Dreams ‘crushed’ as Ticketmaster cancels fans’ Oasis ’25 tickets
Dreams ‘crushed’ as Ticketmaster cancels fans’ Oasis ’25 tickets
Those affected were accused by the company of being bots and asked to fill out a form for the tour’s promoters to review
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Ticketmaster can easily prevent out-of-band reselling by only allowing resales on their site. So anyone selling their tickets on ebay or wherever will still have to transfer the tickets and get paid through ticketmaster, which should only allow you to sell at original purchase price with no extra fees. This would also help prevent scams and fraud because all transactions would be via their system and they already implement that rotating code technology to prevent screenshots from working.
Of course ticketmaster doesn’t do that because they charge a fee on resales, which gets them more money.
How could it actually work though? Without checking ID at the gate you have no idea if the ticketholder is the original or has bought from a scalper?
Like I said, reselling is not the issue, scalping is. People can have many legit reasons for selling their tickets (sick, accident, emergency, etc.), and there should be a way for them to offload those tickets for someone else to enjoy and at the same time get their money back. If tickets aren’t allowed to be sold above their original price, scalpers won’t be able to profit from them, so they’ll stop doing it. Then people who want to sell just to get their money back are able to, while the people who weren’t able to buy during the initial sale period get another chance to buy tickets without getting scalped or scammed. It won’t matter if the ticket you present wasn’t originally yours, as long as you got it for the same price.
It’s a win-win for everyone except ticketmaster who doesn’t get to profit off of the resale market, that’s why they don’t do it. I can’t remember who it was, but there was an artist who demanded resales to be done that way and it worked out well.
I mean, Ticketmaster are greedy bastards, that's why they do what they do. But I think a part of a the veneer of respectability they present is based on the truth that you'll never really be able to stop scalpers, so Ticketmaster might as well be the legal scalper of choice. There will always be a blackmarket for popular tickets (so the reasoning goes). Since reselling isn't illegal then it's hard to force eBay and gumtree to disallow it. And there's nothing to stop touts in person. So Ticketmaster says "fine, we'll host the reselling at whatever the bidding goes up to". They get to make some more money on it and disallowing isn't going to much improve things for the average concert goer..
I think probably one actual solution is to sell tickets linked to your mobile device (somehow). That's probably still vulnerable to being hacked / faked so maybe that's why they haven't done it (aside from them losing out on that resale margin, obvs).
you'll never really be able to stop scalpers
Sure you can, or at least bring them down to a very tiny fraction. But like we both agree on, ticketmaster earns a lot of money from enabling scalpers, so they let it happen. It’s not that they can’t, they just won’t.
If they applied what I mentioned, scalpers will cease to exist:
- Tickets can only be bought on the ticketmaster site/app.
- Resales can only be done via ticketmaster, therefore no one can resell their tickets on ebay or any other site. You don’t have to force ebay to ban resellers, it just won’t work because they’ll have to sell and transfer the ticket via ticketmaster anyway. They can advertise on ebay all they want, at the end of the day they’ll have to transfer the ticket and get paid (the same price) on ticketmaster.
- Buyer logs on to ticketmaster and buys the resale ticket there, and the ticket with the rotating barcode is transferred to their account. Seller gets paid via their ticketmaster account.
- Tickets can only be sold for the same purchase price or lower (if you want to get rid of it faster), and ticketmaster can’t charge a fee for resales.
Scalpers literally won’t waste their time buying up all the tickets because they can only sell them for the same price. The only way they can do it is to sell to some desperate fan who’s willing to pay more (directly to the scalper outside the app), but they’ll have to figure out how to accompany the buyer through security because they can’t transfer the ticket barcode to the buyer’s phone if they don’t sell through the app. A scalper won’t go through that for every resale.
The only problem with that is ticket transfers on the app won’t be allowed unless it’s a re-sale, so sharing tickets that you bought for your family/friends will no longer be possible and you’ll all have to enter the venue together as a group because all the tickets are on your account/phone only. But that’s a small price to pay to get rid of scalpers.
Rotating barcode is the key here. Ties the purchase to a ticketmaster account and requires a phone be presented at the gate. All perfectly doable, if they were so inclined.