Can't Get A Good Seat At Big Concert Tour, Maybe Facebook Can Help

Big concert tours can be looked at in a multitude of ways when it comes to enjoying the show. Do you know that you are about to drop a huge amount of coin, yes? But is it worth spending huge amounts of money on just the right seats or joining a fan club to be allowed early access to ticket purchases? This is entirely up to your budget and what you enjoy, but check out a new company that could help to turn things around by directly engaging the ticket snipers and the almighty wallet vacuum known as Ticketmaster. Whatever tool or technology that might help to level the playing field, will indeed be a great option.


Check out original post on Mashable.com

The price one dude paid for "selling" extra tickets. Image courtesy of basecrawl.wordpress.com

"We’ve all had the experience: You favorite musician is finally going on tour and there’s a concert in your area. You want good seats, so you queue up at your computer to be among the first to buy tickets. However, within seconds of the on-sale time, all the good seats are sold out – sometimes the entire show is sold out. You can still find those tickets, but only on the secondary market from ticket brokers who usually charge a 3X or more markup.

What the heck happened?

The practice is called ticket sniping. Think of it as ticket scalping on steroids. It’s where brokers use sophisticated software to game Ticketmaster (and other) systems so they can cut the line and buy huge blocks of high-value tickets. It’s been going on for years and while ticket brokers and others get rich, consumer frustration grows.

Counter Measures

Ticketmaster has not sat idly by. Back in 2008, it successfully sued sniping technology creator RMG Technologies. It also started using CAPTCHA technology in an effort to slow down the software and force ticket consumers to prove they are in fact real people. This year, Ticketmaster introduced online ticket reselling for Live Nation, a move that may further undercut third-party ticket brokers by providing some competition.

Upstart online event management and ticket agency Eventbrite, which allows virtually anyone to sell tickets for their events (conferences, small concerts), also sells tickets to increasingly large events, including the upcoming Governors Ball concert. [Full disclosure: Mashable uses Eventbrite for some of its own events]

Back when the company secured $50 million in funding, Founder and CEO Kevin Hartz (pictured) was hesitant to say it was ready to take on the biggest names in the business, like Ticketmaster.

"We have this worldwide market," Hartz said, "In a lot of ways it doesn't make sense to fight it out with one competitor. There's a much broader opportunity."

Now, however, Eventbrite may be thinking about taking Ticketmaster, and ticket brokers, head on.


Making It Better

Hartz maintains that the prevalence of ticket sniping and speculation (buying large blocks of tickets based on, for instance, how they think a sports team might perform in the coming season) is “a failure of innovation” in the ticketing industry.

The ticketing industry also remains something of a black box. Hartz told Mashable, “One needs to illuminate the industry to understand the dynamics of it to prevent abuse….
 
"Right now things are done in a back room with great obfuscation.”

Hartz is not pointing figures at any ticketing agency (a former Ticketmaster CEO is on their board), but he does see at least one possible solution.

For much of its existence, the Internet has been “extremely anonymous,” said Hartz. However, using our online identities could be the key to solving the ticket sniping problem.

The fact is, the ability to figure out and retype CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) text is no proof that you’re a human. Technology to interpret and type in CAPTCHA solutions far more quickly than humans is on the rise (to combat this, CAPTCHAs are now so complicated that many humans actually fail to decipher them). A Facebook profile, however, is harder to fake. It's "significantly more challenging for a verified "kevin hartz" to purchase hundreds of tickets versus a bot," Hartz told me in an email.

Additionally, Hartz thinks consumers will gravitate toward attaching their true identities to ticket purchases when they think they can benefit from it. One way is the native interaction that comes with social networks: ticket buying decisions could be driven by socially-generated recommendations and suggestions.

For Eventbrite, Facebook is already a huge traffic driver. Attaching identity to ticket purchases (not something Eventbrite currently does) on major venues and shows within the social media platform is the next logical step and could be the difference between you or a scalper getting those coveted front-row Katy Perry tickets.

Ticketmaster is not ignoring Facebook, far from it. It already has a Facebook app that not only offers event recommendations based on Likes, but also lets you buy tickets. Of course the app works just like the rest of Ticketmaster, and even though it knows who you are on Facebook, Ticketmaster still asks you to complete a CAPTCHA test when you want to buy a ticket. Not quite identity based, yet.

There is some good news on that front, though. Ticketmaster recently announced a plan to phase out its current CAPTCHA program in favor of a solution from partner Solve Media. Instead of hard-to-read nonsense text, ticket buyers will see "phrases, questions or ads." Ari Jacoby, CEO of Solve Media, said in a press release, that
"Consumers can solve these new CAPTCHAs in a "half the time it takes to decipher the outmoded squiggly number and letter CAPTCHAs."

Ticketmaster is also working on a mobile push notification identity proof system.

Aldo the Apache would be a great advocate of regulating Ticketmaster, image courtesy of gavinpatricksmith.blogspot.com

More to Do
 
Hartz, however, contends that traditional ticketing system’s lack of innovation extends beyond identity and anti-sniping measures. The industry is hobbled, he said by old and expensive proprietary equipment. Startups like Eventbrite can, with an iPad, its onboard camera and an iOS app, create box offices virtually on the fly.

Similarly, Eventbrite can scale up to large event management without the need for expensive hardware and software. For server power it can turn to cloud based solutions renting only the servers it needs. That agility allows Eventbrite to, Hartz maintains, expand into areas traditional competitors simply aren’t equipped to be in (international, smaller and more vertical events).

Ultimately, this is Eventbrite’s go-forward strategy, “Innovation, great technology and great service. That’s the winning combination to disrupt traditional dinosaurs in every space.”

Is it enough to truly challenge the likes of Ticketmaster? It's too early to say, though we'd probably all like to buy tickets to that fight.

