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Louis C.K. sees ticket scalping drop over 96% by selling tickets himself

330 points by andymboyle 14y ago

3JPLW 14y ago
It seems as though the important part here wasn't so much that he sold them himself as it was that he added the following clause: "You’ll see that if you try to sell the ticket anywhere for anything above the original price, we have the right to cancel your ticket (and refund your money). This is something I intend to enforce." This is something that any middleman could do, too... but the incentives simply aren't there for them to prevent scalping. Especially as Ticketmaster has its own resale site, TicketExchange.
- pyre 14y ago
  I guess what it really comes down to is: How does he know which ticket is being sold? I imagine if a scalper wants to avoid detection, they just don't give out specific information until the sale is final (banking that Louis CK won't buy their tickets at scalper prices just to find out which tickets to cancel). If the ticket has some sort of ID, avoid giving that out before the final sale. If the ticket has a seat number, just state the general area of where the seat is rather than the specific seat (until final sale).
  - 3JPLW 14y ago
    Yes, this I agree with. And I think this makes the argument in your top-level comment (that he's too small fry to worry about a different ordering system) much more convincing.
  - defen 14y ago
    Switch to will call only; require the original CC or photo ID to pick up tickets. He explicitly stated on the ticket purchase page that this was a possibility.
    - pyre 14y ago
      That would be bad for the people that sold their tickets for face value ($45) to recoup costs, though. He has no way to know what the resale price was once someone shows up at the door with the tickets.
- SeripisChad 14y ago
  StubHub is owned by Ebay
- majorlazer 14y ago
  StubHub is not owned by Ticketmaster, they are owned by ebay. Source: http://www.stubhub.com/about-us/ http://www.stubhub.com/about-us/
  - 3JPLW 14y ago
    Thanks, already fixed. Chacha got it wrong and confused me until I found more authoritative sources.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - adgar 14y ago
      > Chacha got it wrong Chacha? Really? God damn I swear HN is full of internet hipsters. A query for [stubhub] on any major search engine has the following under the Wikipedia search result: > StubHub (often styled StubHub!) is an online marketplace owned by eBay, which provides services for buyers and sellers of tickets for sports, concerts, theater
pkulak 14y ago
What happens if someone does sell one of these tickets for over face? Will it get cancelled, the scalper refunded (in addition to the sale value), then the person who bought it gets screwed?
- trickjarrett 14y ago
  The terms during purchase made it sound like if they discovered a ticket was sold for higher than $45, then they would cancel the ticket without refund. So both buyer and seller get screwed.
  - chwahoo 14y ago
    This doesn't match the text on the site: "If the ticket is found to be offered for resale above face value we may invalidate the barcode and refund the ticket price."
    - esbwhat 14y ago
      Perhaps the refund isn't digital? I.e. you get refunded at the entrance if you have a scalped ticket
      - JohnTHaller 14y ago
        That would make the most sense and is how I read the language. You're free to go buy an $80 scalped ticket if you want. But if they can figure out it was scalped, they'll just cancel the ticket and refund your $45 ticket price right at the show.
    - droithomme 14y ago
      It's not clear who gets the refund here. If the scalper, then he has no risk, and earns both the money he sold it for AND the refund of the original fee. Win! This is also likely the only refund they can do since they don't have the credit card number of the person who bought the scalped ticket. If they refund the final purchaser, then the scalper still makes his money and the purchaser loses the amount above the face value. In both scenarios, the scalper makes his money, or even more than he would have otherwise.
Retric 14y ago
Scalping always seemed like a mismatch between the ticket price incentives and the venues incentives. Venues like to sell out to increase concession sales / parking etc, but 'talent' is better off picking a price that fills, most but not all seats and maximizes their take. I suspect they also increase their cut by selling tickets early and sitting on a few weeks/months worth of interest.
- cron 14y ago
  Building hard core, committed fans is probably more valuable in the long term rather than maximizing profits from ticket sales.
pyre 14y ago
Sounds to me like: 1) Louis CK isn't big enough for scalpers to care about going through a non-traditional method of obtaining tickets. 2) People that would turn to scalping to recoup their expense when they can't go are just going back to Louis CK for a refund. Personally, it sounds like offering a full refund also comes with the possibility that scalpers will purchase the tickets because they can easily flip them back for a refund (an $0 loss sans time spent) if they can't sell them for a profit. I admit that I know nothing about the 'event ticket scene' so I may be missing something.
- nollidge 14y ago
  Did you read it? #1 is invalidated by the fact they're comparing his shows (sold traditionally) vs. his shows (sold independently), not his shows vs. others'. EDIT: nevermind, I get it now.
  - _delirium 14y ago
    I think the hypothesis in #1 is that many scalpers just buy up tickets through regular channels for all big shows, going down the list. If you're not selling tickets through regular channels, people using that approach won't even have you on their radar, and may not consider it worth their time to go after the handful of events sold via "weird" means when they can just move on to scalping the next event on ticketmaster.com instead.
