On: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcod...

[cbsmith]

Yes, I misunderstood what you wrote.

There are plenty of scalpers who sell tickets outside of TicketMaster, despite their best efforts. Do you think the $50/ticket fee that you paid would have been lower if you'd done your transaction outside of TicketMaster's platform?

[bonestamp2 → cbsmith]

I have purchased secondary tickets outside of TicketMaster many times and the fee has always been lower. But, that's anecdotal of course... there's no reason why they couldn't be higher. But, let's leave the actual fee amount aside for a moment...

I'm slightly less concerned with the actual amount of the fee and more concerned with the fact that ticket scalping has apparently become legal and that the original ticket seller is not only in on it, but getting even higher fees on the scalped tickets than the original tickets.

It's disturbing that it's illegal to scalp a single ticket in person outside an event, but if someone does it online with hundreds of tickets then they're a "ticket broker" and that's legal (in California at least).

[cbsmith → bonestamp2]

> It's disturbing that it's illegal to scalp a single ticket in person outside an event, but if someone does it online with hundreds of tickets then they're a "ticket broker" and that's legal (in California at least).

Legal space around ticketing is... insane. The laws protecting "ticker brokers" are cloaked as consumer friendly regulations, and ironically TicketMaster actively lobbies against online "ticket brokers".

> I have purchased secondary tickets outside of TicketMaster many times and the fee has always been lower. But, that's anecdotal of course... there's no reason why they couldn't be higher.

In general, TM's share of resell is much smaller, and the resell market is heavily fee sensitive, as the brokers like to keep as much of the money as they can, so the fees tend to be set by the market (and they didn't go up when TM got in to the business).