Ticketmaster and dynamic pricing

Do these people need protecting from themselves? A bit nanny state ish surely.…

What else are they likely to have lost control off?

Come on, we're through the looking glass if we have to protect people from themselves when purchasing tickets. If someone can't trust themselves when spending money when buying a concert ticket, they should give the credit/debit card to someone responsible.

Are we going to outlaw auctions, furniture sales, airline sales because they're all a form of pressure selling…

The last time I refunded my ticket in June, they didn't refund the handling fee. Honestly, whilst I was disappointed about it, I was the one who bought the ticket and I had no legal right to a refund so I took responsibility for it and moved on. It was ~€8 and for what it's worth, I refunded it because I bought a different (better) ticket.

You could probably make the same argument about a lot of consumer laws. People generally see them as a good thing though because typically they protect the little guys from the big guys

It's almost as if you're saying that marketing and pressure selling doesn't work!!

TBH, there's a bang of "I'm too smart to be conned by this sort of thing and anyone who isn't smart enough, deserves it" off the pair of ye.

Anyway, I haven't anything more to say on it so I'm out

Didn't say it doesn't work, but that ultimately everyone has their own free will and need to take some level of responsibility for their actions. Blaming others without reflecting on your own actions or lack thereoff has become all to common a trait in Irish life.

As for the "bang of" whatever off me - I don't see any "Con" here - you're options are very clear.

Ehhh an auction does involve time sink and short pressure to buy. If you go into a furniture sale on the last day, you have a short window to buy. It's all pressure. When you go into a car dealership, you'll experience a form of pressure selling.

And again, if you're not mature enough or financially responsible enough to make a decision on a ticket purchase, well then ticket purchasing isn't for you.

Oh the poor customer who can't rationally decide if a ticket is too expensive for them. They need to grow up and take responsibility. Nobody wants to blame themselves.

I said it on the Oasis thread before the ticket scrum, the reunion announcement reminded me for some reason of Michael Jackson's "This Is It" tour scheduled for the o2 London in 2009.

Jacko was booked initially for 10 dates. Prince had done 21 dates at the venue in 2007 - every ticket whether standing or seated for those Prince shows cost £31.21 (I was there on the Monday night) - it was naively believed Jacko could pull this off. Another 40 dates were added. Jacko inexplicably was in significant financial difficulty at the time.

750,000 tickets sold in 4 hours, priced at £50 for standing and £75 for seating. VIP was £300.

To be fair to TM, they were originally appointed sole ticket vendor, with online, phone and in person sales. However the Jacko team co-appointed AEG Live, who did a deal with Viagogo, and online tickets costing £75 started appearing at £700 and VIP at £3,000. Jacko himself was insured for £100 million in case the tour didn't go ahead.

I know little about Jacko's last days or other controversies but the thought of 50 shows with that level of anticipation can't have been easy and we know how that ended.

That failed tour in 2009 seems to have set the stage for the current rot we've seen this week. I've no sympathy for the Gallaghers but the pressure on them to deliver with these gigs from the industry as a whole is going to be huge.

The law does exactly what it is required to. Take a report from NME today:

"Adele’s final show before her long break takes place on November 23 at the The Colosseum in Las Vegas. Tickets for the show were originally priced between US$400 for regular tickets and $1000 for VIP passes. Now, however, Viagogo and last-minute ticketing site Gametime have revealed a surge in prices. According to Viagogo’s pricing, tickets for the November 23 show now cost between $3819 and a whopping $17,050. Gametime tickets are ranged between $2166 and $18,766."

That law ensures that that sort of issue cannot happen in Ireland. People are very quick to forget that we had professional touts in Ireland up until that law came in. The amount of tickets hoovered up by touts was significantly higher than the amount of tickets that were marked as 'platinum' - where thousands of tickets were immediately available at 9.05am on Seatwave, Viagogo, Stubhub, Adverts etc. having sold out immediately on Ticketmaster.

I don't agree with in-demand/platinum pricing because I think the artists are gauging fans and I hate it when I get caught down a queue with that being the only option. The solution is to vote with your wallet and don't buy tickets - look at the upcoming Fugees gig and the rake of unsold VIP and Platinum tickets. They will come back down to face value. The problem is that people won't do that for Oasis and other artists because they have no self-restraint.