  - mrtron 14y ago
    I am not sure you understand the argument. #1 is like saying virus makers don't write virii for the operating system I wrote for myself...it just means I have an obscure operating system not necessarily a virus proof operating system. If everyone starts going this independent route, you can bet that scalpers will shift their methods over to these new ticket purchasing systems.
  - tikhonj 14y ago
    The thing is that his shows sold traditionally are sold exactly the same was as plenty of other tickets, through some big site. So, as a scalper, you just trawl through Ticketmaster (or whatever site in question) and buy tickets that look promising. You have your existing process and it works on tickets for anything sold through the site. When an individual performer stops using the site, the only scalpers are going to be the ones familiar with the performer. That is, the sort of scalper that just goes through all the shows on Ticketmaster won't even realize that these tickets are an option--only somebody following Louis CK would. Even if some scalper does realize, a relatively small show (I don't actually know the size of Louis CK's shows, so I'm just assuming they're not too big) will not be worth changing your process for. You would have to spend a significant amount of time figuring out the restrictions of the custom site he is using and how to best profit off them--there is no guarantee that this time would be worth investing. This is basically like a small site using a custom CAPTCHA as compared to using a very common one. Spammers aren't going to bother with your site in particular, but if you use a common CAPTCHA they know how to deal with, they will spam even tiny sites.
erpa1119 14y ago
Sounds like ticketing is ripe for re-invention, how about electronic tickets via smart phone?
- SeripisChad 14y ago
  I would be really easy to create the same type of scale-able ticket selling system and in-venue verification scanners. As a Previous Ticketmaster employee I believe the one thing that help prevent competition in this space is that they work with venues and performers. They subsidize Opex cost for the venues, which I think keeps them happy. For the life of me I can't explain why Ticketmaster would go and "merge" with a competitor who had driven themselves (liveNation) to the verge of bankruptcy (publicly stated within 30 days) just to take some venue market share and select artist. LiveNation now runs this combined company - it was less of a merge and more of a bankrupt company convincing a profitably company that they should "merge". IMO this has everything to do with piss poor management at Ticketmaster and the real value of select venues/artists.
- allwein 14y ago
  You mean like the Pittsburgh startup ShowClix? http://www.showclix.com/ http://www.showclix.com/
- roc 14y ago
  Ticketing has long been ripe for re-invention. The big problem is that TicketMaster has anti-competitive contracts with most popular venues. Louis CK, in trying to do his own thing, is facing largely the same troubles Pearl Jam did in their own effort to end-run Ticketmaster: they're forced to play, in many cases, massively smaller venues. And that winds up excluding more fans than TicketMasters' fees and scalper's artificial price-hikes ever excluded. As for scalping itself, it can't be "solved". Any feasible system needs to allow tickets to be transferred or gifted in some manner. [1] And as soon as you do that you've provided the mechanism whereby a secondary sales channel can allow party A to sell party B a promise to transfer the ticket for above-face-value. [1] To cover people buying X tickets for a giveaway, or one person buying tickets for a group, or people giving tickets as gifts, or people giving tickets away to a show they can no longer attend, etc.
mhartl 14y ago
For his shows, C.K. saw scalping rates as high as 25%, driving up the price of his shows for people who wanted to attend, by those who didn’t. The only people driving up the price of the shows are people who want to attend. How could it be otherwise? People who don't want to go to the show certainly don't raise prices. If scalpers can profit, it means you aren't charging market price. Policies like the one described in the OP simply shoot the messenger. If the market price is too high for some fans, have a lottery with an aftermarket. Once they see the market price, low-income lottery winners can decide whether they'd rather attend the show or sell the tickets to pay the rent. It's not like these issues haven't been studied before. Do a few web searches, or consult an economist. If you don't accept that your naive economic intuition is wrong, you're going to make stupid decisions that often exacerbate the very problems you're trying to solve. (I'm looking at you, Burning Man.)
- Androsynth 14y ago
  yeah I'm confused, isn't scalping a necessary side effect of the process? It seems natural if you sell tickets at a constant price over time and don't adjust that for higher demand (as event gets closer in time) or lower supply (as tickets are sold). Also, is scalping a bad thing? It seems to me that they are making the market more efficient.
  - AndrewDucker 14y ago
    Market efficiency is not necessarily a person's aim.
    - Androsynth 14y ago
