In effect now the black market is the primary market. However much we may say that Ticketmaster or Greedy Artist X has few scruples and no shame, rest assured the bot-powered scalpers have far, far fewer than that.
I wonder if a an artist of TS magnitude could force physical tickets sales only.
Realistically, if you’re in control of your own management you can set any conditions you please. However, sadly, LiveNation is one of the biggest promoters of concerts, too. Someone with her level of public attention could probably get around that. Most others have to fight against that juggernaut.
It wouldn’t be easy. Almost all venues have a contract with a particular ticket vendor, and require all (initial) sales to be through that vendor. Ticketmaster has the contract for most of the big venues a star like Swift would want to book.
Ticketmaster could still sell the tickets but they would have to do it onsite with physical tickets.
Ehh, when I worked for them, they did do that. I worked the ticket booth several times*. The ticket printers they had were really nifty dot-matrix printers. I still see people working the ticket booths at pretty much any event (you have to work the modern equivalent of will call, I imagine). At places like AAC, I don’t know if they’re Ticketmaster employees or not, at the smaller venues I usually know they’re employees of the venue.
*The perk of doing that was that you got to go see the show as standing room after the ticket lines went down to nothing (or sometimes, you just simply sold out).
A friend of mine is a cop. He and three coworkers (cops) drove to New York to see college basketball at Madison Square Garden. It was a sellout, but there were scalpers selling tickets.
They decided how much they’d be willing to spend, then one of them approached a scalper and thus began negotiations. He came back to his buddies triumphant, with 4 tickets and a few dollars left over.
When they went to enter the arena their tickets were scanned and found to be counterfeit. It was a long, quiet drive home for the four rubes who visited the big city.
This trend was clearly happening before 2020, though.
When it first existed, if memory serves, it provided the service of not having to go some place and physically purchase a ticket, or call a place up on the phone during operating hours, hope someone was monitoring the phone, and hope they were willing to sell over the phone-- not every place was.
With Ticketmaster, all you needed to buy a ticket was a credit card, and a touch-tone phone. It was even possible to use a rotary phone, although I think in that case, there were limited hours. But if you had a touch-tone, you could buy a ticket at 12:30am on Sunday. You may have even been able to use Telecheck, although, you probably had to talk to a live person then, too, and they waited for the check to clear before they sent out a ticket.
Before Ticketmaster, my experiences of buying a ticket for a remote location were one of two things: you called up and asked to be sent a form; you received it in 4-8 days, filled out the form and mailed in back with a check, and a self-addressed, stamped envelope; you waited six to eight weeks for your tickets-- if you had submitted a credit card number with the form, instead of a check, it might be three weeks. So plan ahead.
A few places did credit card transactions over the phone, but charged a fee for doing so.
You could also try calling the venue, and inquiring if there was a local seller. Then you called the seller to make sure they had not physically run out of tickets, and what they accepted in exchange-- since the tickets were a consignment item, sometimes they accepted only cash. Then you went there and bought your ticket. The seats available at these places weren’t always the best.
However, that kind of makes them the gold standard of carburetors in the days of fuel injection.
“Dynamic pricing” (where the price of tickets moves up or down depending on demand) gets a bad reputation - I don’t particularly like it myself - but it’s about the only tool possible to ensure original tickets can remain available as long as possible for heavy-demand events. I mean, if that’s the only date you can get there, it sucks if dynamic pricing makes those tickets soar above what you can afford, but if the tickets were cheaper odds are you wouldn’t be able to get them anyway unless you got lucky.
That said, what tactics like dynamic pricing or special presale codes don’t take into account is the secondary market/scalpers/resellers. That’s where the real shenanigans kick in. You see, Ticketmaster has no incentive to try to stop resellers; in fact, the opposite is true - resales through Ticketmaster mean additional fees charged to both the buyer and the seller. For every ticket re-sold, Ticketmaster makes basically free profit from it, so it’s to their benefit to encourage resellers. So … sell tickets at a high face value, knowing the demand actually makes that face value something of a bargain, while not being all that concerned if bots or scalpers scoop up many of those tickets. When those tickets hit the resale market at a higher price - and they will - Ticketmaster makes more money on that sale.
It may not be a monopoly, but it’s darn close to an effective monopoly, certainly for name acts. Live Nation got started as an alternative to Ticketmaster’s policies and high fees (seems like that was around the time of Pearl Jam’s revolt against TM), but you know who owns Live Nation now?
Ticketmaster.
That’s my recollection too. They definitely served a purpose once upon a time. If you lived in a small town like I did and wanted to go see a big show in a place you had to travel to, that could be a chore.
Now, of course, the smallest of businesses will sell you stuff through your phone.
I doubt it. They seem to have more to do with the sellers’ willingness to gouge.
IMHO, the issue is mostly about the modern ubiquity of video. Entertainers have always needed a broader fan base than just the wealthy and their kids in order to reach successful-pop-star level.
But it used to be that you had to be able to offer at least the possibility of some kind of in-person experience to a significant chunk of your fan base if you wanted to keep them interested in you and buying your records. Nowadays, fans “see” you incessantly and on-demand via music videos, concert recordings, and so forth. The visual connection between performer and audience is primarily digital.
