UK Competition and Markets Authority Launches Investigation Into Ticketmaster (variety.com) 36
The U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has formally opened an investigation into Ticketmaster's compliance with consumer protection law in relation to the sale of Oasis concert tickets. From a report: The CMA said on Thursday that it is investigating whether "Ticketmaster has engaged in unfair commercial practices which are prohibited under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008"; "People were given clear and timely information to explain that the tickets could be subject to so-called 'dynamic pricing' with prices changing depending on demand, and how this would operate, including the price they would pay for any tickets purchased"; and if "People were put under pressure to buy tickets within a short period of time -- at a higher price than they understood they would have to pay, potentially impacting their purchasing decisions." The CMA said that it will now engage with Ticketmaster and gather evidence to consider whether it thinks the company has broken consumer protection law.
price should be locked in when you enter the line (Score:5, Interesting)
price should be locked in when you enter the line and not be jacked up when you get to the front of the line
Re:price should be locked in when you enter the li (Score:5, Interesting)
It’s such a fucking scam. They set the price low, which encourages people to join the line for tickets, and then they use that apparent demand as an excuse to raise the prices. But it’s a one way ratchet (and racket). If they truly wanted to implement dynamic pricing, they’d tell everyone in the line what the current price was, and the wait time, and then there would be a feedback mechanism for people to say “I’m not waiting at that price / with that wait time” — demand would subside, and prices would then come down in response to that, and there’d be some kind of equilibrium. This is just ofld fashioned gougin
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Or . . . . prices should just be locked at face value period.
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'price should be locked in when you enter the line and not be jacked up when you get to the front of the line'
That's not how it works anywhere, when you get to the front, there may not be any tickets left, or sandwiches, steaks, coffee.
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Thing is the steak, sandwich and coffee are all pretty fungible. I can get a steak or coffee from several stores all with pretty similar characteristics.
Taking resellers our the equation I only have one place to buy tickets and they are entirely unfungible, that ticket is for one date for one artist at one venue. Seeing a different artist or a different venue or a different time is not really fungible in the same way.
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Erm, that’s exactly how it works. If you line up to buy a bagel at a store, the price you pay when you get to the front of the line won’t have tripled. Sure, the bagels may have run out, but the price won’t have changed. It’s only tickets where the prices are changed in this way.
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But no one is reselling the bagels. Without price surging, scalpers buy the max amount of tickets, wait until they are sold out, then relist them on sites like stubhub. So if you were not one of the luckily ones and you MUST see this show, you are going to be paying more for that ticket via scalper.
I'd rather get gouged by Ticketmaster then gouged and maybe completely scammed by a scalper. At least Ticketmaster is providing an authentic ticket every time.
Good thing no one MUST see a concert.
There are things
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TicketMaster themselves say they use dynamic pricing to maximise revenues. They say nothing about dissuading scalping. You’re absolutely kidding yourself if you think TicketMaster are doing this in the interests of consumers.
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So you make the tickets non-transferable; if the user can't produce the payment method and show it's in their name then the tickets are voided. Ticketmaster only accepts a relatively small number of payment options so this isn't a difficult task.
Ticketmaster isn't interested in making the botters and resellers' lives harder. They're only interested in maximising revenue by gouging their customers, whether "legitimate" or not. They pay lip service to banning bot accounts, but the simple truth is that they do
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Interesting and good points. None of that surprises me but I didn't know all that either. I guess the moniker Ticketbastards is well deserved! I know their fees for digital tickets are insane and they are definitely gouging people.
Seems like we would need an act of Congress (good luck) to fix this.
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The price should be locked in before the line even opens. Fixed price, advertised before hand.
MAFIA (Score:1)
Who needs Ticketmaster? (Score:1)
I'm not sure why Ticketmaster still exists in this day and age. It seems like some combination of the band, their management, their record company, the concert venue, or all of the above, could easily rent a cloud service and run a simple Dutch auction on every seat. This would simultaneously cut out all the leeches including Ticketmaster and 3rd party scalpers, with the actual stakeholders receiving what the people are willing to pay. By lowering the price slowly, they could also greatly cut down on websit
Re: Who needs Ticketmaster? (Score:2)
The bands need Ticketmaster, to have someone to blame as they gouge their own fans. Do you really think Taylor Swift or Oasis has no say in the pricing models?
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Their only option would be to not tour since TM has exclusive contracts with pretty much every large venue.
Re:Who needs Ticketmaster? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who do you think owns the Venues these days?
Live Nation owns or controls over 265 concert venues in North America, including more than 60 of the top 100 amphitheaters in the United States.
If you want to sell large venue tickets in America, you NEED TicketMaster.
Live Nation owns Ticketmaster and live nation runs (Score:2)
Live Nation owns Ticketmaster and live nation runs the venues
"...still exists in this day and age." (Score:2)
It didn't exist at all when I was young. The first time I ever heard of Ticketmaster, I thought it was a stupid idea - even without the scam aspect, it's obvious that adding a middleman adds cost that the customer ultimately pays. I've never bought tickets from Ticketmaster and never will (which explains a lot of why I stopped going to major events - it used to be possible to avoid their de facto monopoly, but not any more. Not in this day and age).