      Leaving money on the table does no one any favors. If people are willing to pay $150 for tickets and hes charging $50 (or whatever it is), he's only doing himself a disservice. If people are willing to pay that much and he delivers a show that is up to his normal standard, they won't hate him for charging them that much; quite the opposite actually. It's only the price gauging and poor service of monopolies that people tend to hate (and for good reason). Now, if you are saying 'what about the people who cant afford $150 for tickets?'. If it's not a charity show, the world definitely does not owe you tickets to a stand-up comedy show. On the other hand, charity shows are fine, but he should call it like it is if thats the case. $50 for tickets means the rich will pay less than theyre willing to pay and the poor won't get in anyways. No one wins in that situation.
toddmorey 14y ago
I love that he's shaking things up. However, he needs to find a better partner to work with on the technology side of things. I tried to purchase tickets for one of the shows listed as available, and it then told me it was actually sold out. Another show let me get further, but then told me my session had already expired (less than 1 min later). Finally, I was able to select ticket options and no 2 adjacent seats were available. It was a lot of effort to discover what they could have told me on the show listing page, and I don't want to spend all the time it would take to check all the other shows.
- Androsynth 14y ago
  Contractors not dogfooding their apps is common. I would think that if you sent that exact paragraph to him through some sort of feedback/contact form from his website, he may actually realize that there are some poor UI flows.
- jbigelow76 14y ago
  Ticketmaster has had most of the issues nailed down for 12 or so years. Nobody ever said disruption wasn't messy :)
qq66 14y ago
Isn't a ban on scalping a violation of the First Sale Doctrine?
- trebor 14y ago
  IANAL, but I believe a ticket to attend an event is different from a CD or record. First Sale states that when you buy something like a book or CD, you have full right/control over what happens to it. But I believe that Louis has the right to revoke a ticket, making scalping virtually impossible. I would like to know what a lawyer says about this, though.
  - TylerE 14y ago
    If you ever read the 2pt font on the back of a ticket, you'll find that what you have bought is in fact a ticket license. The physical ticket itself is just for convenience, what you're paying for is the right to attend.
- knome 14y ago
  It would probably protect selling the paper, but not the service it represents. /ianal
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- rmc 14y ago
  No, first sale refers to copyrighted works. Not tickets to go to a show. You can't easily resell airline tickets, or hotel bookings either.
cletus 14y ago
This is of course interesting and will lead to inevitable comments about disruption being needed in event ticketing. Let me save you the trouble as this has been rehashed many times already: the problem here is Ticketmaster's exclusives on venues and the entertainment's willingness to let Ticketmaster be the "sacrificial anode" and focus of ire from both audiences and performers. There was a deal done some years ago--I forget the name--whereby performers would get 90% of ticket sales. The way around that is not to increase ticket prices but to add "fees". Online transaction fees, mail fees, processing fees, booking fees, you name it. The fees in some cases are approaching the ticket price. Ticketmaster does this, splitting the proceeds with promoters and venues while the artists get a 90% cut of an ever smaller part of the pie. Ticketmaster has multi-year exclusive deals with venues such that none can really afford the attractive cuts they get to "go it alone". IMHO this situation has reached the point of requiring government action as this is now an antritrust issue (the ticketing market basically cannot function now). Until that happens any ticketing disruption is doomed.
- napierzaza 14y ago
  Except for the 6,000,000$ in commerce that LouisCK managed to do? I imagine the problem is with larger venues than most stand-up performers might appear in. Louis CK has a lot of sway when it comes to pretty much anything since he can guarantee a sold-out show practically anywhere. But I wouldn't exactly call this a moot experiment.
- dlikhten 14y ago
  Well said, good sir, well said. However it still goes to show that there is a disconnect between "popular" and "up and coming". The rules for Louis C.K. and up-and-coming comedians are quite different. He is a gorilla and can use his momentum to do interesting things, others cannot. Disruption is possible IF the seller company choses to take a multi-year hit while de-throning ticketmaster. If that happens with the backing of big names like Louis it may be a possibility.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- rmc 14y ago
alanbyrne 14y ago
Louis must have spent an absolute mint on Paypal fees...
- mrtron 14y ago
  ... in order to facilitate the shift away from other ticketing systems that probably cost him 10x?
TylerE 14y ago
Seems like a fair way to do it (while still extracting lots value), would be to a sort of dutch type auction. E.g. theater seats 1000, so you take bids for the max people are willing to pay. Then, once that closes out, you take enough people to fill, say, the first 5 rows off the top of the list, and charge them whatever the lowest winning bid is of the people in that group. Repeat for each tier going back until the venue is sold out. This actually tackles the inefficiencies at both ends - people willing to splurge on great seats get them, but if a show is not high in demand, you might still get people who kind of want to go to pay, say, $5 for the nosebleeds.
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jyu 14y ago
Couldn't someone start an alternative ticketing method using this as a model? Proactively squash scalping, select alternative venues, and only sign artists who have big email/twitter/facebook fan bases. This way, you can avoid the big chicken/egg initial distribution problem.
scotty79 14y ago
