If you were caught with notebooks detailing your plans to kill a list of people, showing that you've meticulously tracked their movements and listing locations for dumping the bodies that would be extremely relevant. I don't see how it'd be a good idea to exclude that kind of evidence.
Why not just ban the transfer of tickets and allow refunds? You buy a ticket, you show your ID at the door. Early refunded tickets get resold online and late refunds are sold at the venue. All seats, including the best seats, go to actual fans instead of scalpers just hoping to make a profit while providing zero value. First choice in seats goes to the most passionate and attentive fans.
Alternatively only allow transfers within a very short period of the event. Anyone with a legitimate reason (giving to a friend etc) can work it out even on the day of the event. But scalpers have to take on a big risk buying up the good seats early, because they have a short window of time within which to secure a sale (buyers won't risk pre-paying, sellers can't risk prospective buyers backing out at the last minute).
Another tactic I've seen when there isn't assigned seating - just different tiers of seating - is to hold back some small portion of tickets to release shortly before the event, devaluing the scalpers' listings.
Online streaming tickets can also help, especially if the fans have enough of an anti-scalper stance. They'd choose one of the endless live streaming tickets over buying from scalpers just to go in-person.
I can only assume that the people flippantly proposing that the solution should be to restrict consumer freedoms don't attend these types of events themselves. Why should we immediately jump to limiting freedoms when we can increase the risk of scalping enough to be beyond the tolerance of most scalpers.
> Anyone with a legitimate reason (giving to a friend etc) can work it out even on the day of the event.
I've seen it happen multiple times people couldn't find someone to take the ticket off of them, even for free.
Sure, for an ultra mainstream act the likes of Rammstein? A FC Bayern soccer game? You'll always find some people outside the venue willing to pay in cash for tickets.
How is a buyer supposed to trust that the scalper won't just run away with the money? And conversely, how is the scalper supposed to trust that buyers aren't just feigning interest and will back out at the last minute?
Even escrow systems don't necessarily bypass this because ultimately the buyer is likely spending on more than just the concert ticket. They're probably taking time off work, maybe traveling in from another city or country. So even if they might get their ticket money back if the seller backs out, by the time that happens, it's too late to get refunds on everything else.
And combined with the possibility of getting lower prices closer to the event (extra drops from the event, honest resellers who just can't make it, scalpers trying to cut their losses), even buyers wouldn't commit early to scalper prices.
Maybe limit total number of transfers among all tickets. Because it should be a small minority of legit transfers.
Scalpers should be less likely to take a chance their transfer will be denied, whereas to a legit customer and friend ticket is otherwise worthless and just a best effort anyway.
Or beyond the first X% of transfers you do more rigorous validation. Like asking for the original buyer to call in to confirm in realtime. Something not easily automated.
It’s kind of annoying in practice. For example you buy four tickets to go with your friends. But you get sick so you offer your ticket to a different friend instead. Oops that’s not allowed so now no one gets to go? Or you buy tickets as a gift for someone.
There’s a lot of legit reasons to want transfers, outside of scalping.
I can't do this with airline tickets, hotel bookings, train tickets, dinner reservations, or any other kind of receipt that allows me to put my butt in a seat at a specified time.
You can change a name on a flight. There’s a fee perhaps. I don’t know where you are but in most European countries train tickets are valid to the bearer. Dinner reservations, I’ve never once been asked for ID. And indeed I’ve often had reservations made by others for me, or arranged reservations for friends and colleagues from out of town - “I know a great restaurant you’ll like, I’ll reserve a table, just give them my name”.
Hotel bookings - again, the number of times I’ve booked a bunch of rooms for work under my name and then we just assign them at check-in, and the number of times I’ve travelled for work where the hotel room is reserved in someone else’s name.
So yeah, pretty sure this is commonplace that the person who shows up with the chit and can verify certain info gets the access.
And of course, there nothing at all to stop concert tickets being sold to verified buyers and then transferred to other verified buyers.
But during this court hearing it transpired - from emails sent by Michael Rapino - that Live Nation/Ticketmaster’s “Verified Fan” scheme is just a scam to make artist feel like ticketing isn’t the murky Wild West that Ticketmaster knows it is. “Verified Fan” meant almost nothing.
