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Comment by navaed01 | Hacker News Reader

The ticketing market is out of control.

I would love to see the government break of ticket master.better innovation to avoid scalping by a company that does not benefit from i. The banning of reselling on platforms that sell the original tickets. Caps on fees

I’m a higher earner who loves music and rarely go to stadium size shows because the costs for anything is typically $500+. How does that make any sense?

Basic math tells you the margin on a stadium seat is huge.

Other factors to consider: More is spent on marketing and promotion than ever before, but the cost of digital marketing is a fraction of marketing costs decades ago - especially with the ability to target fans.

The market is willing to bear these higher costs because experience are more valuable to generations today than 20+ years ago.

Artists are also complicit to an extent but reasonably so. The market for paid music has collapsed, touring is how you generate revenue as a musician

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Touring used to promote record sales when their main revenue was the music media itself.

Thanks to Spotify (and streaming media in general), where music is almost worthless, artists need to tour and sell merchandise just to keep break even.

It's a sad state to be in really :(

> The market is willing to bear these higher costs because experience are more valuable to generations today than 20+ years ago.

What does that mean?

It sure seems that things like concerts, festivals, theme parks, even movies are more expensive than e.g. 20 years ago - though I don't have inflation-adjusted data on hand. If true, people are willing to pay more for these kinds of "experiences", and I'd have to agree with parent. Although I'm not sure if it really is a generational thing.

This doesn't mean what Ticketmaster is doing is right, but they are hardly the only ones. E.g. cinemas or theme parks don't use them.

I’m specifically curious about how “experience are more valuable to generations today.” I don’t think there’s much difference between today’s generation and past generations in terms of their enjoyment of concerts, festivals, and other live events. Surely Michael Jackson fans in the 90s were as excited to see him as Taylor Swift fans are today, maybe even more so. Michael Jackson, the Stones, U2, Bruce Springsteen, heck, The Beatles: all of these acts’ had super-fans and their tickets had nearly inelastic demand. In their heydays, they could have charged any price and filled stadiums.

People in those days demanded “experiences” just as much as people today.

How do you know it’s ‘just as much’ instead of proportionally higher?

Wasn't alive in the 60s and don't have a US perspective only a UK/EU one. My parents did see the Stones in the day and I distinctly remember them struggling to decide whether they should go see them in the 00s because tickets were 100€+ (seems cheap now!). But they are not "super-fans" I guess.

I also remember festivals getting more expensive 15-ish years ago, so my friends and me often decided to go hiking instead. IDK if that's a typical case but there are alternative "experiences". With the rise of social media I could understand there's additional incentive to go to more well-known events for the photos, over smaller live-music venues. At least it seems like a lot of photos are taken.

This is all anecdotes, so makes for an unsatisfying answer. But I think it's possible (certain) "experiences are more valuable to generations today". It's at least interesting to consider.

It’s probably true that there were fewer of the eye watering ticket prices that top stars demand today in many cases. Someone told me they were actually flying from the US to Brazil to see Taylor Swift because it was cheaper than getting a local ticket. My sense is highly in-demand concerts was more of a lottery than an auction in the past.

I assume it’s the experiences over stuff meme. Don’t know if it’s accurate or not. If it is it’s probably because stuff like electronics is probably cheaper than in the past. And urbanites just have less space to accumulate gee-gas of all sorts. On the other hand real estate tends to be more expensive at least among those people thinking about experiences.

Believe it or not, but this is actually a usecase for crypto (evm)

Downvoted comment but it's not completely wrong.

While NFT sales and token releases on ethereum and other chains with smart contracts are absolutely botted and scalped/sniped very aggressively, there has been a lot experimentation on how to avoid this. Whitelists are one (bad, IMO) solution, various type of auctions are a fairer solution that aren't that popular in crypto because people are mostly interested in flipping the asset rather than obtaining it at a fair market price.

For things like tickets to a concert or things that people actually want to keep/consume, auctions make a lot of sense.

>While NFT sales and token releases on ethereum and other chains with smart contracts are absolutely botted and scalped/sniped very aggressively,

I didn't quite understand what you're referring to with this. Would you mind elaborating a bit? Honestly curious.

Bots will "snipe" hyped up releases of NFTs or tokens, using various techniques depending on the chain. On ethereum and most others the miners participate in this in exchange for a tip (usually an open market where people can bid to be first in line). Since miners produce the blocks they can order the transactions however they want and put the highest tipper first.

The goal is just the same as ticket scalping. The botters/snipers will just list the the asset on the market immediately at anywhere from 2x-10x the original sale price.

At its peak during NFT mania there were tips of millions of dollars being paid in tips to miners to buy up 75% of the supply of an extremely anticipated NFT collection for another couple of million dollars ( the sale price ) and still coming out in profit.

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