Why not just sell the tickets via Dutch multi-item auction with bidding. If auction ends sufficiently close to the event scalpers can't get much profit from rich fans because they don't have much time to find buyers and price at what they bought tickets is closer to the market value. Also scalpers coul only sell for profit only to people who didn't attend the auction or decided to pay more then they declared during auction.
- cbr 14y ago
  > Dutch multi-item auction with bidding. Some events fail to sell out because they were priced too high, but others don't sell out because there's not enough interest. So you'd need to set a price floor. > If auction ends sufficiently close to the event... People don't know whether they've gotten in until after the auction ends. End it close enough to the event and people are unhappy they can't plan.
  - scotty79 14y ago
    You can set minimal price in multi-item auction. You don't have to sell out for auction to end. And you don't have to sell for zero if there are not enough buyers. As for the second argument, I don't suggest ending it minutes or even hours before the event. Rather days or weeks. The point is that all people who want to go can declare how much they are willing to pay beforehand and if their best offer gets beaten by scalpers, the scalpers won't profit by selling tickets for more money to them just before the show. My suggestion is not to remove scalpers altogether but limit their opportunities for earning and helping artist extract some of the additional wealth that currently goes to scalpers. Those scalpers that remain would provide legit service of providing tickets to people who couldn't attend an auction.
    - masterzora 14y ago
      Even days or weeks is insufficient. If I buy tickets to an event four months from now it is usually incredibly easy to arrange an affordable flight, for example. Or if two mutually exclusive events I am interested in have tickets go on sale at the same time right now I can pick one and purchase a ticket. If they are sold out I can pick the other event instead. With this system if I enter the auction for only one and do not win then I am screwed for the second one as well. If I enter both auctions I run the risk of purchasing both tickets. I can imagine some other, more subtle planning issues that arise as well. Not that the system couldn't work but I think it would make for a terrible standard model. As a sort of side-note you talk about helping the artist extract some of the money they are leaving on the table. I don't it's fair to assume that they are leaving the money there because they can't figure out "hey, if people are successfully scalping then I could make more money by charging more!" They have to look beyond a single transaction and keep in mind lower income fans that they still want to please, for example. Such fans would inevitably lose the auction for any show that sells out but some of them actually get to attend the show with the current structure.
paulsutter 14y ago
Ticketmaster IS the scalper. Ticketmaster is the party listing the tickets on Stubhub. The whole system is indeed a mess. Legislation may be the only way to get things unstuck.
larrys 14y ago
"You’ll see that if you try to sell the ticket anywhere for anything above the original price, we have the right to cancel your ticket (and refund your money). This is something I intend to enforce." How? He doesn't claim that he will check id's for all sold tickets (he says he might) and he may not be on strong legal footing to take a chance and deny entrance to someone who shows up with a ticket that they purchased. Using stubhub as an example I'm wondering what the connection is legally between a representative from louisck seeing a particular seat is for sale on stubhub and then cancelling the ticket making the assumption of course that the person buying the ticket posted it there (and it's not a typo or other error or even some kind of "denial of seat" attack against the true purchaser). "Tickets may not be resold for any amount above face value." How is that going to be enforced? What is the cross check between a particular seat and proof that a ticket was sold for a higher amount? Edit: Also what happens if you want to buy a ticket as a gift for someone? How can it be proven that a ticket was not a gift and that it was resold at a price higher than face value?
melvinmt 14y ago
This all makes me wonder: why don't we have scalpers for popular plane flights?
- r7000 14y ago
  Dynamic pricing. No such thing as "face value" for a plane ticket. Ability to schedule more flights in the same day as demand increases.
- Steko 14y ago
  You mean people that buy blocks of tickets not for personal use and then resell them? We call them travel agencies.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
agotterer 14y ago
How are they planning to police scalping?
barbs 14y ago
Did anyone else find the whole "left and right arrow keys to browse articles" on this site really annoying? I accidentally hit them when pressing up and down to read the article itself.
pbreit 14y ago
The entertainment industry an ticket scalpers have a very healthy symbiotic relationship. Industry gets to sell tickets at fan-friendly prices and rich people get to go to the shows they want to. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. And I have no problem with this experiment.
todtown 14y ago
I've read this entire thread with great enthusiasm, and I am about to make a comment that will probably be scoffed at by the majority of you. However, where does ethics and morality factor into the good/bad of ticket scalping? If it was NEVER the artist's intention to have their tickets resold, and the scalper does it anyway, then regardless of who benefits or who doesn't, is it still ethical? And if not, should it be practiced?

