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Comment by hackermailman | Hacker News Reader

Live Nation and its ticket distributor Ticketmaster consistently promote scarcity by diverting the majority of tickets into the hands of resellers like TicketsNow, which is a Ticketmaster subsidiary so they can get the full demand rate in the secondary market. The artist gets a cut of this, it's all a scheme and nobody at Ticketmaster cares about the bots who fight over the tiny amount of released tickets.

Artists know they can charge much more for tickets, but can't do so overtly because everybody will cry in the media about them locking out their "true fans", so hence we have this scheme where bands like U2 scalp their own tickets to get paid what they are worth.

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In most cases, they aren't diverting tickets directly to TicketsNow, and if they are, it's a select few. They don't need to. They sell to the public, which includes resellers (whether they be fans or brokers), and that public then sells the tickets on TicketsNow, which show up as verified resale tickets on the ticketmaster/livenation website if barcodes are supplied (or you sell directly out of your ticketmaster account). You can actually list and sell some tickets this way prior to them being available to download, as it syncs the token for the purchase and sells that, and delivers when the tickets are actually issued (tickets routinely have a delayed delivery now).

Ticketmaster makes money on every sale (fees, as well as 7%-12% of the sale amount) so it's not like they are really losing anything this way. In fact, they may make more money, since even if the tickets sell at a premium on resale, if they don't sell for more than the cut the exchange takes, the broker still loses money (which ends up in the hands of the exchange).

It is true that some artists and venues are more amenable to this than others though. Some allow the ticketmaster sanctioned secondary market (TM+), and some don't.

In some cases they definitely are diverting directly, U2 only sold 1/4 of their tickets here through TM, the rest were held back for secondary market Seatwave and TicketsNow (both owned by LiveNation/TM). By directly capturing the secondary market the band can get a cut of this revenue, if they just allow the public to resell and TM gets all the fees the band makes less income.

Also, doesn't Ticketmaster benefit from the scalping through more transaction fees anyway? Between TicketsNow and the increased transaction volume from scalpers/flippers, seems like TicketMaster can't really lose.

Live Nation owns Ticketmaster, and often the venues too, so in the end it all flows back to the promoter from drink pricing to ticket reselling. We used to joke in highschool that the guys punting tickets for 10x the price in the parking lot of shows were Ticketmaster employees and now they actually are.

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