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by ID1452319 1308 days ago
The reason resellers exist is because people are prepared to pay many multiples of the face value for tickets. If people stopped buying tickets on the secondary market, the resellers would be left with worthless paper they paid thousands of dollars for and the secondary market would disappear.
3 comments
mikewebkist 1308 days ago
If artists and venues used market clearing prices there would also be much less demand for a secondary market. The "problem" Ticketmaster solves is that for someone like Taylor Swift the supply of tickets is VASTLY lower than the demand for tickets. But Taylor, reasonably, doesn't want to be seen selling tickets for thousands of dollars each. Instead you get presales and lotteries and "ticketmaster fees" and a secondary market.
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randomdata 1308 days ago
> The reason resellers exist is because people are prepared to pay many multiples of the face value for tickets.

And below that, artists sell their tickets at wholesale prices to ensure that they are sold, providing some guarantees about how much money will be made for a given performance. They have better things to do than waste their time trying to eke out every last possible penny, along with the risks associated with that. It's best to let someone else put in that work, and that's where resellers enter the picture. The same reason why you find a wholesale/retail divide in pretty much every industry.

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skeeter2020 1308 days ago
TM is actively dismantling the secondary ticket market by (a) being a secondary market themselves, (b) pushing paperless tickets so they are very hard to transfer, (c) surge pricing to capture the margin the secondary market needs.

There's both pros and cons to this outcome, but I don't believe havig TM as the single owner of the entire live event industry is on the whole, a good one.

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hnburnsy 1308 days ago
You are correct but you are missing that TM is doing this in collaboration with the promoters and artists, which of course means sharing the profits with them too.Example, The Black Keyes told TM to invalidate secondary market tickets to one of its.shows.

https://variety.com/2019/music/news/black-keys-hundreds-turn...

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