330 points by andymboyle 14y ago

3JPLW 14y ago

It seems as though the important part here wasn't so much that he sold them himself as it was that he added the following clause: "You’ll see that if you try to sell the ticket anywhere for anything above the original price, we have the right to cancel your ticket (and refund your money). This is something I intend to enforce." This is something that any middleman could do, too... but the incentives simply aren't there for them to prevent scalping. Especially as Ticketmaster has its own resale site, TicketExchange.

pyre 14y ago
I guess what it really comes down to is: How does he know which ticket is being sold? I imagine if a scalper wants to avoid detection, they just don't give out specific information until the sale is final (banking that Louis CK won't buy their tickets at scalper prices just to find out which tickets to cancel). If the ticket has some sort of ID, avoid giving that out before the final sale. If the ticket has a seat number, just state the general area of where the seat is rather than the specific seat (until final sale).
- 3JPLW 14y ago
  Yes, this I agree with. And I think this makes the argument in your top-level comment (that he's too small fry to worry about a different ordering system) much more convincing.
- defen 14y ago
  Switch to will call only; require the original CC or photo ID to pick up tickets. He explicitly stated on the ticket purchase page that this was a possibility.
  - pyre 14y ago
    That would be bad for the people that sold their tickets for face value ($45) to recoup costs, though. He has no way to know what the resale price was once someone shows up at the door with the tickets.
SeripisChad 14y ago
StubHub is owned by Ebay
majorlazer 14y ago
StubHub is not owned by Ticketmaster, they are owned by ebay. Source: http://www.stubhub.com/about-us/ http://www.stubhub.com/about-us/
- 3JPLW 14y ago
  Thanks, already fixed. Chacha got it wrong and confused me until I found more authoritative sources.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - adgar 14y ago
    > Chacha got it wrong Chacha? Really? God damn I swear HN is full of internet hipsters. A query for [stubhub] on any major search engine has the following under the Wikipedia search result: > StubHub (often styled StubHub!) is an online marketplace owned by eBay, which provides services for buyers and sellers of tickets for sports, concerts, theater

pkulak 14y ago

What happens if someone does sell one of these tickets for over face? Will it get cancelled, the scalper refunded (in addition to the sale value), then the person who bought it gets screwed?

trickjarrett 14y ago
The terms during purchase made it sound like if they discovered a ticket was sold for higher than $45, then they would cancel the ticket without refund. So both buyer and seller get screwed.
- chwahoo 14y ago
  This doesn't match the text on the site: "If the ticket is found to be offered for resale above face value we may invalidate the barcode and refund the ticket price."
  - esbwhat 14y ago
    Perhaps the refund isn't digital? I.e. you get refunded at the entrance if you have a scalped ticket
    - JohnTHaller 14y ago
      That would make the most sense and is how I read the language. You're free to go buy an $80 scalped ticket if you want. But if they can figure out it was scalped, they'll just cancel the ticket and refund your $45 ticket price right at the show.
  - droithomme 14y ago
    It's not clear who gets the refund here. If the scalper, then he has no risk, and earns both the money he sold it for AND the refund of the original fee. Win! This is also likely the only refund they can do since they don't have the credit card number of the person who bought the scalped ticket. If they refund the final purchaser, then the scalper still makes his money and the purchaser loses the amount above the face value. In both scenarios, the scalper makes his money, or even more than he would have otherwise.

Retric 14y ago

Scalping always seemed like a mismatch between the ticket price incentives and the venues incentives. Venues like to sell out to increase concession sales / parking etc, but 'talent' is better off picking a price that fills, most but not all seats and maximizes their take. I suspect they also increase their cut by selling tickets early and sitting on a few weeks/months worth of interest.

cron 14y ago
Building hard core, committed fans is probably more valuable in the long term rather than maximizing profits from ticket sales.

pyre 14y ago

Sounds to me like: 1) Louis CK isn't big enough for scalpers to care about going through a non-traditional method of obtaining tickets. 2) People that would turn to scalping to recoup their expense when they can't go are just going back to Louis CK for a refund. Personally, it sounds like offering a full refund also comes with the possibility that scalpers will purchase the tickets because they can easily flip them back for a refund (an $0 loss sans time spent) if they can't sell them for a profit. I admit that I know nothing about the 'event ticket scene' so I may be missing something.

