I buy a lot of tickets, on all platforms, and all for personal use. I have once or twice sold tickets through the TM or Live Nation resale portal, but if I buy a ticket or 4, they are usually for me and my wife or other friends. A lot of the public comment and outrage over the Taylor Swift ticket presale kerfuffle seems to ignore the realities of ticket buying and shows so I write to add my observations.
I totally agree that Live Nation and TM should never been allowed to merge. And I wish the US did a lot more vertical antitrust regulation (regulating company’s ability to offer artist management, show production, concert venues, ticket sales, and ticket resales), but it historically the US has focused only on horizontal antitrust (one ticket selling service acquiring another), and since the Reagan era has not done as much of that as it probably should.
Competition, however, is not really the issue here as to why the Swift onsale resulted in so many dissatisfied fans. For a reserved seat house, there really must be only one ticket vendor—there is only one front row to sell, and fans care if they are sitting center, stage left, or stage right. So how does one force competition at that level? If tickets are distributed to Company A, Company B, and Company C, how do they share the house? And even if they do share the house and have different service charges as a result, if the show sells out, each company will sell all its tickets and make all its service charges. And the fans unable to buy tickets will be on the outside complaining. So, the merger of TM and LN had nothing to do with this.
The problem is far more nuanced than simply saying you need competition.
I suspect there were two major problems with the Swift presale: first, the overwhelming demand for ticket overloaded the system. If 14 million people are looking to buy some 3.65 million tickets (there were 52 announced stadium dates with around 70,000 tickets a show), over 10 million fans necessarily go away unable to purchase tickets. And since almost every buyer is buying 2, only 1.8 million scored and it might have been worse than that if the maximum was 4 ( 900,000 buyers), or 6 (around 600,000 buyers). This was also supposed to be a presale, which by definition should have only involved a portion of each venue. If the supply could only satisfy 600,000 of 14 million potential customers, 95% of the fans necessarily went away empty handed. This reality had nothing to do with TM, it simply resulted from Swift success and popularity.
The second problem probably had to do with novices buying tickets. The TM interface is not particularly intuitive, even for someone like myself that uses it frequently. Also, it has on very pernicious feature, which is the fact that verified resale tickets will immediately be showing up on the screen along with the original unsold tickets. TM allows you to buy a ticket, and immediately list that ticket for resale at whatever markup you choose. In my opinion, this practice should be prohibited, at least the for the first 24 hours a show is on sale. Presently, though, the practice is allowed and someone unfamiliar with this easily can get burned (I have accidentally bought resale tickets in the frenzy to buy in the minutes after a show went on sale). Some person new to the platform who does not understand this feature, may well see that the ticket the tried to buy for, say $100, sold out from under them is now selling for $200; this is caused by a different but also confusing feature of the TM platform, one has to click on specific seats to choose tickets, then move the selected seats to one’s cart, in the time interval between seat selection and placing them in the cart, any other buyer can chose the same seats, and if they get them into their cart faster, you get a message like “sorry, some other fan just purchased those tickets, try again.” Technically, TM is not repricing the ticket, it does facilitating that by offering its verified resale platform immediately after tickets go onsale. That certainly can generate a lot of confusion, and a lot of complaints.
And that brings one to an additional problem, the professional ticket buyer. There are organized groups that jump on tickets sales, and compete with fans, but have far more experience with how the platform works, know all the ticket buying tricks, and are very successful at obtaining tickets. They will use multiple IDs to be verified fans, will have the credit cards from sources which give you presale options. If these pro-buyers have confidence a show will sell out (such as the Swift shows), they would buy out the whole house if they could. I have seen shows at amphitheaters where a couple of days after an onsale, a “sold out” show has several thousand seats (perhaps 25% of tickets) available on the resale portals and Stubhub.
With the advent of electronic tickets, I can think of many ways to greatly reduce the resale of tickets at a profit, but the promoters do not really want that, as the existence of the resale market is what drives shows to sell out quickly. TM, LN, and AXS profit greatly from the resale market: they charge a service fee on the original sale, charge a fee to the original ticket purchaser when that purchaser uses the resale platform, and then charges a fee to the second purchaser, thereby making three fees on the ticket instead of one. A pretty good profit for moving some electrons around.
So while I would love to see more regulation of some aspects of ticket sale, there is no magic to create 14 million satisfied customers when only 3.5 million tickets are available.
That finally gets one to the great debate, how should scarce tickets be allocated? In the old days, one got in a line two or three days before a show went on sale, and the people at the front of the line, the hard core fans with the time to do that, got the best seats. Now, it basically your luck with your computer terminal, but you are fighting the ticket buying pros and the millions of others seeking tickets. The lack of transparency makes people suspect this process, and rumors of back doors, and groups sales to insiders abound.
One solution (adopted by bands which sell their own tickets such as Phish), is to have a window of several days where anyone can put in a request for tickets, and the ticketing system then randomly issues tickets to the lucky winners. There is no seat selection, and the downside of that system is that you can end up with a back row ticket that you might have walked away from had that been all that was available on a choose-your-seat platform. But where the fan demand will exceed available tickets by millions, that sort of approach might actually have been the best to employ here. And it removes all pressure to get online at 10am or whenever to try for that lucky first position in the queue.
If I were Swift, I would void all the tickets sole and refund all the money and original service charges. This would burn all the scalpers who have resold tickets a profit as the tickets would be worth only face. Then, do the lottery along the lines suggested above and only allow any unique customer to seek two tickets to a single show. Then, after the signup window closes, void any requests which use the credit card numbers, addresses, or cell phone numbers (that cuts down on cheaters). It will not satisfy everyone, or even anyone, but it would fairly distribute the tickets to this popular event.
