https://wjla.com/news/local/dc-council-washington-fair-ticket-resale-act-ticket-scalpers-bots-online-fees-resellers-price-gouging-capital-one-arena-capitals-sports-concert-music-fans-markup-resale-consumer-protection-live-entertainment-imp-anthem-930-club

This is an interesting piece of legislation. I do think scalping of any products within a set time period of release or useability, not just tickets should be illegal above a specific amount over msrp. Just like the savannah bananas have done, you can resale but it can be a max of ticket face value or you risk getting your ticket cancelled. This lets you still offload your tickets for in demand events if your plans change while providing the greatest access to actual fans who want to attend or purchase a product for personal use. Checkout fees and the like need to be limited too. None of this % of sale price **** or hundreds of dollars just to literally email a ticket out after purchased. Fees need to be fact based when you have a monopoly on the initial sale and follow up resales of items and listed next to msrp on item page. No more hiding it until last step before clicking submit order.

Yada yada free market and all that crap, you can shove that argument up your backsides. We are in the age of scalper bots and ai bots immediately buying up inventory by running hundreds/thousands of simultaneous threads searching inventory by the second and merchants engaging in unfair trade by giving early or favorable access to inventory before the public just to drive up resale scalper prices for the fees mentioned before. Free trade doesn't work when there are legalized monopolies involved.

Edit: https://wjla.com/news/local/music-washington-dc-union-stage-presents-resale-admendment-act-ward-6-artists-tickets-sales-fraud-price-gouging-market-stubhub-vivivd-seats-ticketmaster-livenation-concert-consumers

New article from yesterday on this topic.

Season ticket holders will strongly disagree. Team owners will strongly disagree. 3rd Patry reseller businesses will strongly disagree. Ticket revenue comes from season ticket holders. DOA

FatZilla said:

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https://wjla.com/news/local/dc-council-washington-fair-ticket-resale-act-ticket-scalpers-bots-online-fees-resellers-price-gouging-capital-one-arena-capitals-sports-concert-music-fans-markup-resale-consumer-protection-live-entertainment-imp-anthem-930-club

This is an interesting piece of legislation. I do think scalping of any products within a set time period of release or useability, not just tickets should be illegal above a specific amount over msrp. Just like the savannah bananas have done, you can resale but it can be a max of ticket face value or you risk getting your ticket cancelled. This lets you still offload your tickets for in demand events if your plans change while providing the greatest access to actual fans who want to attend or purchase a product for personal use. Checkout fees and the like need to be limited too. None of this % of sale price **** or hundreds of dollars just to literally email a ticket out after purchased. Fees need to be fact based when you have a monopoly on the initial sale and follow up resales of items and listed next to msrp on item page. No more hiding it until last step before clicking submit order.

Yada yada free market and all that crap, you can shove that argument up your backsides. We are in the age of scalper bots and ai bots immediately buying up inventory by running hundreds/thousands of simultaneous threads searching inventory by the second and merchants engaging in unfair trade by giving early or favorable access to inventory before the public just to drive up resale scalper prices for the fees mentioned before. Free trade doesn't work when there are legalized monopolies involved.

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So focus on the legalized monopolies and the bots, don't restrict a free market even more.

I've always been amazed at people upset with ticket scalping. If OP thinks scalping is cheating the buyer, you should buy the best Aggie season tickets you can afford and try to make a profit on them. That includes the years we go 5-7 and the games we play against Sam Houston and Appellation State.

When a willing buyer and seller agree on a price, who gets hurt? That's called capitalism.

pfo said:

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I've always been amazed at people upset with ticket scalping. If OP thinks scalping is cheating the buyer, you should buy the best Aggie season tickets you can afford and try to make a profit on them. That includes the years we go 5-7 and the games we play against Sam Houston and Appellation State.

When a willing buyer and seller agree on a price, who gets hurt? That's called capitalism.

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There's more to it than that, and it goes beyond a buyer and seller agreeing on price. It's not buyers and sellers agreeing on a price, it's buyers and sellers agreeing on a price and scalpers forcing themselves in as a middleman.