nollidge 14y ago
Did you read it? #1 is invalidated by the fact they're comparing his shows (sold traditionally) vs. his shows (sold independently), not his shows vs. others'. EDIT: nevermind, I get it now.
- _delirium 14y ago
  I think the hypothesis in #1 is that many scalpers just buy up tickets through regular channels for all big shows, going down the list. If you're not selling tickets through regular channels, people using that approach won't even have you on their radar, and may not consider it worth their time to go after the handful of events sold via "weird" means when they can just move on to scalping the next event on ticketmaster.com instead.
- mrtron 14y ago
  I am not sure you understand the argument. #1 is like saying virus makers don't write virii for the operating system I wrote for myself...it just means I have an obscure operating system not necessarily a virus proof operating system. If everyone starts going this independent route, you can bet that scalpers will shift their methods over to these new ticket purchasing systems.
- tikhonj 14y ago
  The thing is that his shows sold traditionally are sold exactly the same was as plenty of other tickets, through some big site. So, as a scalper, you just trawl through Ticketmaster (or whatever site in question) and buy tickets that look promising. You have your existing process and it works on tickets for anything sold through the site. When an individual performer stops using the site, the only scalpers are going to be the ones familiar with the performer. That is, the sort of scalper that just goes through all the shows on Ticketmaster won't even realize that these tickets are an option--only somebody following Louis CK would. Even if some scalper does realize, a relatively small show (I don't actually know the size of Louis CK's shows, so I'm just assuming they're not too big) will not be worth changing your process for. You would have to spend a significant amount of time figuring out the restrictions of the custom site he is using and how to best profit off them--there is no guarantee that this time would be worth investing. This is basically like a small site using a custom CAPTCHA as compared to using a very common one. Spammers aren't going to bother with your site in particular, but if you use a common CAPTCHA they know how to deal with, they will spam even tiny sites.

erpa1119 14y ago

Sounds like ticketing is ripe for re-invention, how about electronic tickets via smart phone?

SeripisChad 14y ago
I would be really easy to create the same type of scale-able ticket selling system and in-venue verification scanners. As a Previous Ticketmaster employee I believe the one thing that help prevent competition in this space is that they work with venues and performers. They subsidize Opex cost for the venues, which I think keeps them happy. For the life of me I can't explain why Ticketmaster would go and "merge" with a competitor who had driven themselves (liveNation) to the verge of bankruptcy (publicly stated within 30 days) just to take some venue market share and select artist. LiveNation now runs this combined company - it was less of a merge and more of a bankrupt company convincing a profitably company that they should "merge". IMO this has everything to do with piss poor management at Ticketmaster and the real value of select venues/artists.
allwein 14y ago
You mean like the Pittsburgh startup ShowClix? http://www.showclix.com/ http://www.showclix.com/
roc 14y ago
Ticketing has long been ripe for re-invention. The big problem is that TicketMaster has anti-competitive contracts with most popular venues. Louis CK, in trying to do his own thing, is facing largely the same troubles Pearl Jam did in their own effort to end-run Ticketmaster: they're forced to play, in many cases, massively smaller venues. And that winds up excluding more fans than TicketMasters' fees and scalper's artificial price-hikes ever excluded. As for scalping itself, it can't be "solved". Any feasible system needs to allow tickets to be transferred or gifted in some manner. [1] And as soon as you do that you've provided the mechanism whereby a secondary sales channel can allow party A to sell party B a promise to transfer the ticket for above-face-value. [1] To cover people buying X tickets for a giveaway, or one person buying tickets for a group, or people giving tickets as gifts, or people giving tickets away to a show they can no longer attend, etc.

mhartl 14y ago

For his shows, C.K. saw scalping rates as high as 25%, driving up the price of his shows for people who wanted to attend, by those who didn’t. The only people driving up the price of the shows are people who want to attend. How could it be otherwise? People who don't want to go to the show certainly don't raise prices. If scalpers can profit, it means you aren't charging market price. Policies like the one described in the OP simply shoot the messenger. If the market price is too high for some fans, have a lottery with an aftermarket. Once they see the market price, low-income lottery winners can decide whether they'd rather attend the show or sell the tickets to pay the rent. It's not like these issues haven't been studied before. Do a few web searches, or consult an economist. If you don't accept that your naive economic intuition is wrong, you're going to make stupid decisions that often exacerbate the very problems you're trying to solve. (I'm looking at you, Burning Man.)

