Ticketmaster and dynamic pricing

It's wrong and anyone supporting it should be executed

Isn't it amazing how the ticket price for half sold Gigs never comes down, surely it should work both ways...…

the fairest solution is oasis should of charged €50 extra per ticket and not done dynamic as they would have generated same amount of money

Until there is some way to come up with an alternative to the random number generator that decides where you are in the queue there will always be issues. Having some sort of merit based approach to tickets would at least make it less galling if you can't get tickets (e.g. that person queued for 2 nights, so they deserve it more than me).

A guy I work with's brother-in-law logged onto ticketmaster at 07:55 and when the queue started he was number 2,000 or something. Easily got tickets. Whereas I know other people were on from whenever the waiting room opened and got put into position 200k or 300k in the queue. That feels wrong.

If you don't do it randomly then people and bots will game the system. While someone waiting patiently at their screen for hours might "deserve" tickets, a bot or a script could easily mimic that.

The only way the system cannot be gamed is to make it random. When it's random it's unfair, but it's always been unfair especially when there aren't enough tickets to go around so the market sets the price at an affordable level.

It is the Bands getting there own back on the ticket touts and to a certain extent the music buying public many of whom have been downloading music for free for years.

I guess putting up a gig for sale with tickets priced at 100 and then seeing touts selling them on for multiples of that price sickened the promoters and bands and dynamic pricing is there solution to that problem.

So the bands are trying to get back the money they feel is being stolen from them on an ongoing basis.

I don't agree with it though, because most people are law abiding and as usual the majority are paying for the minorities actions.

How does this work in practice?

Don't need to hear politicians whinging about it, when they're the ones who can put stop to it it with regulation.

Thankfully, I've never been stung by it, as I only attend gigs by uber cool/obscure small acts 😉

They could probably legislate that ticket prices have to be announced the day before and no changes can be made. The way around that I suppose is any gigs that are a guaranteed to sell out the cheapest ticket will €200+

Unlikely. The average price of tickets is likely around 275-300 mark. Single fixed sitting and standing prices would have cost Oasis at least €100 a head. No way would you have every attendee spending that much on merch if the ticket prices were lower. Instead, touts would have pocketed the difference.

The only thing it's cost them is people now consider them greedy and out of touch with their roots. What that's actually worth remains to be seen as it hasn't harmed the likes of Springsteen in the long term.

we should also require all new hotels not to charge more than €200 a night.
dynamic pricing only affected a small number of tickets, in the 5% range if even.
tickets to events have always been stratified. And if dynamic banned all that will mean is artists will move dynamic allotment to vip packages for €500 or more

I think if a robust push back comes against dynamic pricing, it will be from the EU.

On the face of it, its already highly illegal under EU consumer and competition rules.

I mean any fool could have seen there would be demand for these tickets and indeed any popular act. And so dynamic pricing, as described, is also highly disingenuous.

Comparisons excusing the practice have been made with Air Fares and Hotel Tariffs, but while concert or match demands may certainly affect both, at least when you search Ryanair or Aer Lingus, the price is there in front of you. It does not increase between selecting the flight, or the room and completing the transaction.

If concert promoters want to set their prices, at say 85 for the pitch tickets, or 105, or even 405, then thats what the prices should be advertised as from the beginning, and let consumers make the choice, not have a gun put to their head after hours and hours of waiting.

I think if Ticketmaster is to be probed, then it should also be a systems audit to investigate the queuing process and site capacity, as its clearly disadvantageous to the consumer as things stand.

is this the first thread in the history of boards where we all agree on something?

My god.

Hotels are not the same thing! You have a choice to stay elsewhere with them.

I’d say the “Ticketmaster are great” Lads from the other thread will arrive soon enough.

Who is saying ticketmaster are great?

For some reason people think they have no option but to buy something if its there in front of them - that seems to be the issue here.

Yeah totally - it will short term I guess but come next year? Yeah some will remember and shy away from the Oasis overpriced sho1e merchandise tent but it will still be tempting for many

The way I see it is that dynamic pricing is a creation of consumerism and lacks definition as it's a open-ended profiteering strategy.

If you take any hypothetical reasonably popular band who are touring, the vast majority of their gigs are going to be desirable to the average punter and would be reasonably expected to sell out in a short time. A marketing strategy therefore would try match the availability to the demand, but this creates a three-fold opportunity to the gougers such as ticketmaster:

1. What defines when a gig is "in demand" and therefore subject to dynamic pricing; and how is the level of demand measured and respective pricing increases applied? It can't be left down to Ticketmaster to define as they have been proven to be dishonest in this respect.
2. What then happens in a case where a gig is sold as a one-night event and the ticket prices are highly desirable and therefore dynamically priced on that basis - but then a second night is later announced. Ticketmaster have then modified the marketplace by later increasing the availability of a limited commodity. This is commonly called market manipulation.
3. Irish legislation has made it illegal to sell tickets at a value inflated from their face-value, but if you control the face-valve (through dynamic pricing) and also control all of the resale opportunities, then you're defined as a monopoly within a closed marketplace.

So this absolutely needs to be tackled at a European level and not just an a national level, but the end result should require the separation of Ticketmaster from Live Nation and then also from the resale websites at a minimum.

Interested for that... Not sure I've seen one poster claim that they're great or even good yet.

True, but it pisses on that marketing model and disrupts it. It will probably end up akin to fuel pricing but in this case you'll get to see the ticket pricing and availability in advance, ie:

7,000 standing at 80 EUR
500 standing at 180 EUR
20,000 seated at 120 EUR
25,000 seated at 170 EUR
3,000 seated at 210 EUR

…and so on. It's then still stinks but at least it's up-front.

Dynamic pricing for gigs such as Oasis is a complete joke. You can have someone at their computer 10 hours before the sale paying multiples of what someone who was at their computer 1 hour beforehans(which doesn’t happen with airlines and hotels for whoever insists it’s the same thing).

Its meaningless and not based on demand, ultimately its Ticketmasters algorithm deciding that you’re simply going to have to pay more because of where you were assigned in the queue.

Hopefully the EU do something about it. Can’t stop bands demanding ridiculous amounts of cash, but don’t force someone to pay way more than they should. Have the ticket prices posted 48 hours before sale so people know what they should expect.

When Mary Lou McDonald came out with an idea to set house prices at €300K the outrage from the shysters in government was off the scale. Now it's outrage because concert ticket prices are not set in stone.

People keep saying 'concerts' like they're all the same. It's doing my head in. It's like saying 'football matches' when you're talking about Champions league finals. There'll be 20 great gigs in Dublin this week, great acts in lovely, small venues with crowds made up of sound people who love music. I don't give a **** if Coldplay become an act only accessible to the rich. Actual music is there whenever people want it.