A lot of (most at this point?) scalpers this is targeting will use bots or other means to buy up tickets before actual buyers can get them. Normal buyers simply cannot compete with tens to hundreds of thousands of bots making direct API calls or finding ways around virtual queues and authentications. It doesn't matter if you're hitting the "Buy Now" button exactly when online sales go live because tens of thousands of automated scalper calls have already been sent before your page has even loaded and beaten you to the punch.

And this isn't people buying the 8-10 tickets you're typically allowed by purchase limits and trying to turn them for a few hundred bucks. It's organized groups buying tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in tickets across hundreds to thousands of fake accounts to cause artificial scarcity and distort the market. That was a major issue with Taylor Swift tickets a couple of years ago where botting scalpers were circumventing purchase limits to buy out venues before actual concert goers had a chance to get them and then reselling them at vastly inflated prices because they controlled a limited market. Retailers and distributors who want to fairly price their product and distribute to customers end up having to spend a lot of extra money fighting these people to who try to get around their limits with the sole intention of flipping product.

You see this with collectibles as well, especially sneakers, Magic The Gathering, and Pokemon cards. The resale Pokemon market right now is astronomical because scalpers have entered the market and will collectively drop millions to buy out products as soon as they're released. Costco had to build an online queue system after botters used scripts to buy memberships and create fake accounts to hit their product drops. Initially they were seeking out in seconds from when product went live. Walmart has also implemented a (less effective) queue, and Pokemon's own website has had to add several layers of security to their online ordering.

The real problem is many of the scalpers get their tickets illegally, via bots online. They take advantage of weak security measures on the resale sites. Scalpers with bots are able to buy up hundreds of tickets at a time before a human is able to buy one. They also flood the website ips with traffic bogging them down to a crawl, but the bots can brute force their way through. This is why when you're at your computer or phone ready to buy tickets the second they drop for popular events, and you finally get though, they're all sold out.

It's also pretty cheap to do/setup and lots of people and groups do it. Need to spend $100-$500 on a solid bot, some can cost thousands, depending on their capabilities and how they get their access. Many of the most expensive ones were geared toward the shoe websites. Then go find some good proxys for $50 and set up accounts on the site you want to target. Really as simple as that.

However, If people obtain their tickets legally, can't really complain at what price they list them for. The market should decide that.

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Just like the savannah bananas have done,

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So they managed to do it without government intrusion? Impossible!

pfo said:

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When a willing buyer and seller agree on a price, who gets hurt? That's called capitalism.

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You ask who is hurt here? The injured party is the thousands upon thousands of everyday consumers who want to purchase the product for retail that never get a chance to because scalpers are allowed to exist and their incentives to scalp are not stopped.

I'll never understand why people are fine paying huge 10x-15x markups on products when you could have purchased that same at retail pricing if scalpers were no longer incentivised to gobble up every bit of inventory.

You know what they say about fools and their money...

1) Ticketmaster has set the market in such a way that they make $$$ on the original purchase, the resale listing of the ticket, and the secondary purchase. They have no incentive to limit bots because financially they come out ahead. They also artificially bar the resale market because they essentially set the price in order to make higher fees. For many shows, you just can't sell the ticket at $20 to get rid of it.

2) There are some resale sites (StubHub in particular) that I'm pretty sure is selling fake tickets at overinflated prices. When you get your tickets delivered sometimes during the beginning of the start of the concert, they aren't what you purchased. You can't do anything about it because you've already invested money to get to the concert venue. Once the tickets are scanned in, their T&C say they won't adjust prices even if you paid $1,000 for nosebleeds. They charge more for "guaranteed" ticket delivery before the show.

The Savannah Bananas have been able to control it because they own their own ticket processing system. This is not possible for most entertainment options because LiveNation owns both the venue, TicketMaster, and in many cases are the producer of the tour. Every level is built in to extract more money from the consumer without necessarily providing a product in return.

pfo said:

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Appellation State.

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Siri is drunk again.