Androsynth 14y ago
yeah I'm confused, isn't scalping a necessary side effect of the process? It seems natural if you sell tickets at a constant price over time and don't adjust that for higher demand (as event gets closer in time) or lower supply (as tickets are sold). Also, is scalping a bad thing? It seems to me that they are making the market more efficient.
- AndrewDucker 14y ago
  Market efficiency is not necessarily a person's aim.
  - Androsynth 14y ago
    Leaving money on the table does no one any favors. If people are willing to pay $150 for tickets and hes charging $50 (or whatever it is), he's only doing himself a disservice. If people are willing to pay that much and he delivers a show that is up to his normal standard, they won't hate him for charging them that much; quite the opposite actually. It's only the price gauging and poor service of monopolies that people tend to hate (and for good reason). Now, if you are saying 'what about the people who cant afford $150 for tickets?'. If it's not a charity show, the world definitely does not owe you tickets to a stand-up comedy show. On the other hand, charity shows are fine, but he should call it like it is if thats the case. $50 for tickets means the rich will pay less than theyre willing to pay and the poor won't get in anyways. No one wins in that situation.

toddmorey 14y ago

I love that he's shaking things up. However, he needs to find a better partner to work with on the technology side of things. I tried to purchase tickets for one of the shows listed as available, and it then told me it was actually sold out. Another show let me get further, but then told me my session had already expired (less than 1 min later). Finally, I was able to select ticket options and no 2 adjacent seats were available. It was a lot of effort to discover what they could have told me on the show listing page, and I don't want to spend all the time it would take to check all the other shows.

Androsynth 14y ago
Contractors not dogfooding their apps is common. I would think that if you sent that exact paragraph to him through some sort of feedback/contact form from his website, he may actually realize that there are some poor UI flows.
jbigelow76 14y ago
Ticketmaster has had most of the issues nailed down for 12 or so years. Nobody ever said disruption wasn't messy :)

qq66 14y ago

Isn't a ban on scalping a violation of the First Sale Doctrine?

trebor 14y ago
IANAL, but I believe a ticket to attend an event is different from a CD or record. First Sale states that when you buy something like a book or CD, you have full right/control over what happens to it. But I believe that Louis has the right to revoke a ticket, making scalping virtually impossible. I would like to know what a lawyer says about this, though.
- TylerE 14y ago
  If you ever read the 2pt font on the back of a ticket, you'll find that what you have bought is in fact a ticket license. The physical ticket itself is just for convenience, what you're paying for is the right to attend.
knome 14y ago
It would probably protect selling the paper, but not the service it represents. /ianal
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rmc 14y ago
No, first sale refers to copyrighted works. Not tickets to go to a show. You can't easily resell airline tickets, or hotel bookings either.

cletus 14y ago

This is of course interesting and will lead to inevitable comments about disruption being needed in event ticketing. Let me save you the trouble as this has been rehashed many times already: the problem here is Ticketmaster's exclusives on venues and the entertainment's willingness to let Ticketmaster be the "sacrificial anode" and focus of ire from both audiences and performers. There was a deal done some years ago--I forget the name--whereby performers would get 90% of ticket sales. The way around that is not to increase ticket prices but to add "fees". Online transaction fees, mail fees, processing fees, booking fees, you name it. The fees in some cases are approaching the ticket price. Ticketmaster does this, splitting the proceeds with promoters and venues while the artists get a 90% cut of an ever smaller part of the pie. Ticketmaster has multi-year exclusive deals with venues such that none can really afford the attractive cuts they get to "go it alone". IMHO this situation has reached the point of requiring government action as this is now an antritrust issue (the ticketing market basically cannot function now). Until that happens any ticketing disruption is doomed.

napierzaza 14y ago
Except for the 6,000,000$ in commerce that LouisCK managed to do? I imagine the problem is with larger venues than most stand-up performers might appear in. Louis CK has a lot of sway when it comes to pretty much anything since he can guarantee a sold-out show practically anywhere. But I wouldn't exactly call this a moot experiment.
dlikhten 14y ago
Well said, good sir, well said. However it still goes to show that there is a disconnect between "popular" and "up and coming". The rules for Louis C.K. and up-and-coming comedians are quite different. He is a gorilla and can use his momentum to do interesting things, others cannot. Disruption is possible IF the seller company choses to take a multi-year hit while de-throning ticketmaster. If that happens with the backing of big names like Louis it may be a possibility.
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rmc 14y ago

alanbyrne 14y ago

Louis must have spent an absolute mint on Paypal fees...

mrtron 14y ago
... in order to facilitate the shift away from other ticketing systems that probably cost him 10x?

TylerE 14y ago

Seems like a fair way to do it (while still extracting lots value), would be to a sort of dutch type auction. E.g. theater seats 1000, so you take bids for the max people are willing to pay. Then, once that closes out, you take enough people to fill, say, the first 5 rows off the top of the list, and charge them whatever the lowest winning bid is of the people in that group. Repeat for each tier going back until the venue is sold out. This actually tackles the inefficiencies at both ends - people willing to splurge on great seats get them, but if a show is not high in demand, you might still get people who kind of want to go to pay, say, $5 for the nosebleeds.

