6/52 — The Ticket Scam Problem
What do Adele, Beyonce, Justin Bieber, & Coldplay all have in common? They are going on huge world tours this year.
What else do they have in common? Their shows in Amsterdam, and probably other places around the world, sold out very quickly. Some even in minutes.
This morning I tried to get Beyoncé tickets. I went to Ticketmaster at 9:30AM and I was greeted with this friendly waiting page:
I think that this waiting page is executed very well. It informs the user the wait time, shows and updates the wait progress often, gives information on what to do and what not to do, and incorporates a playful pun since they know that this whole process is stressful.
At 10:00, when tickets went on sale, the page reloaded and I was presented with this message.
Between 9:30 and 10:00, the progress bar changed and you can see that my wait time decreased from more than 60 minutes to somewhere between 30–60 minutes. Okay cool.
Then, around 10:20, the page reloads again and I get this message.
Boom! Tickets were gone. REALLY?! At this point I was so frustrated. This has happened one too many times. Everyone has had an experience very similar to this. I told my coworkers and one of them told me that he is flying to Berlin to see Muse in June because it sold out so quickly in Amsterdam. So I started thinking, why hasn’t anyone done anything about this yet??
High demand concert and sporting event tickets are sold out within minutes and then appear on second hand ticket sites like StubHub and Ticketmaster owned SeatWave for usually more than double the price. Vendors can acquire large numbers of tickets quickly by using multiple IP addresses and special software called ticket bots.
Ideas to combat the issue
This weeks edition of 52 Elevator Pitches is a bit different from the rest. More of a rant to be honest. I don’t have one idea for a product but several ideas on how the ticket industry can be improved to stop and regulate ticket bots and scalpers.
Make the ticket vendors more responsible.
Ticketmaster and sites like these should take more responsibility to try and prevent bots and scalpers from buying tickets. Yes they try with the captchas and things like “identify which image is a street sign”, but obviously it is not working.
They should also work harder to prevent people from flipping their tickets immediately after purchasing them. SeatWave, a second hand ticket site, is a Ticketmaster company. Minutes after Beyoncé tickets went on sale this morning, SeatWave had multiple Beyoncé tickets for sale. If the tickets were bought through Ticketmaster, there should be no way that SeatWave allows these tickets to be listed right away. Obviously, these people are scalpers and their tickets should be revoked.
Require the seller to verify the reason why they are putting their tickets up for sale
When the seller lists their tickets for sale, require that they write a paragraph on why they are selling their ticket. Before the ticket is listed on the second hand tickets site, someone from the company would read the reason and approve if the reason is valid or not. If the reason is valid, the tickets immediately go on sale. If the employee has doubts about the reason, they will contact the seller. After talking to the seller, the employee can either put the tickets on sale or decide not to list them.
2nd hand ticket sites should cap the price at which tickets can be sold
Most second hand ticket websites allow the seller to set whatever price they want for their tickets. Because the second hand ticket sites charge the seller a fee, sellers normally charge a bit higher than the face value of the ticket so that they can break even. Unfortunately, sellers also take advantage of this and will set their ticket price to an exorbitant amount.
Fortunately, there are some second hand sites that have begun to implement policies like this. Ticketswap sets a maximum selling price of 120% of the face value of a ticket.
Require social proof when buying tickets.
Prove somehow that you are a real human when buying the tickets. Just creating an account is not enough anymore. Maybe you have to log in with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or another verified social network.
Let the artists sell their tickets directly
Since ticket sales sites aren’t doing much to combat the issue, let the artists be in control of how they sell their tickets.
Adele has partnered with Songkick, a website that specializes in selling and managing tickets sold through an artist’s website, to sell 235,000 tickets to legitimate fans and to block approximately 53,000 sales to those who were determined “known or likely” scalpers (possibly determined by the quantity of tickets people were trying to buy). As a result of Songkick’s efforts, more Adele fans were able to buy their tickets at normal prices instead of the exorbitant fees scalpers (or “touts” as British people call them) charge. — The Atlantic
There should be another option besides Ticketmaster and LiveNation
Ticketmaster and LiveNation basically have a monopoly on the ticket industry. I have never met anyone that has been a loyal Ticketmaster customer. If there was another option, it would create more competition and Ticketmaster/LiveNation would have the incentive to really take the scalper problem seriously.
These are just a couple ideas, and I will add to this post as I think of more ways to combat the scalpers and bots.
I would love to hear your ideas in the comments!
52 Elevator Pitches is a creative challenge to come up with a product idea that solves a specific problem at the end of every week.