Airline tickets and train tickets are because they want to identify the person, for tracking/supposed national security purposes. Also, you typically can transfer train tickets. Depends on the country.
Dinner reservations: I’ve literally never had an issue “transferring” a reservation. There’s no verification, often, and the reservation tools typically let you change contact details. If I present myself as John Smith, I’ve never once had anyone question that.
Concert tickets are almost certainly in the 'dinner reservation' category. They have no need to identify me for national security reasons, so transferring them should not be a problem.
Airline tickets are done for identity at some level (although even that is dubious since until recently you could fly without any id at all), but at another level they charge exorbitant fees to change the name on the ticket or even to just cancel the itinerary.
> Concert tickets are almost certainly in the 'dinner reservation' category. They have no need to identify me for national security reasons
Admittedly I haven't been to many concerts, but 'national security reasons' seems like a reasonable rationale to me because a packed concert sounds like a great place to set off a suicide bomb vest for maximum impact. Have a cut-out who doesn't raise any red flags buy the ticket and hand it off to the person wearing the vest. No ID check? Mass panic ensues when the vest goes off, and people are hurt in the stampede for the exits even if the blast radius of the vest itself isn't all that large.
To be fair, we didn't start having the government screen people on planes when hijackers were merely endangering one plane worth of people. About 3,000 people died and likely tens of thousands of people were injured before we started doing that.
Because 3,000 people died I am unable to just transfer my upcoming flight to someone else? Even if this crazy sentence rang through in any way, just this year I had to fly twice "the next day" so-to-speak and basically bought tickets and then flew the next day. 9/11 is as far from a reason why airline tickets are non-transferable as it gets.
I didn’t make the claim you’re arguing against, that was someone else.
But the answer to your question is: partially
The reason you can’t change it overall is simply airline policy for business reasons. But the reason you can’t change even a misspelling within the last couple of days before a flight is in fact security related.
You can do this with train tickets, dinner reservations and hotel bookings though? Only thing you can’t do that with is for flights and that’s due to security checks/passport etc
Most concert tickets are not standing and you used to get paper tickets you could just hand to someone else, why should you not be allowed to do this just because it moved to digital?
Dinner reservations is a weird one. I have never heard of this concept where they would id you while you are being seated. Maybe there are super exclusive restaurants I'm oblivious to? But even so, roughly 100% of dinner reservations can be implicitly transferred.
I like the combined suggestions of three other commenters:
1) Allow transfers during a very short window (e.g. 24h before the event)
2) Allow full refunds up to x days before the event
3) Release a small batch of tickets 24h before the event, as a way of reducing the chance for scalpers to make money, and giving real fans a last chance without paying exorbitant prices
All three together offer a reasonable tradeoff. The tickets will go (mostly) to real fans, yet still giving you flexibility in case your plans change (work, sick, etc). And if you know well in advance, you can get a full refund, without having to worry with reselling, paying commission, etc.
Also prohibit secondary markets entirely. Similar to airlines, there's no reselling of tickets.
Of course, this is just wishful thinking. Too many intermediaries benefit from screwing showgoers, so this will never be implemented.
I think they do kinda work that way. When you buy an airline ticket through some third-party website, the price is lower than the main site, yet they're making a profit. They must be hoarding then reselling tickets with the airline's permission, right? Same with cruises.
The thing is, you as an individual can't transfer tickets because of what the other person said.
Because they're not airline tickets nor hotel bookings. Crazy though that nowadays train tickets have started implementing this ID thing (I'll take your word for it, last time I purchased a train ticket, as a tourist, I had to input no name on it, it was either in Italy or Switzerland, I forgot), the same goes for dinner reservations. Enshittification is indeed accelerating.
> For example you buy four tickets to go with your friends. But you get sick so you offer your ticket to a different friend instead. Oops that’s not allowed so now no one gets to go?
Or you give your friend's names when buying their tickets so they can go even when you can't or you have them buy their own tickets, or you're sick so you get a refund for your four tickets and your friends each buy their own afterwards.
