Olivia Rodrigo - SOUR (May 21, 2021) • Page 57

There's truth to this, but it's not quite as cut and dry as this article would make it appear. Ticketmaster doesn't have "their own" scalpers, they just co-opted the market to some extent.

Ticketmaster's TradeDesk platform is their official resale point-of-sale system. It competes with other industry solutions owned by StubHub, VividSeats, and TicketNetwork (they're the ones who make websites that make you think you're buying from the box office - the top google search results. Super predatory.) They don't charge for the use of their platform, but they also don't provide any assistance or leg up in getting tickets.

They created this more or less in response to other secondary marketplaces getting so big, so they could get a cut of the pie, and also to cut down on the number of invalid tickets being brought to events by buyers who got scammed by a shady fly-by-night broker who would duplicate barcodes. By integrating their barcode generation into a sales platform, it gave sellers a bit of peace of mind that their orders were guaranteed.

Yes, they absolutely turn a blind eye to sellers who have dozens or hundreds of individual Ticketmaster accounts and use them to purchase tickets for resale, but they absolutely do not provide those accounts with advantages in the ticket buying process. If a broker wants that, they need to purchase bots from a third party, and that's the biggest problem in this whole ordeal. The bots are nearly impossible to weed out, and they're the ones garbling up thousands of tickets and inflating the entire market.

For the record, I can only comment so deeply on this because I've worked in and around the ticket industry for more than a decade. I see this stuff every day.

 

Simple way of doing it is attach a name to a ticket and make it possible to change, but make resale sites illegal to run at prices more than X% above the ticket price. There would still be a black market, but it'd be much different than what's happening.

Meanwhile, others are probably trying to figure out how to use blockchain to make it so that every time a ticket is sold, the promoter/artist make a percentage of that money back.

 

You shouldn't need to ever resell tickets above face value IMHO

 

Yeah, I would say mostly just to cover platform fees.

 

How did you write all this so fast!

Interesting tho - but I still believe in my theory hahah

 

Haha, it's become second nature to talk about this stuff since I do it all the time for work, just kind of flows.

 

I think resale is definitely necessary, especially since certain shows sell out immediately and people may not be able to get tickets at that time, but the markup is definitely scummy and absurd

part of the problem is that it's amazing how ticketmaster is cool with being the bad guy in this, when it's clearly complicated by the fact that there's a lot of demand for tickets and the cost of everything is skyrocketing

 

Why would Ticketmaster care? They have a monopoly on the tickets they're selling.

Bringing it back to music, I'm finally watching her Tiny Desk and her voice sounds better than ever. Definitely leaning into the theater-kid-meets-emo-kid vibes. Would love to see her live! Not enough to pay $1000 for the worst seat in the house though.

 

Only just watching this but damn her live chops have grown by leaps and bounds. Those little improvisations in the drawn-out last verse are fantastic.

 

The ACL and NPR tiny desk are both fantastic. She is incredibly on point and her backing band is stellar. I'm not a big overall pop music fan by any means and as a 30 year-old male it blows my mind how much her music speaks to me and reminds me of what it was like being in high-school. They're really good songs and she does a great job as a performer. It's refreshing pop music, in my opinion. Happy for her and the success; it feels very well deserved.

 

You take the good you take the bad

 

If Adele had released her album earlier we wouldn't have had to deal with Morgan Wallen being 2021's top seller. Real shame.

 

For the love of god please dont hire Scooter.

 

She’s such a huge swiftie. I can’t imagine she’d do that. She knows better. Hopefully.

 

Just keep that producer

 

I didn’t even get a call? I’m hurt.

 

Strange, I DID get a call...

 

There is a zero percent chance she would ever do this.

 

Gracie Abrams and Olivia Rodrigo on the Risks and Rewards of Songwriting

 

Written by Olivia and Dan

 

thanks I hate it

 

I like it