Beating the (Unfair) Ticket Aftermarket
In a battle between Ticketmaster and resellers like Stubhub and SeatGeek, consumers are left holding the bill.
and I dug deep and we stuck it to the man.Bewilderment in the Bronx
In August 2015, Kyle decided spontaneously to check out a Yankees game on a particularly warm, pleasant evening. He purchased three tickets from SeatGeek, a secondary ticket seller, through their website. Within minutes, they were emailed. He made his way up to the Bronx and proceeded to the gate of Yankee stadium. Approaching the ticket scanning employee, he enlarged the barcode of the emailed tickets and had the screen brightness on high ready to be scanned.
“We can’t accept this. You’ll need to print this out,” the ticket-taker explained.
“What do you mean? You’re scanning the barcode on it. What’s it matter if it’s on a piece of paper or a screen?” he jockeyed.
He was told step step aside. The ticket wasn’t valid.
Beginning to fume, he kept on, “What are you talking about? This is a valid ticket. Just scan the barcode!”
“Sir, please step aside, this ticket has to be printed,” they repeated.
Furious, fuming, and bewildered at why they wouldn’t scan the digital tickets but were scanning other’s, he decided he still wanted to see the game. He bought paper tickets from a scalper and continued thinking throughout the evening why the tickets had to be printed. How can the TSA scan digital or printed boarding passes but the fancy mobile scanners at the new Yankee Stadium can’t?
He ate a hot dog, drank a few beers, and enjoyed the game, but the ticket experience had soured the visit and he vowed it would be the last time to buy tickets for a game at Yankee Stadium. Maybe the Mets were more chill. He left and never thought about it again.
Obstacles at US Open
Fast forward a year to Labor Day weekend of 2016 when we’re heading out to Queens for a few nights of US Open tennis. I (Byron) took a screenshot of each ticket and sent it via text to the others joining me. The ticket-taker took aim, scanned, and handed me a printout — a small paper slip with 328, N, 3 on it. I was in with no questions asked.
We were back the next day hanging out in between day and evening sessions. We were having a beer outside of Arthur Ashe Stadium and talking about the absurd cost of court side seats. To prove my point, I opened up the SeatGeek app to show the crazy prices. There were a few tickets going for 2x or 3x face value, but we also noticed there were an abundance of tickets listed for a fraction of the original price.
I kept asking, “Why am I paying full price when there are $9 tickets available?” 7pm is the official starting time for night matches at Ashe, but the first match doesn’t usually start until 7:30 or so.
I got so excited at the thought of sitting down low, I decided to go for it and buy court side seats for only $100 each (normally $3,000+). I found the largest green dot closest to the court and bought the tickets. In retrospect, SeatGeek’s iOS mobile app flow is incredibly deceptive to the end user. The flow is as follows:
- Open the app and select your event
- Change the sort and filter settings to only show “E-Tickets” that offer “In-App Delivery”
- Find the tickets you want. You’re reminded that “These tickets will be delivered in-app”
- Proceed to checkout and enter payment info. You’re again reminded that “Tickets will be delivered with minutes of your purchase.”
- Receive tickets that have a surprise “Printing required” orange label on them.
SeatGeek iOS app ticket buying flow. “Printing required” is not shown until after purchase.
I figured they meant for convenience. Of course they would scan my “E-Ticket” that had been delivered via “In-App Delivery,” right?
We head towards the ticket-takers in a throng and get separated. The ticket-taker looked at my barcode (the 6th image on the right above) and wouldn’t scan it. They said it had to be printed.
Kyle is in the stadium but can’t find me because I’m not. He eventually learns that I’m still outside the stadium because the ticket-taker wouldn’t scan my tickets. He recalled to me later that he was suddenly having flashbacks to the South Bronx and his blood was boiling again. It couldn’t be a coincidence. It had to be related.
I message back and forth with Kyle as I traipse around the US Open grounds looking for a printer. I’m denied at every step, including the US Open ticket window through which I can see a row of printers in the back office. The not-so-polite sales agent says, “We don’t have any printers here. There’s a Holiday Inn nearby.” I thought I had a perfectly legal and valid ticket, but this guy is telling me to trek to a not-so-close hotel and print them out. WTF.