For many events, the demographics lean toward age groups where people have jobs with work schedules that aren't known more than a few weeks in advance. The initially planned friend group (e.g., four people) can have little overlap with who is actually free on the event date and actually attends. Also, if the event has assigned seating, people buying their own tickets typically has the adverse outcome that you can't sit together.
Most flights are available at high frequencies (on the order of days, weeks) compared to concerts (once a year or so). You also don't care as much about sitting together on a plane.
I disagree, if you can't get seats with your friends in a concert, you might just not go because the social aspect is part of the experience, but if you can't get neighboring seats on a plane, you'd (or at least I would) just tolerate it since you would still get to be together at the main event (the destination).
> It’s kind of annoying in practice. For example you buy four tickets to go with your friends. But you get sick so you offer your ticket to a different friend instead. Oops that’s not allowed so now no one gets to go?
Get a refund if you can't go
> Or you buy tickets as a gift for someone.
This is easy part.
> There’s a lot of legit reasons to want transfers, outside of scalping
There of course are but they pale in comparison to what is currently happening with scalping. And as many have pointed out, there are a lot of other "tickets" we buy that are 100% non-transferable, these are because wrong people are making too much money
Scalping only exists because there's a difference between what the tickets cost and what the fans value them at.
For popular shows, there are more people who want to see the show than there are tickets available, so you need to pick a strategy for deciding who's going to go.. Ticket sellers have to balance lost profits from lower prices, prices being too high and the show not selling out, and fans being furious at the artist for making the tickets unaffordable for most of the true fanbase.
Dynamic pricing (airline style) and auction-based systems basically ensure that only the rich can attend. Scalping is a way to do price discrimination / progressive pricing. If you're a true fan, you know when the ticket sale will happen ahead of time, and you snatch the tickets quickly. If you're not, but are rich enough not to care, you have to buy from a scalper. Like all discounting and price discrimination strategies, it sometimes backfires; if you're a true fan attending your mother's funeral when the sale opens, you'll have to pay the rich person's price.
You can also see scalpers as being awarded by capitalism for taking risks. They make sure the show sells out and the artist is happy, even if fan interest is lower than expected. In such a case, they take on the losses, if all goes well, they take some of the profits from the sales.
That's fairly common in Japan: you can't transfer tickets, as they get a name attached at purchase, and many concerts use a lottery system. You register interest in tickets, and if you're selected, you get a window to buy them. No camping out the minute presales open, and the price is the price instead of rent-extracting dynamic bullshit.
Square Enix did that for the Final Fantasy conventions in the US as well (where details of the next FFXIV expansion will be announced later this month), but they added an additional requirement. You have to have an active subscription to the game to even have a chance.
The Savannah bananas do that for their tickets. You enter a free lottery to buy tickets then pay the same price regardless of when you buy them in that window if you're chosen. I don't think there's much scalping that happens with their tickets, so it must work.
I went through the multi-step process for the bananas last year. It failed to validate me during the purchase window. Their support never responded to me (it's been 9 months now).
It was a stupid flow that sent me from email to computer to phone and had one-time links that didn't transfer between devices.
I have no interest in going through this much effort to go to an event.
And I like your ideas but I don't see why the venues and artists don't want to capture more of what people are willing to pay enabled by what the parent comment suggested.
I wonder if in your system it actually attracts fans or just people that have the time to wait for tickets.
> I don't see why the venues and artists don't want to capture more of what people are willing to pay
Because artists don't always want to extract the maximum money possible from their fanbase?
Artists are not always rapacious capitalists. Sure, they want to make money from the show, but a lot of them also genuinely want to reach people who may not be able to drop hundreds of bucks on a ticket. Always selling to the highest bidder is a recipe for larger acts to only be accessible to the wealthy. And as surprising as it may seem, some of them have views on that sort of thing.
> Because artists don't always want to extract the maximum money possible from their fanbase?
I think that's both true and not. The larger truth is that trying to maximize the extraction during a single ticket sale is incredibly short-sighted of an artist. Having fans attend shows is a very effective way to grow your fan base and your brand, and that brings so much more lifetime value for an artist than you'd ever get from a single ticket sale (except for maybe on your retirement tour --and even then).
