[mattgreenrocks]

I've seen Muse at least 25 times and have paid face value for tickets when buying them direct through TM for almost all of those times. I saw them first in 2006 for about $25-$35 at Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC for the Black Holes tour. Since then, they've become more and more popular, causing ticket prices to go up. Totally fair. With their 2023 Will of the People tour, dynamic pricing essentially sets the floor of ticket prices much, much higher. I'm seeing 200-level seats starting at $150 per ticket at some venues. Apparently that was the point where I'm fine with just completely missing the tour. I suppose the system works in that regard.

The specific implementation of it is also not great. TM has you wait in a queue to select seats; the position in which is randomly assigned. This is to protect the servers from the thundering herd. (Lousy but fair.) When you finally make it in, you need to choose your seats and book as fast as possible, because dynamic pricing can cause the seats you selected to move up in price while you are selecting them, and the implementation doesn't let you OK it and move on, you have to essentially hope you choose and confirm before the price you locked in goes up. If you don't, it says, "sorry, the prices have gone up since you started, please choose new seats." This is both a super crappy UX and it ensures that they milk every last cent from people, as you can't lock in a price by moving quickly.

The thing is, I'm not sure if the dynamic pricing floor ever gets dropped. Are they fine with not selling out venues because the people get priced out? Or do we wait on the secondary market to try to push prices back as demand recedes?

The previous system sucked quite a bit with scalpers. However, the new system seems like it brings a whole new set of problems with it and it has made me question whether I even like going to concerts at all. Maybe I just don't care much anymore and this is a bridge too far. I don't know.

[bombcar]

The "fair" method would be to reliably slice tickets into ticket classes (location, etc) and then let people select the tickets from the slice they want, and then basically do a reverse auction and set all the prices for that slice to whatever would sell them out exactly.

However, this leaves money on the table (if there are five seats, and ten people, and the fifth highest amount paid would be $10, then they get $50, even if one person would pay $500 for a ticket).