The SeatGeek mobile flow never said a word about printing required until after the tickets were purchased. What a dubious practice. And the very special my-event-is-today customer service phone number for SeatGeek went unanswered, even though it was during the hours they claimed the line would be serviced.
Luckily I had my original tickets and was able to use those to gain entry. I opened the US Open mobile app, pulled up the tickets, and waltzed right in. I finally met up with Kyle as Nick Kyrgios was halfway through self-disintegrating. He told me about his Yankees experience and we started to try and figure out what had just happened and why. Similar to his night at Yankee Stadium, we had a beer, watched some sport, but left with a sour taste in our mouth.
Playing God with Fair Market Values
Back at work the next day, we became truly obsessed with figuring out how and why this was happening. We came across a Deadspin article about the Yankees planning to abandon paper tickets altogether.
The Yankees would have you believe that eliminating print-at-home tickets is entirely motivated by a desire to prevent fraud, but the reality is that it has everything to do with the team’s partnership with Ticketmaster and ongoing war against StubHub. — Deadspin
Holy. Shit. No way. Were our tickets legal and valid but rejected because the Yankees and the US Open were trying to prevent last minute tickets sales at prices that devalue their brand and demand?!
The Deadspin article continued:
When ticket resellers use StubHub, they can sell the ticket for as little as they’d like, but Ticketmaster sets artificial price floors that prevent sellers from listing tickets below face value. This practice has recently been called out by the New York Attorney General, as it deprives fans the opportunity to buy tickets on a fair market.
Say you’re a Yankees fan, and you decide you want to duck out of work early and go to a shitty Twins-Yankees game on a Wednesday afternoon in August. There are tickets available for $19 on StubHub, but they are selling for face value on Ticketmaster, which will deliver an electronic ticket to your phone. You can’t get in with a PDF ticket, so unless you can figure out a way to get the StubHub seller’s physical tickets in your hands within a few hours, you’re stuck paying full price on Ticketmaster. You’ve been boned.
Replace StubHub with SeatGeek and there you have it, that’s what happened to us. We were furious. We became even more obsessed and totally consumed. How was this legal? Ticket-takers at the gate must have been instructed to only scan digital tickets that looked a certain way. Who else was doing this?
It looks like it’s anyone selling tickets through Ticketmaster. The New York Attorney General is also investigating the NFL because they’re doing their encouraging the same tactics. In January of 2016, bloomberg.com reported:
The Attorney General’s investigation centers on resale price floors — the practice of putting a lower limit on ticket prices to ensure that they don’t go for less than a certain value. The NFL Ticket Exchange enforces these floors, usually preventing sales below the face value of the ticket… Because some teams require ticket holders to use the league-promoted platform, even sellers who would be willing to sell for less can’t. — bloomberg.com
Kyle and I continued to say, “How is this legal?” for two days straight. And we began scheming ways to beat the system.
The Little Guy Wins
As Tom Ley from Deadspin said, “… so unless you can figure out a way to get the StubHub seller’s physical tickets in your hands within a few hours, you’re stuck paying full price on Ticketmaster.”
Our first thought, given the discussion around paper tickets, was to get a mobile printer. Amazon sells the Canon PIXMA iP110 Wireless Mobile Printer with Airprint™. We could get it, print the ticket just outside the gate, then bag check our bag. Done and done. The printer would pay for itself in a single use.
But then we started thinking. What is a barcode anyway? What about a QR code? It’s really just a representation of a 12-digit number. They wouldn’t scan a barcode on a digital PDF, but they would scan a QR code with a ridiculous digital Ticketmaster watermark behind it. So we Googled, “Convert Barcode to QR Code.”
PDF barcode from E-Ticket
Our Google search led us to goqr.me. Turns out, if you stick “557864358345” into the QR code generator, it will spit out:
QR code for 557864358345
But it’s unlikely we could just flash a QR code with a blank white background. We needed that fancy Ticketmaster watermark. We had an official looking ticket from days prior, though. What if we could just use Photoshop to replace the QR code with the new one? Ok, that works. Do we bring our laptop to the stadium / concert? What if there was app that could do it? Yep: Adobe Photoshop Mix — Cut out, combine, blend images.