On the other, well, I just bought tickets to Iron Maiden’s “all the best bits” tour (who have to be getting close to retiring, one member already has) supported by Megadeth who are explicitly on their retirement tour.
And those were not cheap. No sir or ma’am.
There are also artists like the Cure though, and Robert Smith seems to have a genuine interest in keeping prices accessible.
> Why not just ban the transfer of tickets and allow refunds?
There are laws against transfer bans. Also, people don't like being required to provide identity information just to buy a ticket to a live event, and venues HATE enforcing identity checks.
...and you'd be surprised how often you can get a refund on tickets just by asking your venue for a refund.
> First choice in seats goes to the most passionate and attentive fans.
Now you've opened the debate about how to determine which fans are the most passionate and attentive... ;-) Ticketmaster has a service for this that attempts to address this called Verified Fan.
That's exactly my point: boycott the artists who contract with Live Nation. Your life won't be any less rich if you go see a local band instead of Taylor Swift. People have so many options now and yet they're afflicted with this weird FOMO.
I think you either missed the point or are intentionally sidestepping the point. If I have a favorite band and they're reasonably large and I want to go see them live, it'd be a bonafide miracle if their show wasn't at a LiveNation venue. The local spots are simply too small to be a reasonable stop on tour for any moderately popular artist.
I agree that you should definitely go see local artists at local venues, but you can do that and still really want to take your dad to see Steve Hackett play a live show. It's not up to you to decide what enriches my life.
Ah yes, the bands that can gather more than 1000 fans at a concert are all Taylor Swifts.
One of my favorite bands I've listened to since their first album is First Aid Kit. On their 10th anniversary they had several sold-out concerts at Globen [1] in Stockholm. Should've I just stopped immediately once they crossed the threshold of 100 fans worldwide? But they are a local band, they are Swedish.
In August I'm going to a concert of a Finnish band called Steve'n'Seagulls. They will play in Karlstad, a small Swedish town. They sell their tickets through Ticketmaster. Boycott I say! They are on the same level as Taylor Swift! (137k monthly listeners on Spotify, compared to Swift's 102 million).
Okay. What about bands that have been around since before Live Nation? Should I skip Radiohead, Guns'n'Roses and Sting because there's literally no way for them to tour except to book LiveNation-affiliated venues?
These are getting harder to find, but it's worth it. When I was in high school/college, I didn't need a YouTube algorithm to bring hip music to my attention. I just needed the flyer with upcoming shows at the church basement.
If you think it's trivial you must not be paying attention. You cannot keep your data from Google. Government websites include google tracking. Google drives past your house to take photos and sniff your wifi traffic. Your employer hands your data over to google. Your doctor hands your data over to google. Your bank hands your data over to google. You can limit how much you actively and voluntarily give them, but you can't free yourself from them entirely and still function in society.
Google doesn't care about privacy, but its easier for them to keep collecting your data if they can also keep it from getting unintentionally leaked to others.
The last thing Google wants is for people to start thinking about the amount of data they're handing over.
I'm sure that Sam isn't too worried. He's got to have many homes and bunkers all over the world. One crazy guy at your gates is easy to ignore. If AI ever starts putting massive numbers of people out of work and people end up angry and desperate and with a lot of time on their hands they could start to get troublesome though.
There are downsides to both formats, but with paper there's no company keeping track of the date/time I open the books on my selves, or how often I open them, or how long I spend on each page, or how long I take to read the whole thing. I also don't have to worry about the books on my shelves being remotely and silently censored or edited. I don't have to worry about ads being inserted into them and I can freely read them and sell/loan them to others long after they've been banned.
If it helps, the bright white pages yellow with age.
It'd be nice if dark mode caught on as an option. https://darkeditionbooks.com/ tries, but it looks like they don't have much more than works in the public domain.
> modern layoffs in aggregate are at least partially (~20%) intended and communicated as being ways to get rid of 'low performers',
In my experience they're often used to get rid of high wage earners and people with benefits no longer offered by company. Those people then get replaced with new hires who get paid less and have fewer benefits.
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