As long as there are concerts to be attended, there will be people trying to scalp tickets for them. If you’re not familiar with the term ticket scalping, it usually refers to people buying concert tickets and then selling them for extremely inflated prices. While many think of ticket scalpers as people standing in front of the performance venue on the day of the event waving around tickets, today’s ticket scalpers actually take on a new form: online bots. Ticket scalpers may set up bots that can buy up tickets, only to resell them for inflated prices. Ticket scalpers are enemies of fans and artists both; the artists do not profit from the increased resale price and fans often find themselves unable to afford the new inflated ticket price.
Ticketmaster is perhaps the biggest verified online seller for tickets. Many entertainers use this website exclusively for ticket sales, but this does not mean it is without problems. While I had been warned that Ticketmaster was an untamable beast, I had yet to encounter any problems myself.
I digress. I was an emo kid, so when My Chemical Romance announced their reunion and North American tour, I was determined to get tickets to live out my 13-year-old dreams. I did everything Ticketmaster’s website suggested to get the best tickets: signed in 10 minutes early, verified my payment information and joined a virtual queue. Then, chaos ensued; every ticket I clicked on was being sold instantaneously and the website crashed multiple times. It took 20 minutes before I finally located a ticket that was still available. I filled in my payment information, excitedly clicked the purchase button, and just when I thought I had triumphed, it all came crashing down.
Seriously, the app crashed and could not reconnect. Five minutes passed, and the floor level tickets that were just in my grasp slipped away. I had to rejoin the queue; this time an hour-long, and by the time I got back to the ticket selection page, the only options were tickets that were being resold. The same ticket I had been seconds away from having for $125 was being resold for upwards of $1,000. I ended up finding a ticket for $140, but the seat was originally being sold for only $75. Even now, weeks after the ticket sales started, floor level tickets remain anywhere from $500 to $1,500 and the original $75 tickets are over $200.
In late 2018, Ticketmaster introduced fan-to-fan resale, letting fans resell their verified tickets directly from the website to create some transparency in the resale process. However, literally anyone with a Ticketmaster account can resell a ticket for any price that is the same or higher than the original face value of the ticket. That means that scalpers who run hundreds of accounts may purchase tickets and resell them for virtually any price. The only instance where fan-to-fan resale may be prohibited is if the venue or artist removes the option, which hardly ever happens.
There is nothing stopping ticket scalpers from reselling their tickets for 10 times its original amount. Instead of perhaps implementing a system where there is a resale price limit on tickets, Ticketmaster has turned a blind eye and fans continue to struggle to compete with online ticket scalpers.
Photo: R. Mnypcm
