Going, Going, Gone To The Concert

from the ticket-auctions dept

Last month Ticketmaster announced their plans to auction off tickets to their concerts, to cut down on the secondary market that seems to develop around popular tickets - making a ton of money for scalpers, but not a penny for Ticketmaster. They've started to experiment with the auction format, and found that, in the first attempt, ticket prices didn't go nearly as high as they expected - and, in fact, may have been lower than they would have set as a flat price. Still, they discovered that 10% of those tickets still made it to the secondary market, where they were priced nearly double the price they went for in the initial auction. Does this mean there's a 100% markup for being lazy and not buying tickets when they first go on sale? Also interesting is to listen to the spin on the auctions, where Ticketmaster plays down the "richest fans get the best seats" complaints, and points out that this means that poorer fans can get the crappy seats - at cheaper rates than than those seats would have sold at flat-rate prices. How generous of them to sell the crappy seats that otherwise would have remained empty.

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