Even if all the bítching and moaning is successful about platinum tickets and they're no longer allowed - ticket prices will simply go up to cover the difference. So it will be an entirely pyrrhic victory.

But is it really just the last few tickets to Oasis or whoever. How do we know how many tickets were sold over the normal prices.

How do we know this?

My issue with dynamic pricing in these instances is that it’s not really responding to increased demand. The demand was there before they went on sale and they were certain to be sold out, and the consumer had to rely on Ticketmasters random queue algorithm to see what price would generate for them, which they are unable to track or have any awareness of until the moment they get out of the queue and have very little time to decide.

Fairer way to do it, imo, would be:

Announce all ticket types will be variably priced, and publish the range of these prices before they go on sale.

Pricing is determined by waiting room size. The larger the pre-queue the more expensive the tickets will be. The waiting room should show what pricing level is currently applied.

Once the tickets go on sale, the price is locked for anyone who was confirmed to be in the waiting room prior to sale. Anyone who joins after the sale could be subject to increased pricing.

I think the above would spread the cost with smaller increases across the board(instead of huge increases for a small number of tickets), while still keeping the consumer informed and allows the band to maximise their revenue. The only thing that would probably need to be done is an independent review of Ticketmasters waiting room/queue process but that probably needs to be done anyway.

I was over in London for the Prince 3121 tour too. He's an outlier amongst global superstars since then. His stance on the whole 'slave' thing, his insistence on fair deals for his fans, he was ahead of his time in more than music. God knows what he'd make of the state of the upper end of the music business now.

Taylor and harry styles had split the main pitch areas and had named tickets types for those at a premium above general standard. They are a completely separate concept to platinum or dynamic which are usually just normal seats or standing at 2x or 3x normal price.
now Taylor had platinum in aviva as well for lower bowl choice seats etc which were higher priced. It wasn’t all over the stadium and in crazy numbers for those platinum seats.

the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK want to hear from people

https://connect.cma.gov.uk/oasis-tickets

Maybe crossed wires here. I meant that there's no way of knowing how many tickets were 'platinum or in-demand tickets' generally. For Oasis it seems like it was relatively low as the admittedly small sample size on Boards spat out only one or two people who paid for them whereas the rest said they got face value tickets.

The VIP tickets for Taylor Swift were indeed in various places in the stadium as she had so many different tiers of VIP tickets. I'd agree that it seemed that there were loads of Taylor Swift VIP tickets but similarly, we have no idea how many or what % of tickets were VIP tickets.

Are you daring to doubt fanirish who knows everything there is to know?

Yeah there are definitely only certain acts that can pull off a stadium show. I would say that Coldplay and Taylor Swift did that (but that's my personal opinion), primarily because they used the stadium and its size to its fullest. Agree on the Rolling Stones, their show in Croke Park was killer.

Adele, Ed Sheeran and others just look lost on stage when the venue is too big.

Prince just decided on whim not to play it.
He told Denis Desmond of mcd to chill a few weeks before

Not at all. People would be complaining if they weren't able to sell their tickets through Ticketmaster given that there is nowhere else to legally sell/transfer them at present.

You should be able to transfer/sell them as soon as you like.

Now, as an edit to this. Both of these tickets are now gone - ie someone bought them in the past hour - probably less.

So I ask the question again: do people think that ticketmaster are doing anything wrong with their practices in selling these tickets versus what they were doing last weekend?

Or should people be up in arms about the "tactics" used by ticketmaster to sell high priced tickets to people - bearing in mind the queue was almost non existent today, you would have had some time to make a decision etc, yet two people felt that these tickets were worth buying………..

See my post immediately above yours. There's no pressure tactics in play now, it's less of an issue.

It's extremely poor form on Oasis's part that they are happy to have gigs where tickets are going for €500+ as an official price, but that's on them.

again your missing the point about the dynamic pricing vs early bird menus , flights etc. you aren’t waiting in a queue for all that crap and then presented with a new price.

exactly my point , wasn’t advertised in advance. Ie presented with a new price.its the key reason why the uk authorities are looking at it. Can’t be compared to a box office queue where only the dear seats are left when you known the price range.