Ask yourself why airlines deliberately overbook flights while venues do their best to never overbook events, why are subject to identify verification before a flight, and why you go through the TSA before you board... and you'll start to understand why airline seats are maybe not such the perfect metaphor for concert seats.
> If only the federal government were allowed to pursue this case, it would have ended when the administration changed.
This is more why DOJ cases should remain independent from the executive branch. Politically controlled prosecutions means justice is intrinsically unequal. Having states be independent is helpful, but not in this regard.
> 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.
> They don't seem to mention the most obvious reason: the same companies profit from both the primary and secondary market.
That's not true. Ticketmaster has a monopoly (or near-monopoly) on the primary market. On the secondary market they have a fraction of the market; the dominant players are StubHub, SeatGeek, and Vivid. Furthermore, most of the revenue from primary ticket sales goes to the venue and the artist/promoter, and they are usually completely disintermediated from the resale market.
> 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.
> A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company.
The monopoly findings were about vertical integration, but the resale issue wasn't. I think, if you do some research, you discover that the vertical integration issues they were concerned about are actually a bigger part of the problem.
> Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale, because it gets to charge fees on all the resales through its platform.
The incentives for to prevent abuse of the primary ticket sale is that the venues, who actually decide how tickets are sold, don't like it. If Ticketmaster doesn't make them happy, they go elsewhere and lose out on the primary market. Perhaps ironically, they are often less concerned about abuse if they still have control over the ticket resale as well, which they often do when the resale happens on Ticketmaster. In practice though, most of the resale doesn't happen on Ticketmaster; this gives both the venues and Ticketmaster plenty of incentive to combat abuse.
> I'd like to see tickets sold by dutch auction.
Pretty much everyone who first enters the ticketing industry thinks auctions are a better way to sell tickets until they learn how the industry works. Interestingly, Ticketmaster offers auction-based ticket sales. You wouldn't know this, because venues don't want to use it. You might think a dutch auction for tickets would be great, but people who experience the reality often don't. Dutch auctions work when you're selling a commodity where each item is effectively the same as the other. Often people value each seat for an event differently. Dutch auctions, by their very nature, require the a fixed time window for the auction, which makes them difficult to fit the outcome you're describing... that would more be handled by some form of yield management where venues release blocks of tickets for sale at specific time windows, which is something that already happens in the live event business.
There's all kinds of dark aspects to the live event business, but it's generally completely different from the perception of the general public.
You might want to read their post before commenting. They seem very much aware of the need to reach people who aren't supporters and have always actively engaged with the platforms they are critical of. It's just that X isn't really an effective use of their time anymore.
> Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year.
Their YouTube channel reports 2,759,491 views in total, since 2006. So while X may be a fraction of what it was, it's still a significant multiple of at least one of the other channels they are happy to use.
What kind of activist org turns down the opportunity to reach 13 million people for essentially zero cost? One that has a different reason for doing so. The subtext is clear.
I imagine the new pay per use pricing for the X API has something to do with it. If you're reaching single digit percentage impressions and now you have to pay for that as well ...
If you think it is "essentially zero cost", I'm going to respectfully suggest you do not understand what you read. If you think they reached 13 million people on X last year, you do not understand social media.
They have made 399 posts to YouTube over the life of their YouTube channel, so that's an average of 20 posts a year.
Their posts on X are getting multiple millions of views. Yes, that has declined, but I need to see whether their viewership on Facebook has declined similarly before I can pass judgement on X.
People don’t use social media in the same way they did ten years ago.
And in any case, they’re still getting massive viewership on X by most people’s standards, surely?
I’m not convinced “X is declining” is a good faith argument here.
The post feigns outreach but the "Facebook and Tiktok are Evil" section blatantly panders to EFF supporters. It frontloads identity-group-affirming language to justify using platforms its supporters dislike at while saying nothing critical about platforms its supporters enjoy (Bluesky / Mastodon). That selective scrutiny suggest the EFF either doesn't care or is ignorant about the hang-ups of non-supporters, e.g., conservative and center-right folks.
I'm neither a supporter nor opponent; I only see the EFF's rhetoric as way for themselves and their supporters to lie about their mutual contempt for their opponents.
It's really weird that the EFF would post something on their own site to speak to their supporters, and that it would employ "identity-group-affirming language".
Just because they issue one post that is targeting their supporters doesn't mean that they don't care or are ignorant about the broader audience. That's ridiculous.
Agreed, I'm dismayed that the parent comment is currently the top comment, because it seems to be completely clueless as to what was actually in the blog post. EFF highlights that an X post gets less than 3% of the viewership of a tweet from 7 years ago. They also highlight that they are staying on platforms that they have strong disagreements with like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
I personally don't understand how anyone can use X anymore. I mean, even before the Musk takeover, there were plenty of loud (or, IMO, extremely obnoxious) voices from all sides, and I was generally not a fan because it just seemed designed to amplify the extremes and petty disagreements. Now, though, whenever I go there it is just a steaming pile of useless shit. Like I would look at a tweet or two from people whose perspectives I find insightful (even for folks I sometimes strongly disagree with), and the top comments under any of these people's posts is now the equivalent of "But your daddy is a giant poopie head!!" It doesn't even have any entertainment value, it's just pointless drivel where I can feel myself losing brain cells for every post I read.
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