If the retailer fails to set their prices at market value to maximize revenue, why shouldn't the free market be allowed to balance supply and demand by adjusting pricing?

BlackGold said:

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The real problem is many of the scalpers get their tickets illegally, via bots online. They take advantage of weak security measures on the resale sites. Scalpers with bots are able to buy up hundreds of tickets at a time before a human is able to buy one. They also flood the website ips with traffic bogging them down to a crawl, but the bots can brute force their way through. This is why when you're at your computer or phone ready to buy tickets the second they drop for popular events, and you finally get though, they're all sold out.

It's also pretty cheap to do/setup and lots of people and groups do it. Need to spend $100-$500 on a solid bot, some can cost thousands, depending on their capabilities and how they get their access. Many of the most expensive ones were geared toward the shoe websites. Then go find some good proxys for $50 and set up accounts on the site you want to target. Really as simple as that.

However, If people obtain their tickets legally, can't really complain at what price they list them for. The market should decide that.

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well i'm sure more government regulation is the solution then

Basically it's a battle between consumers and a monopoly and organized crime.

I think one of the few good government intrusions into the market is trust busting. Good old fashioned breakup of monopoly. The better approach is to make sure you don't have the government creating the situation for monopoly. But I think the market moves faster than the government and the result is sometimes you have to weild a hammer.

pfo said:

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That includes the years we go 5-7 and the games we play against Sam Houston and Appellation State.

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I was lucky enough to be purchasing my season tickets and choosing seats during Fran's last year. I had my pick of just about any section I wanted.

Couldn't repeat that today.

This should all be handled by the issuers of the tickets. Any necessary policies or procedures or safeguards areup to them. Not the government.

Yes, trust busting can be valid use of government, but is wouldn't seem to be one of those cases

For those that didn't click the article, looks like this is just the DC…city council!

The surest way to end the scalpers is for people to stop paying ridiculous prices for the scalpers inventory.

France doesn't let you scalp tickets. Didn't seem to destroy the sports or entertainment market there.

I don't think resale is a big deal, but I do think the primary seller should get to decide if resale is allowed or not.

chris1515 said:

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For those that didn't click the article, looks like this is just the DC…city council!

The surest way to end the scalpers is for people to stop paying ridiculous prices for the scalpers inventory.

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Agreed. But I would argue that tickets are not priced correctly to begin with if an entire industry has sprung up to profit off scalping. The scalpers seem to know much better what people are willing to pay. I get that their actions cause scarcity which naturally raises the price, but it seems like their margin would be way tighter if venues charged considerably more than they do when tickets go on sale. Couldn't they lower prices as the concert date came closer if they still had a lot of unsold tickets?

It is not the face value that worries me, it is the added fees!

It's not fair crybabies...

Resellers provide a valuable service. The reason you can get tickets to a big event on a couple days or even hours notice is because they offer market pricing.

If there is an issue, it's with performers listing tickets below market prices to show how egalitarian they are while secretly taking a cut of the resell market.

"Fair" is a child's word.

lb3 said:

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Resellers provide a valuable service. The reason you can get tickets to a big event on a couple days or even hours notice is because they offer market pricing.

If there is an issue, it's with performers listing tickets below market prices to show how egalitarian they are while secretly taking a cut of the resell market.

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I've always suspected this. Performers don't want to alienate their biggest fans by charging what seems to be too much, but what is really fair market value.

If this starts affecting ski lift tickets, then I'll be concerned.

I am all for free market and allowing buyers and sellers to set a price but the ticket industry is not a traditional market. The guys hanging around the stadium scalping aren't the issue. Monopolies exist in the form of Ticketmaster/Stubhub and then scalpers further manipulate the market with technology specifically designed to skirt the "rules" that try to limit scalping. The Stubhuds and Ticketmasters don't care about scalping and likely love it given these massive fees they get on the resale.

The market is simply not healthy and is massively manipulated.

pfo said:

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I've always been amazed at people upset with ticket scalping. If OP thinks scalping is cheating the buyer, you should buy the best Aggie season tickets you can afford and try to make a profit on them. That includes the years we go 5-7 and the games we play against Sam Houston and Appellation State.