So performers and venues now have the opportunity to turn the actual in-person experience into a luxury good, at prices only the wealthy can afford. They don’t have to make tickets crazy expensive, but now they can get away with it because their non-wealthy fan bases are already so heavily invested in them through social-media connections and digital performances.
It’s not that the presence of more “very wealthy professionals” is somehow forcing them to charge higher prices for tickets. It’s that live concerts can now be reimagined as exclusive events for the comparatively wealthy without destroying the connections between performers and non-wealthy fans.
That’s probably at least part of it. In the 70’s and 80’s, the golden age of stadium rock concerts, the concert tour was to support record sales. Now it’s the other way around, the sake of the music supports the concert tour.
Still have ticket stubs for Led Zeppelin in 1973, as well as for Yes and many other groups. Ticket prices ranged from $5.00 to $8.00, with a $0.50 to $1.00 charge if you bought them at a record store or any outlet not located at the venue. We would take the subway to the venue to make sure we got decent seats and save a dollar or so.
If you consider $7.00 to be an average total price for a ticket, that would be about $47.00 today. Seeing just about ANY act that’s on tour is going to cost me at least three times that amount if I go through TM. Three tickets to my local theater company’s production of “A Christmas Carol” this year just cost me $380. (In fairness, it’s very, very good.)
I would love too see some of the classic bands and performers once again before they all die, but it’s just not possible for me as even an upper-middle-class retiree.
But that doesn’t disagree with Sam at all. Gouging doesn’t work unless people want to pay, and we aren’t talking about genuine gouging here where people are buying things out of literal physical necessity, like fresh water in a disaster zone,
It’s not like promoters are greedy now but weren’t greedy in 1973 when @ZonexandScout paid eight bucks to see one of the most popular bands in the history of music. They were super greedy then. If people would have been willing to pay $50 a ticket they would absolutely have charged it.
So - and you’ve provided some very believable hypotheses as to what - Sam’s right. You are both right. It’s a change in demand.
So we have a number of interesting factors here answering my question:
- Social media and media spread helps to promote concerts to people who would previously not have easily known about them
- The music landscape, especially the internet, has changed the nature of where the industry can get paid
- Ticketmaster is increasing the cost of tickets
- It’s now easier to scalp tickets, thus even further narrowing the ticket oligopoly
I’m not saying that there aren’t a lot of fans sufficiently wealthy and willing to pay ticket prices that are out of reach for the non-wealthy. I’m saying that there have always been a lot of such fans, but ticket sellers didn’t used to set prices to cater exclusively to them.
The primary reason that concert tickets are now too expensive for the bulk of “working class people”, AFAICT, is not that there are suddenly a lot more wealthy people than there used to be or that those wealthy people suddenly got a lot more willing to buy expensive tickets, as Sam was suggesting.
Rather, it’s that concert promoters have realized that star performers no longer need to make in-person concert performances accessible to large numbers of non-wealthy fans in order to keep the support of those fans. Mostly, as I said, because there’s now so much access to so much performance footage that’s not in-person.
I think a bigger factor is that before the Internet, streaming, and p2p file sharing, musicians used to make a bulk of their income from recording. Now recording sales income is basically zero. So if they’ve going to make money they have to maximize revenue from live appearances.
In the 1950s through 1990s, the formula was simple: The record companies send Group X to perform in Kansas City and then record sales in Kansas City increased significantly. Sometimes the concert would be very profitable by itself, but often they were not. The groups usually hated doing them, but they understood that performing live was the best way to boost (physical) record sales, where they made money and obtained the leverage to make more records. If you take a look at how much the groups got paid for performing live, you can see how little they actually took home. Touring was expensive. And the people who could have afforded higher ticket prices (age cohorts 30 and up) were more likely to spend their money on tickets to Broadway shows or going to Vegas to see the Rat Pack, Wayne Newton, or Connie Francis.
Compare (and contrast) the 1970s to today. Streaming income is hardly worth keeping track of for most performers. But the age groups interested in and capable of spending money on live concerts now stretch way beyond what they did in the 1970s. Many more people with REAL money want to see the groups live.
Finally, as a teen in the 1960s, it was a point of pride to have the latest Steppenwolf album. People would actually come to your house to listen to it. You rarely lent the albums you paid your entire week’s allowance for at the local record store. The pride and status of having the latest The Who album has been completely replaced by seeing the remaining members wheeze around on stage live at the local hockey stadium.
Forgot to put in my main point: What’s made TM and outrageous ticket prices/policies possible is actually the streaming music system, not newly-discovered greed.
He-he. My wife just read my last two posts and pointed something out that should have been obvious to me:
There has been a complete reversal. In the 60s, my parents wanted to go see Broadway plays and elaborate stage shows in Vegas. 16 YO me wanted to see Led Zep playing live…raw.
Nowadays, teens want to see elaborate stage shows and singers performing to backing tracks while dancing around a stage. I’m 70 YO and I want to see Cheap Trick playing live…raw.