Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

> Those $100 face-value tickets were selling for 10 to 50x their price on secondary markets. Either she truly believed her tickets were only worth $100 (unlikely), or she was deliberately underpricing to maintain her image as an artist who cares about fan access.

No, those $100 tickets are mostly worth $100. There are a lot of reasons why someone will overpay to get a ticket; but don't delude yourself: If Taylor Swift decided to charge $1000 for each ticket, many less people would go. She might sell 1/10th of the tickets, and it would be a wash, she might sell 1/3rd of the tickets, and make more money, or she might sell 1/20th of the tickets, and make less money.

What drives the price of the tickets up is scarcity: Once the venue is sold out (or close to sold out,) it's useful to only sell the tickets to people who really, really want to pay.

Edit: I should add that, unless I really want to see an artist, I tend to buy my tickets shortly before the show, and only if they are a reasonable price.

For example, last summer Green Day & Smashing Pumpkins was $200 / ticket. I kinda wanted to go, but I didn't want to pay that much.

In contrast, Weezer was $70 a ticket and playing around the corner from my office. I went to Weezer. (And wished I bought a floor ticket sooner because the Flaming Lips were the opening band.)

Had Weezer charged $200, I never would have gone.

There are reasons to prefer full avenue instead of half full, even if second one brings more money for this single event:

- artist might prefer the full-avenue energy

- it produces positive hype (it's often newsworthy when show is sold out)

- you can sometimes add new dates in the same avenue, maximising profits since lot of stage, travel, staff, marketing costs don't increase if you have another concert the next day.

- You grow fan base instead of shrinking it. It's better to have twice the number of satisfied fans when you revisited the city in few years. But it can also increase future album sales, streaming revenue, etc.

I think it's very clear that her tickets were worth much more than $1000 - especially when 15 million people competed for tickets for only 1.5 million fans.

"I would never buy a $200 ticket, therefore there does not exist a taylor swift ticket worth $200"

As you point out, different people have different price elasticities. Is it so hard to believe that some people really are willing to pay $5000 to attend?

You rightly point out that resale market prices are likely higher than the market clearing price compared to if there were a single-price auction for all the tickets, but saying that they're worth $100 is just flat out wrong.

> > Those $100 face-value tickets were selling for 10 to 50x their price on secondary markets. Either she truly believed her tickets were only worth $100 (unlikely), or she was deliberately underpricing to maintain her image as an artist who cares about fan access.

> No, those $100 tickets are mostly worth $100.

No, all of those tickets were worth more than $100, which you see from the fact that, if you had one, you could sell it for more than $100.

You would only see it if you sold all of them for more than $100.

This is a totally idiosyncratic definition of "worth". If I say a company is worth $100 a share, that doesn't imply that you could simultaneously sell every single share for at least $100

You inserted 'simultaneously', not me.

But if you are not able to eventually sell all the tickets for more than $100, clearly not all of them are worth more than $100. Some, at the right time and place, might be, but not all.

Selling 1 ticket for 100x != Selling all tickets for 100x

Especially not when many of those 100x prices are from scalpers or rescalpers in the first place. Once a ticket is seen as an investment vehicle it gets divorced from the intrinsic value of "seat at concert I'd like to go to".

The article claims that 95% of tickets are grabbed by "The profiteers, the bots, the scalpers, the ticketing reseller". I'm not sure if it's hyperbole or not.

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