When a willing buyer and seller agree on a price, who gets hurt? That's called capitalism.

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In some cases that's true. But there are some products that there so overrun by scalpers that it creates artificial scarcity and drives up prices for no good reason.

Case in point: My kid collects pokemon cards. They cost $6 per pack for retail. But grown ass men will wait in lines overnight and raid shipments for the sole purpose of turning them over for $15 per pack. And it becomes so hard to even find them at retail that kids often have no choice.

Even if egalitarianism is a bad thing (debateable), it's not the only reason for offering tickets below market value. There are legitimate business reasons for wanting to do so as well. TV shows have done this for generations in their studio audiences. Others may be more interested in developing a fan base through live interaction to create more demand for other products.

Jeeper79 said:

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pfo said:

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I've always been amazed at people upset with ticket scalping. If OP thinks scalping is cheating the buyer, you should buy the best Aggie season tickets you can afford and try to make a profit on them. That includes the years we go 5-7 and the games we play against Sam Houston and Appellation State.

When a willing buyer and seller agree on a price, who gets hurt? That's called capitalism.

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In some cases that's true. But there are some products that there so overrun by scalpers that it creates artificial scarcity and drives up prices for no good reason.

Case in point: My kid collects pokemon cards. They cost $6 per pack for retail. But grown ass men will wait in lines overnight and raid shipments for the sole purpose of turning them over for $15 per pack. And it becomes so hard to even find them at retail that kids often have no choice.

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Costco had so many fist fights by these scalpers they had to institute new country wide policies and spend likely an enormous amount of money to quickly hotfix sales terminal & website code to put daily purchasing limits on the Pokmon cards per membership. Its absolutely ridiculous.

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I do think scalping of any products within a set time period of release or useability, not just tickets should be illegal above a specific amount over msrp.

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Why? Supply and Demand should still win the day.

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Yada yada free market and all that crap, you can shove that argument up your backsides. We are in the age of scalper bots and ai bots immediately buying up inventory by running hundreds/thousands of simultaneous threads searching inventory by the second and merchants engaging in unfair trade

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So fix the issue at the Point of Sale. Fix the bot issue, set quantity limits, etc. If the free market is being manipulated, fix that.

Fix the problem, not the symptom.

Just because 'normal people' want it, doesnt justify punishing 'normal' people reselling tickets. I might not be able to afford a Ferrari, but that doesnt mean we should punish the dealership.

MouthBQ98 said:

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If this starts affecting ski lift tickets, then I'll be concerned.

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That market is jacked up by dynamic pricing so bad now that the only way to make it affordable is to buy a season pass if you plan on more than 5 days skiing in a season.

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The proposal would ban ticket-buying bots and fake websites, require clear disclosure of all service fees, and cap resale prices at 10% above face value.

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It is one thing to reign in bots or scams, but the bolded? Straight up commie BS. There is a reason this being pushed by the Leftist DC city council!

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Yada yada free market and all that crap, you can shove that argument up your backsides

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Who said it?

Decay said:

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Basically it's a battle between consumers and a monopoly and organized crime.

I think one of the few good government intrusions into the market is trust busting. Good old fashioned breakup of monopoly.* The better approach is to make sure you don't have the government creating the situation for monopoly.** But I think the market moves faster than the government and the result is sometimes you have to weild a hammer.

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* except for schools and other government authorized monopolies
** like schools

Also, the more things like this happen (add voting to the list too), the more I think we should just go back to the old days.

You lined up early, you sat in the elements and you got a paper ticket. Just like ticket pull used to be for Aggie football games.

There are too many tickets in Kyle and Blue Bell Park that are held by ticket brokers.

I have tickets in 125 in Kyle, Seats to my left are sold every game. My son usually sits in those section. Also have two seats this year in FB 11. Seats to my left and in front of me are sold for every game.


A number of seats in section 102 in BBP are held by brokers. Can see them for sale in the ticket exchange

These folks have a lot of PP.

Please tell me, oh great overlord, what price I may ask for my personal property…