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jyu 14y ago

Couldn't someone start an alternative ticketing method using this as a model? Proactively squash scalping, select alternative venues, and only sign artists who have big email/twitter/facebook fan bases. This way, you can avoid the big chicken/egg initial distribution problem.

scotty79 14y ago

Why not just sell the tickets via Dutch multi-item auction with bidding. If auction ends sufficiently close to the event scalpers can't get much profit from rich fans because they don't have much time to find buyers and price at what they bought tickets is closer to the market value. Also scalpers coul only sell for profit only to people who didn't attend the auction or decided to pay more then they declared during auction.

cbr 14y ago
> Dutch multi-item auction with bidding. Some events fail to sell out because they were priced too high, but others don't sell out because there's not enough interest. So you'd need to set a price floor. > If auction ends sufficiently close to the event... People don't know whether they've gotten in until after the auction ends. End it close enough to the event and people are unhappy they can't plan.
- scotty79 14y ago
  You can set minimal price in multi-item auction. You don't have to sell out for auction to end. And you don't have to sell for zero if there are not enough buyers. As for the second argument, I don't suggest ending it minutes or even hours before the event. Rather days or weeks. The point is that all people who want to go can declare how much they are willing to pay beforehand and if their best offer gets beaten by scalpers, the scalpers won't profit by selling tickets for more money to them just before the show. My suggestion is not to remove scalpers altogether but limit their opportunities for earning and helping artist extract some of the additional wealth that currently goes to scalpers. Those scalpers that remain would provide legit service of providing tickets to people who couldn't attend an auction.
  - masterzora 14y ago
    Even days or weeks is insufficient. If I buy tickets to an event four months from now it is usually incredibly easy to arrange an affordable flight, for example. Or if two mutually exclusive events I am interested in have tickets go on sale at the same time right now I can pick one and purchase a ticket. If they are sold out I can pick the other event instead. With this system if I enter the auction for only one and do not win then I am screwed for the second one as well. If I enter both auctions I run the risk of purchasing both tickets. I can imagine some other, more subtle planning issues that arise as well. Not that the system couldn't work but I think it would make for a terrible standard model. As a sort of side-note you talk about helping the artist extract some of the money they are leaving on the table. I don't it's fair to assume that they are leaving the money there because they can't figure out "hey, if people are successfully scalping then I could make more money by charging more!" They have to look beyond a single transaction and keep in mind lower income fans that they still want to please, for example. Such fans would inevitably lose the auction for any show that sells out but some of them actually get to attend the show with the current structure.

paulsutter 14y ago

Ticketmaster IS the scalper. Ticketmaster is the party listing the tickets on Stubhub. The whole system is indeed a mess. Legislation may be the only way to get things unstuck.

larrys 14y ago

"You’ll see that if you try to sell the ticket anywhere for anything above the original price, we have the right to cancel your ticket (and refund your money). This is something I intend to enforce." How? He doesn't claim that he will check id's for all sold tickets (he says he might) and he may not be on strong legal footing to take a chance and deny entrance to someone who shows up with a ticket that they purchased. Using stubhub as an example I'm wondering what the connection is legally between a representative from louisck seeing a particular seat is for sale on stubhub and then cancelling the ticket making the assumption of course that the person buying the ticket posted it there (and it's not a typo or other error or even some kind of "denial of seat" attack against the true purchaser). "Tickets may not be resold for any amount above face value." How is that going to be enforced? What is the cross check between a particular seat and proof that a ticket was sold for a higher amount? Edit: Also what happens if you want to buy a ticket as a gift for someone? How can it be proven that a ticket was not a gift and that it was resold at a price higher than face value?

melvinmt 14y ago

This all makes me wonder: why don't we have scalpers for popular plane flights?

r7000 14y ago
Dynamic pricing. No such thing as "face value" for a plane ticket. Ability to schedule more flights in the same day as demand increases.
Steko 14y ago
You mean people that buy blocks of tickets not for personal use and then resell them? We call them travel agencies.
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agotterer 14y ago

How are they planning to police scalping?

barbs 14y ago

Did anyone else find the whole "left and right arrow keys to browse articles" on this site really annoying? I accidentally hit them when pressing up and down to read the article itself.

pbreit 14y ago

The entertainment industry an ticket scalpers have a very healthy symbiotic relationship. Industry gets to sell tickets at fan-friendly prices and rich people get to go to the shows they want to. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. And I have no problem with this experiment.

todtown 14y ago

I've read this entire thread with great enthusiasm, and I am about to make a comment that will probably be scoffed at by the majority of you. However, where does ethics and morality factor into the good/bad of ticket scalping? If it was NEVER the artist's intention to have their tickets resold, and the scalper does it anyway, then regardless of who benefits or who doesn't, is it still ethical? And if not, should it be practiced?