. </p>
<p>And, I’m pretty sure the presales are for a limited number of tickets. They don’t open up the whole venue at that time. The fan club gets so many, American Express gets so many, you get the idea. Glad you got your seats though and hope you enjoy the show. Which artist? </p>
<p>Many tickets that are not available at first sale date, do become available later.
It depends on the artist & the venue to how many tickets are available.
Sometimes most of the floor is reserved, but other times not.</p>
<p>A friend got 11th row tickets ( on the floor) to see Paul McCartney last summer, and then moved up to 7th row. I don’t think she was part of any presale. It was more than $200 though for one ticket.</p>
<p>So am I understanding this correctly …
Once these pre-sales open, both “legitimate” folks like me (who want to buy for themselves) and “illegitimate” ones rush the system - and these scalpers coordinate umpteen hundred people each buying 2 - 4 tickets apiece so they wind up with umpteen hundred tickets - and then they sell them on something like StubHub, which I’m gathering is like an eBay for ticketing, presumably at above-face-value so that’s how they make their money?</p>
<p>It must be quite an operation, because I’d have to believe that a lot of these “ticket pullers” experience the same issue I did, not being able to get online because thousands of people are crushing the site at once, no? Did I ever (theoretically) have a chance at the best seats in the house?</p>
<p>Or do these venues explicitly reserve X number of seats for re-sellers?</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the artist isn’t making any extra off this, right? And it prohibits their average fans from seeing their shows.<br>
I guess the legal issue at hand is that I can’t be prevented from selling a ticket I’ve bought (no matter what my original intent was), right?</p>
<p>[url=<a href=“http://wtvf.images.worldnow.com/images/incoming/Investigates/TaylorHolds.pdf]Here[/url”>http://wtvf.images.worldnow.com/images/incoming/Investigates/TaylorHolds.pdf]Here[/url</a>] is a list of ticket allocations for a Taylor Swift concert in Nashville at an arena with 13,330 seats. As you can see, only about 1600 tickets were available for public sale and, importantly for Pizzagirl, the amount allocated to the fan club is also limited. So it isn’t really that fan club tickets go on sale first, but that the allocation of tickets to the fan club is put on sale at a certain date. Big difference. (BTW, the link came from an NPR story; it’s not a private blog or anything.)</p>
<p>Similar investigations have shown the same thing for other popular acts. One looked at Bieber ticket sales at the same arena: only 1000 tickets were available to the general public after allocations and most of the allocation went to fan club members who paid $100 or more for membership. </p>
<p>The allocations also can vary within the group, as in the fan club may have an allocation but higher paying fans can get tickets for much more money that come with things like dinner and/or souvenirs and/or meet and greet. I see these all the time for shows at the Garden (in Boston). </p>
<p>I find the last fascinating; the acts say they are taking what scalpers would make and keeping it for themselves, but it’s also true they’re milking their fan base for every penny. </p>
<p>The allocations are more and more determined by contractual relationships between the artists and their sponsors. Taylor gets money from Amex in exchange for them scooping up tickets for card holders. Her ticket allocations are, on the face, different from say Bon Jovi’s; he is known for more control and more higher priced packaging. But the result is similar. </p>
<p>Some acts like Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam keep ticket prices pretty low, $50 or $60 for any seat in venue oftentimes.
However that provides more incentive for scalpers, because tickets can easily be sold for multiple times that much.
Other artists have much higher ticket prices, but I don’t know if that actually limits scalper activity.
Sometimes you can’t resale tickets within city limits, Ive run into that before with sporting events.</p>
<p>Thank you, Lergnom. That’s the kind of info I was looking for - the order of magnitude as to what was available to the general (dare I say - unhooked) public. </p>
<p>In the case of this particular fan club / website, I didn’t pay a penny for membership - just signed up at the website to receive emails. </p>
<p>Thanks Lergnom and Pizzagirl I’ve wondered about this also. I tried to get Taylor Swift tickets 2 years ago because I thought it would be a great gift for my DS. I had two computers ready when the sale opened and within literally seconds all tickets were gone. With only 1600 in the above example available it explains why.</p>
<p>I hope they pass the Bruno Mars Act. It would be worth the drive if I was confident I could actually purchase tickets at the venue. These days with the online sales, I would be afraid that the venue wouldn’t have any available. </p>
<p>I saw a 60 minutes (IIRC) expose on scalping that had one of the scalpers who hired a bunch of people in India to simply go online and buy the tickets. They typed in the CAPTCHAs themselves, so it was actually just a “human” bot, or more accurately a lot of them that were doing the buying. </p>
<p>Manchester United is playing Real Madrid at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor in August. This is a huge deal for soccer fans. The tickets went on sale to registered alumni one day and someone I know tried to buy them but those sold out in minutes. Then the next day they went on sale to another group, maybe season ticket holders? He tried again and still couldn’t. The third day they went on sale to the general public. There are 110,000 seats in Michigan stadium and all tickets were sold in less than 8 minutes.</p>
<p>They are now on sale on stub hub for many times face value. </p>
<p>I think this system needs to be fixed. But I don’t know how.</p>
<p>Whatever hopes may once have existed for a fair ticket system died when artists stopped making money from record sales. They now depend much, much more on show revenue and that has changed the system in big ways. </p>
<p>It has, for example, brought sponsor money into ticket allocations. Amex is big on this.</p>
<p>It has also changed the way shows are arranged. Used to be common that a promoter took on the risk of the show sales and paid the artist a guarantee, with sometimes no guarantee but a percentage of the gross, etc. This meant the promoter had no reason to push ticket prices to the market max: why risk not selling out, especially when you’re paying a guarantee? And that meant a market opportunity for scalpers who could gather tickets and pocket the difference between face and actual market value. </p>
<p>Because artists rely so much more on tour revenue, they want to grab the share of money going to scalpers - and now the legal resellers like StubHub. Makes sense. So the acts offer special packages that can run into the thousands. I see, for example, packages that include “first out” parking, dinner, limited edition merchandise (i.e., t-shirts), seats in the better sections, etc. </p>
<p>And also because they rely on touring, artists need to get people in their fan clubs - because fans come to show and buy merchandise - so they need tickets for their fan clubs. </p>
<p>If another party has tickets in their cart they may return them to the stock for sale if they don’t actually purchase them. It is not uncommon for a household or group of friends to be on several devices trying to buy tickets then compare and keep the best selection and give the others up. So . . . sometimes tickets will come up as available with a refresh that were not available earlier.</p>