TICKETMASTER: SOLD OUT DOESN’T NECESSARILY MEAN SOLD OUT.At this Saturday’s Bruno Mars concert at the Scotiabank Arena, eight lucky fans will have a close-up view of the show from the second row of section 118 — seats they landed for $546 apiece.
Sixteen seats away, in the same row, will be another Bruno Mars fan who paid only $191 for a nearly identical view of the show — an eight-metre gap that comes with a $350 discount.
A seven-month
Toronto Star/CBC analysis of box office sales for the show, part of Mars’s 24K Magic world tour, reveals the hidden tricks of the ticketing trade that allow manipulation of seat prices, create the appearance of scarcity and maximize revenues.
Sold out doesn’t necessarily mean sold out.
Ticketmaster didn’t disclose how many seats were put on sale when the box office opened at noon on Feb. The investigation, which analyzed the box office seven times in the first hour of sales, found fewer than half of the seats in the arena for sale. These seats are known as "hold-backs" and effectively throttle the supply of tickets in the opening moments when demand is highest.
It’s the digital equivalent of security staff keeping a long line of partygoers outside a nightclub to create the illusion of popularity and mask the reality that there’s plenty of room inside. "They have complete rows but they don’t put them up all at once," he said. "If only sees a few pairs for sale, they’re going to jump on them". Hold-backs don’t just occur in the opening hours.
Months after the box office opened, more blocks of tickets were released for the Bruno Mars show. 7, another 144 tickets were released. "They’re artificially driving the price up. " He said
Ticketmaster is making it impossible for consumers to make informed choices about their ticket purchases.
"I think government ought to be looking into it".
Ticketmaster refused multiple requests for an interview to respond to the investigation’s findings. Instead, spokesperson Catherine Martin provided an emailed statement. " We do not own the tickets sold on our platform nor do we have any control over ticket pricing," she wrote.
Bruno Mars did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, which owns the Scotiabank Arena, referred comment to the concert’s promoters. The 24K Magic tour is promoted by Live Nation, which owns
Ticketmaster . Ticket prices for Mars’s show were a moving target.
The investigation found 152 seats had a face price that changed without notice, some by hundreds of dollars. For example, six seats in section 118 went on sale for $799 each. Ninety minutes later, their price jumped to $895. They were bought, and one was posted for resale at $1,400.
Changing the face price of a ticket is a technique the ticket industry calls "dynamic pricing." It’s been compared to the variable prices of a plane ticket or hotel room. Unlike airlines and hotels, however, there’s a very limited number of Bruno Mars concerts, so a customer can’t simply opt for a cheaper show. A pop-up window on
Ticketmaster .com informs buyers that "Platinum Tickets are tickets that are dynamically priced up and down based on demand." But the investigation found the face price changed on far more standard tickets than on platinum seats . While it can drive prices up, dynamic pricing can also result in cheaper tickets.
The price jumped to $895 a little more than an hour later. Two were bought the next day, but the other pair sat unsold for four months. "When a show is really popular, works," said ticket broker DiGiusto. "But when it doesn’t sell out, the prices come back down again".
The Star/CBC analysis found that fees on resale tickets stood to nearly double
Ticketmaster ’s revenues for the show. In recent years,
Ticketmaster has moved into the lucrative scalping market, allowing people to re-post tickets for sale through its website. These "verified resale" tickets appear as pink dots alongside the blue dots marking box office tickets on
Ticketmaster ’s map of the arena.
Ticketmaster collects a second fee on every pink seat sold.
For example,
Ticketmaster collected a $25.75 fee on a $209.50 ticket sold through the box office. When the buyer posted the ticket for resale at $400, the company stood to collect an another $76 fee on the same ticket. This practice of "double dipping" on commissions "is just plain wrong," said Richard Powers, an associate professor and sports marketing specialist at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business.
"They know that the vast majority of these tickets will end up for resale on the secondary market, where they will likely collect a second commission. That is misleading and unethical," Powers said. As enticement to prospective ticket buyers,
Ticketmaster promoted seats for the Bruno Mars show priced as low as $56. While the analysis likely missed some of those cheap seats, it’s safe to say they still made up less than 1 per cent of the tickets to the show. Even with decades of experience, DiGiusto says it has become much more difficult for anyone to procure good seats for shows.
The average concert-goer needs to jump through hoops in order to obtain tickets on the primary market. If it’s not bad enough that bots buy up all the tickets in first two minutes of pre-sale, the ticket price surely increases double or triple that of the original price point, on the secondary market.
So, how can we, as buyers, stand up to the likes of Ticketmaster and their minions? Search for secure, anti-counterfeiting, transparent ticketing companies.
Companies who use blockchain technology to sell event tickets maintain these ethics:
- Transparency
- Security
- Promotion of decentralized transactions
- Defence against scalpers and counterfeit assets
- Value for services
In its most simplistic terms, blockchain ticketing is a system where no single system holds power; the power is decentralized and distributed among multiple processing systems. If there is any transaction happening on the Blockchain, multiple systems need to validate/verify the transaction for it to be approved. No minions allowed.
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