Fans Aren’t Secondary: Disassembling the Secondary Ticketing Market
Though obvious a sentiment for most, music is as necessary to life as breathing. If that sentence seems absurd you’ll likely want to stop reading at this point. But for fans obsessed with the music they love, let’s dream forward.
Because it’s not only the sound rising from the speaker. It’s the connection. The way an artist gets inside your head, tells your story for you in a manner you could never quite express yet immediately recognize.
The origin of language likely began as music. It makes sense. I need to express something to you. What is the best vehicle to accomplish this? Something melodic, rhythmic. A sense of understanding my space while simultaneously realizing someone else occupies that same space. A relationship develops, a bond formed.
For the first 250,000 or so years of our development humans only had one opportunity for music: with the musicians. Live. A ceremony, a crying out, a celebration.
What audio technology is incredible for is expanding the reach of music. What it lacks is the immediacy of others.
That connection is what drives us to live performances. While we’ve monetized the ceremony of communion, so be it if it supports the artists creating the music you cherish most. We can work within whatever system is in place.
But the current system is broken.
What “sold out” used to mean is that a musician achieved more fans than the venue they’re performing at can hold. A badge of honor for the artist; a necessary tension that comes with the turf of being a fan.
Music itself is tension: fingertips on strings, breath against vocal cords. Not knowing whether or not you’ll get a ticket is part of the game.
When the game is rigged, however, both fan and artist pay the price.
The global secondary ticketing market is expected to generate $15.2 billion by 2020. This money only goes to the mediator—not the artist, fan, venue, or management. Secondary market services are completely unnecessary yet have created their own industry by wedging themselves between artists and fans. It has purposefully put a price on one of the most important moments of bonding that humans experience, that of a musician and the audience that loves them.
It’s not as if artists aren’t fighting. Bikini Kill didn’t want headlines about their reunion tour to be dominated by secondary market gauging. Bruce Springsteen has long been vocal about his opposition to reselling. Imagine how he felt reading this:
With an average resale price hovering around $1,800, tickets to Springsteen on Broadway have been resold for more money on average than tickets to any other Broadway show on the secondary market. For example, a ticket to Hamilton on the secondary market sells for about $479, and a ticket to Dear Evan Hansen sells for about $356.
Taylor Swift would rather have empty seats than cave to resellers. The famed Newport Folk Festival took measures into its own hands to combat scalping. My Morning Jacket identified bots and cancelled those tickets to sell them to fans at the proper price.
The secondary market is capitalism unhinged. A nation built on democratic principles, which include fairness and justice, as well as a strong work ethic, is catering to what it purports to despise: leeches. Disrupting the exchange between artist and fan is criminal, in every respect, but an unregulated industry continues its dishonest ways until an intervention succeeds.
A friend once offered me an important piece of advice: you’ll only change when you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired. I’m both when it comes to people taking advantage of one of the most sacred human experiences: the ritual of music.
Sold out just means a system is broken. Fans aren’t secondary. Which means we need to change the system.
Enrapt is creating a scalp-proof ticket to combat the secondary market.