Confessions of a Ticket Scalper, Thieves or Equalizers?

How many big shows have you been to whether it be sports, music or any form of entertainment and you see the usual cadre of hustlers working the corners around the venue? Do you think they have a right to make a profit on tickets or does it get you more pissed off about their tactics? Hell, does StubHub have a positive or negative effect on ticket sales or does it become an equalizer and a value added service?

Personally after working at independent music venues for numerous years, these folks drove us nuts with their strong arm tactics and inevitably keeping tickets away from fans that truly wanted to get into the show. Granted the fans could have always paid them for the tickets, but many a time, they were also selling fake tickets. 

Sometimes I would ask a co-worker to play the role of a mark and go up and see how many tickets he could buy. Then knowing how many tickets the scalper had, we would then sell tickets to the fans that were waiting to get in and force the scalper to give up. This definitely took some wind out of their sales, but they never gave up as the street hustlers were being backed by someone with deeper pockets who could absorb the loss.

The article below is quite interesting as its a direct conversation with a scalper or basically a high end gambler. Here is some advice from a former club manager to deal with scalpers. If you really need to buy the ticket for the show from a scalper, wait til the doors open as the prices continue to go down and haggle the shit out of them.

Link to original article on Billboard.com

Ticket Scalper photo illustration from Billboard.com

As part of a Billboard special report on the state of the ticketing business, our touring expert Ray Waddell picked the brain of a ticket broker who's been in the game, as he says, "since it was invented." We chose to protext his identity so he'd speak freely. And he did.

So you've been active in the ticket brokering business?
You know how many airline miles guys like me have? I haven't paid for a plane ticket since they came out with frequent-flier miles for using the credit card.

What's it like out there in your business?
It's out of control these days. I've been in this game since it was invented. I made my money, and this business is on the downside for me now. One of these days [brokers] are going to piss off the wrong people in the prosecutor's office and they're going to go after them criminally and make it stick. When the shit hits the fan, I want to be able to go to sleep at night.

What do you mean by "out of control"?
The bots. I met a guy who told me he had 600 modems in his piece of crap strip mall store that generated so much heat the neighbor couldn't get their temperature right.


You're talking about the use of automated bots that hit the ticketing company at on-sale with thousands of requests for tickets. How did brokers used to operate, say, 25 years ago?
Those guys were no angels, but they had actual businesses. There were checks and balances. These guys [today] that sell to StubHub and these other sites are able to lock up the entire inventory on these screens, decide what they want and dump back the rest. Sometimes they hire some computer genius to do their dirty work: "Get me the tickets, I'll make the money, I'll take the risk and put them up on all these [secondary-market] boards." There's another type of guy that says, "I'm going to find me a guy in India to write this program."

There's plenty of guys in my business that are crazy, and doing this at levels where I really don't want to participate. It's not the moral end of it, but I know one day this will turn around. They didn't get the Wise Guys but they're going to get you. [He's referring to the Wise Guys case, where three brokers operating as Wise Guys were given probation last year in New Jersey District Court after being charged with wire fraud, among other charges, for using bots to procure approximately 1.5 million tickets for resale.]


Does paperless ticketing -- which requires the person who bought the ticket to enter the show with the credit card he or she used for purchase -- stop brokers?
It slows people down, definitely. But because these tickets are so valuable, a [broker] will say to his wife, "Let's go up to Jersey for Springsteen. I've got these idiot customers that paid $1,200 apiece. We'll walk in with them, then we'll leave. I'll take you to dinner." It's more trouble, it's more money, but to a certain extent it can't be stopped.

What about asking fans to join a fan club, sometimes for a fee, for a chance to buy tickets?
Fan clubs are old hat. To me that's just Live Nation's way to get some piece of something.

Aldo The Apache is ready to deal with Scalpers. Illustration by Gavin Smith

How much risk is involved in what you do?
I'll make money on Springsteen and then lose on some country act I thought was going to be hot. I throw those tickets in the garbage, but I still helped you, Live Nation. If I made $200,000-$300,000 in gross profit for a good summer, I could lose $100,000 by fucking up. That's the nature of the business-we're gamblers. We can't pick every horse right. And when we picked the wrong horses, the concert industry still got paid.


Why take a risk on tickets that aren't a sure sell?
A [ticket] source might say, "You can't just cherry-pick me and take all the Springsteen. You got to buy some of these other crap shows." So I'll say, "OK, send me the crap shows. I'll get rid of them." But the hot shows don't always mean we make money. When Bon Jovi's charging $175, he takes the money out of the business. The fan doesn't have money to go to the next show, and I don't make any money. What can I get-$210? I end up making $20, where I used to make $60, $70, and out of that I'd lose $20-$30 because you don't pick all winners. It's very difficult to pick the winners and the losers, and you don't make as much on the winners these days. I can't take the marginal shots anymore.


Historically, where did brokers get tickets?
People at the record store, the box office, the promoter's office, the low-paid people. There must be somewhere where there's legit people in those jobs, but why would they be? They don't get paid a lot, and it's there for the taking. If you don't take it, somebody else will.

What's your take on speculative selling, where brokers sell tickets they don't physically have in hand?
It's definitely gotten out of hand. It hurts the guy who actually owns the inventory, but it's just like shorting on the stock market -- as long as they cover, who really cares? You can look at a Broadway show for next week: There's so many guys selling inventory they don't have for a hot show, there could be more seats available than the theater even has. But it's the computers that are out of control.

What do you think when you see $100 tickets going for thousands of dollars on the secondary market?
For the life of me I can't understand how StubHub has gotten away with this. There used to be self-policing in our business. Even if there was a show where stuff was ridiculously priced, you never had those prices where people could see it -- you'd just quote it to the right guy. You always know somebody that is willing to pay.