Having tried it at home, we decided to try it for real. We went back to the US Open for the Thursday night session. It was the women’s semis, so we’d get to see Serena play Karolina Pliskova and then Caroline Wozniacki play Angelique Kerber. We arrived just after 7pm, found a great deal on SeatGeek, and bought the tickets just outside the gate. We converted our PDF barcodes to QR codes and then used Adobe Photoshop Mix to stitch it together. The whole process took about two minutes.
Adobe Photoshop Mix: Stitch a new QR code after converting from a barcode
After exporting from the app, I had my new ticket.
It was time for the moment of truth. We walked up, the ticket-taker aimed, scanned, and then reached for their printer. Nothing printed. There was a brief moment of panic, but then the ticket-taker said, “Oh, my printer is broken. You’re good to go.”
It worked! It was thrilling. We’d beaten the system and we were court side.
Sitting courtside at the US Open for ~$100 instead of $3,000+
Regarding the printer not printing the paper ticket, we think we were missing the alpha “o” character at the end of the barcode number. It didn’t matter, though.
Would it work for a concert? YES. I went to see Morrissey at King’s Theater in Brooklyn, NY. I got pit tickets on SeatGeek after the official start time of the concert for less than face value. They’d been for sale earlier in the day for 2x face value. The ticket-taker scanned the digital PDF barcode, but did mention that we should have had the tickets printed. King’s Theater was more chill than the Yankees or the US Open. The mobile printer as a backup is probably a good thing to have. Or be near a FedEx Office type of place.
Pit tickets for Morrissey at King’s Theater for less than face value. Photo by Byron Sorrells.
This whole scheme requires being at the venue and gambling that you can get a ticket. It’s likely to work better for events and venues like the US Open where there are an abundance of tickets for sale. However, we noticed great prices just before doors were set to open at several highly coveted Broadway shows.
Tip of the Iceberg
When you zoom out, there’s a lot more to this than just the instances above and a requirement to print a ticket affecting a particular last-minute scenario. It’s a sustained and systematic effort by one corporation to defraud and profit from the entire population in an industry that is worth more than $13 Billion annually. It’s not just happening at a few select venues, it’s happening at nearly every concert, baseball/football/basketball/hockey game in the country. In January of 2016 the New York Attorney General released a special report on the state of the ticket industry and outlined some of the issues at hand. If you break it down, this is what’s going on on a macro level.
Ticketmaster owns the vast majority of the ticket sale market. Venues will broker a deal with Ticketmaster to be the exclusive seller of tickets. Venues have an interest in selling a large number of tickets for as high a price as possible. They have a strong interest in also preventing the market value of tickets dropping below face value because it undermines the initial ticket price.
Venues and Ticketmaster also do not have any motivation to prevent brokers or bot-buyers from buying all the tickets, as anyone who’s ever wanted to see their favorite band would have experienced when tickets are sold out within minutes of release. You might wonder, as I do, why hasn’t this been stopped? Well it’s pretty simple, TicketMaster doesn’t want bots or brokers to stop being able to buy all tickets. The effect is two fold — they sell all the tickets, and it increases the value over-all of tickets because it creates an artificial scarcity. The traditional market forces of supply and demand are not working properly because demand is artificial. The technology to block this from happening exists. Two-factor authentication would put an immediate end to this. Allowing verified buyers to have first option to purchase. There’s a reason that this is still happening and it’s simply because it’s allowed to.
The fact that Ticketmaster controls the entire market of tickets means there is not any competition driving down the large margins and fees on tickets. The size and number of ‘service fees’, ‘convenience fees’, or other price gouges have increased. Because these fees are add-on fees they are not disclosed in the advertised ticket price, further misleading the buyer on the true cost.
Blocking the resale market is the behavior that is particularly heinous and close to criminal. It’s what we experienced.
This practice won’t last forever, but there are ways to beat it while it does. Let me know (in the comments) if it works for you.