It turns out, you can fight city hall - but if you go u
Oh, say "Pounds", or "Euros" instead of Benjamins. (Score:2)
you used to be able to go to the box office and bu (Score:3)
you used to be able to go to the box office and buy direct with out any fees!
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So you want each venue, regardless of size, to roll out their own ticketing service? That's what happens if you ban ticketmaster from being the gatekeeper for all ticket sales.
One of the best things about Ticketmaster is that you know your tickets are legit and you can do everything through their website or app. I dislike the excessive fees they charge by being a monopoly, but let's face it, every venue under the sun having to roll out their own ticket selling solution won't work.
Also, what you describe is
They've been a monopolist for decades. (Score:3)
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How has this parasite company been teflon for so long?
Because about 50 years ago, politicians decided that companies were more important than people. So we're in the situation where they were allowed to grow more powerful than anyone could control.
dynamic process - or process problem? (Score:2)
The dynamic pricing is a problem, potentially. But having queued up for the tickets on ticketmaster myself I can tell you that the process was the worst bit.
It look me nearly 3 hours to hit the front of the queue to find out that there were only high priced tickets available. If I had known instantaneously I would have wasted no time with my decision not to purchase -- instead, I held out hope and was glued to my computer for hours.
When the queue started to go faster there was a notice from ticketmaster s
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I could get behind this idea. You jump in line and their is an active price at all times. You would know what you will pay as you approached your turn and if you didn't like the cost it got up to, you could bail.
I'm glad I only buy my tickets on presale. I may not get the best seats but I pay the lowest price every time and I get to see the shows I want to see.
Sound familiar? (Score:2)
Rick: Well obviously Summer it appears the lower tier of this society is being manipulated through sex and advanced technology by a hidden ruling class. Sound familiar?
Summer: [*gasp*] Ticketmaster.
a fact of life (Score:2)
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How does the "resale" site have tickets before the main site puts them up for sale? Yes I have seen this. The answer is, I think, that the "resale" site is nothing of the kind and it's just Ticketmaster in another guise. Ticketmaster "buys" a ticket for $100 (before anyone in line) and then gets to "resell" it for $1000. Does the artist get any part of the $900 difference?
I think what is really happening is that Ticketmaster is also skimming profits from the artists (although, I think it likely that the re
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They don't have the ticket yet. You know this because you don't immediately GET the ticket when you buy from them. You have to wait however long, etc.
When you buy your ticket from TM, it shows up in the app almost immediately after you purchase.
A friend of mine bought a ticket from stubhub before the presale even happened, but they ended up paying much more then I did for the exact same ticket that I got *drum roll* during presale. They eventually got their ticket but it was months after I got mine.
I recomm
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They don't have the ticket yet.
So how are they able to sell a ticket for a specific seat?
ticket master looks the other way on 3rd partys us (Score:2)
ticket master looks the other way on 3rd partys useing bots to buy and resell tickets as they get to change fees each time. So they can in theory get to take X3 fees per ticket.
They say the have stuff to stop bots but at the same time they have API's for bulk listing of tickets on the resale side.
Also buy rush has issues as well even when you block ticket transfers. But the system has found an new way to rip people with stuff like well if you pay $500-$1000 then you have the right to an saved ticket to buy
Why ticketmaster? (Score:2)
Why not wizzair? Ryanair? Booking.com? Pretty much all online sales channels use dynamic procing. What's up with that?
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Because the differences make the difference:
1. You don’t have to sit in a computer queue for four hours to buy a Ryanair ticket
2. If you want to fly from London to Barcelona, you have a choice of airlines
3. Prices will come down as well as go up
4. Airline ticket pricing doesn’t change dynamically from the time you start to book a ticket to the time you finish
Re: Why ticketmaster? (Score:2)
Re: #4. Actually, airlines can be worse than that. Hereâ(TM)s an example of ticket prices going up after agreeing the transaction price: https://www.theguardian.com/mo... [theguardian.com]
Re: Why ticketmaster? (Score:2)
2) you also have a choice of trash bands and music to listen to
3) never seen a plane ticket go down, always up
4) in fact I've had tickets go up even before I clicked on pay, sometimes I had whole flights dissappear on me alltogether and was forced to book 3-stop flights at 4 times the price. Once I was even asked to purchase a whole new ticket at the check in desk at 7 am because "no ticket number was issued".
5) on a few occassions I was offered to go to a "u2" "concert" instead of "oasis" since my "concert
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2) You have a choice of trash bands, but you don't have a choice of ticket agents. And it's the ticket agents who control this market
3) You've not looked hard enough. It happens all the time. For example, tickets typically go down in price between day 80 and day 70 before the flight. The whole point of actual dynamic pricing is to maximise revenue by balancing price vs volume
4) That sounds like a US thing -- even Ryanair wouldn't get away with pulling those stunts in the UK or EU markets
5) Sure, but you wer