Artists are in on it to. Allowing scalpers almost always guarantees a sell out, even if the actual show only ends up half full.
When the Foo Fighters came to New Hampshire, they requested that no third party tickets be honored.
The band will play at the Bank of New Hampshire Pavilion in Gilford. The venue will not be accepting any third-party tickets for the concert. This includes sites like StubHub or Vivid Seats. The request was made by the band to try to thwart scalpers and ticket companies from buying up tickets to resell at higher prices. Unfortunately, a number of fans already bought the tickets and had them transferred.
WBZ has been talking with the venue and Live Nation for the past three days but have yet to get a statement or interview with the company. They did release a statement to fans saying only tickets that show up in a Live Nation or Ticketmaster account will be valid.
I wasnāt able to get tickets, I donāt know if it was a disaster. I remember a decade ago, I think the Foo Fighters only released physical tickets you could buy at a box office.
Normally, Matt Levineās newsletter goes in the stonk thread, but today this part fits here:
People are worried about Travis Scott liquidity
My understanding of how popular musiciansā concerts work is:
- Tickets go on sale for normal-seeming prices.
- Five seconds later, all of the tickets have been bought by bots, brokers, resellers, etc., and the show is sold out.
- The resellers sell the tickets online at whatever price the market will bear, which is generally many times the face value of the tickets.
This understanding is, however, pretty biased by how I consume information. I do not buy a lot of concert tickets. When I am aware of concert ticket pricing dynamics, it is because people on the internet are saying ājust paid $20,000 for two Taylor Swift tickets and it was worth it!ā For all I know there are like two artists like that, [4] and everyone else just sells tickets for $60 directly to people who actually want to go to the shows. The ones with speculative frenzies are just the ones I read about.
Iām not alone, though. If your model of concert tickets is āresellers buy them on Ticketmaster for $60 and resell them on StubHub at $1,000,ā then you might want to get in on that. You might find a way to buy dozens, or thousands, of tickets for $60 each, and then resell them all at $1,000. Everyone might do that. But maybe this model is wrong? Maybe the market-clearing rate for a lot of concert tickets is in fact $60? Maybe itās less? Maybe lots of concerts donāt sell out at $60? Or maybe they do, but only to speculative resellers, who then have nobody to sell to. Maybe every concert is oversubscribed, but a lot of the buyers are flippers?
At 404, Jason Koebler writes about Travis Scottās tour:
Check StubHub right now, though, and you can find thousands of tickets to āsold outā shows in many cities for between $10 and $20, far below the face value for his cheapest tickets at $61.50 before fees when they first went on sale.
In ticket reseller lingo, Scottās tour is a ābloodbath,ā the result of overzealous brokers and noobs āoverbuyingā tickets based on a miscalculation of the likely value of his tickets on the secondary market. Many brokers now stand to lose a lot of money on Scottās shows. At least part of this buying frenzy was fueled by a bet placed by PFS Buyers Club, a credit card maxing site I wrote about earlier this week that has recently pivoted from buying rare coins to buying concert tickets. PFS told its members to buy as many tickets to Scottās shows as possible, according to emails viewed by 404 Media. PFS itself stands to lose more than $1 million on Travis Scott alone when all is said and done, it told members.
Members of the club were promised by PFS that they would be reimbursed for any tickets they bought and would additionally get a $25 per ticket commission. Hundreds of members bought thousands of tickets, most of which are now selling for far below face value. I spoke to people who are currently floating tens of thousands of dollars on their credit cards for Travis Scott tickets they have no idea what to do with. PFS has been telling angry members that it could go out of business because of how much money it stands to lose from the bet.
āTickets they have no idea what to do withā? They can just go to the concerts! And bring, like, dozens of friends. Just arenas filled with disgruntled credit card points maximizers who have never heard of Travis Scott, really great energy for those shows.
Hahaha that last paragraph is the best.
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Foo Fighters are playing at Fenway Park next summer - The Hives opening! and it does say Tickets Not Transferable.
Who looks at that weirdo crackhead spouting nonstop deranged garbage and thinks yeah, Iāll front that guy a few million on spec.
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Thats awesome. We need every one of these shows to just get bloodbathed to death to correct the market.
Much like meme stonks, NFTs, and crypto, speculators ruin fucking everything and normal people are left holding the bag, either priced out of a show theyre dying to see or stuck paying 10sx the face value to get to. Its gross. It needs to die. You shouldnt be able to speculate on entertainment just because you have a credit limit to do so
We found Domās secret UP account.
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Dom has way better stories than that.
Said it before, but I think a billion people will be on this stuff in 10 years.
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I was going to say that this is ridiculousāno way itās become widespread enough (and effective enough) that it woud have a measurable effect on Walmart sales.
But then I see itās already been prescribed 9 million times, in just the last 3 months of 2022!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/27/ozempic-prescriptions-data-analysis/
This is crazy:
Analysts at Goldman Sachs on Tuesday published research highlighting 54 anti-obesity drugs in clinical trials or that have shown positive results in late-stage studies. Though uncertainties remain, they wrote, the new generation of weight-loss drugs has the potential to ābecome one of the largest therapeutic categories across the biopharmaceutical industry.ā
Dom would have banged Drew and Heather.
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Artist I love has recently became famous famous and his summer 2024 tour tickets went on sale last week through Ticketmaster. In an attempt to prevent a re-sale fiasco, tickets are ONLY sold through Ticketmaster and are only transferrable at face value. Sounds great, letās do this.
I get in the āwaiting roomā queue for Hollywood Bowl tickets and thereās 8,000 people in front of me. Ticketmaster has also activated some kind of dynamic, demand-based pricing for this sale, so prices are kinda through the roof. I purchase 2 decent seats for way more than I want to, and cough up an additional $100 in Ticketmaster bullshit fees. Have a peek on Reddit and his fans are ripshit at ticket prices and the overall purchasing experience. This isnāt rich boomers going to Bruce or Billy Joel, itās a folk-y artist selling to 20 and 30 year olds.
Now the artist is apologizing to fans at his current shows and trying to do damage control. People are rightfully pissed off. More so at the grubby label and the venues, but heās still taking plenty of ricochets. The entire experience is totally broken once an artist achieves a certain level of fame. We just saw this guy last November at a little theatre and GA tickets were like $40 each. For next summerās show, Iām in for over a nickel and we havenāt even gotten to parking/transit, drinks, and $60 sweatshirts yet. Lol me.
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āmake money buying Travis Scott concert ticketsā sounds like some sort of reddit meme stock joke. I canāt imagine why selling concert tickets for a guy that killed 10 people at one of his concerts didnāt work out?
Yeah, I saw a bunch of the pre sale chatter from people in those buying clubs who knew nothing about Travis Scott but just assumed it was a good deal b/c this random buyers club told them it wasā¦ Iām an lolold, but I knew enough to figure out that if I was able to get $20 tickets to see Nas and Wu Tang in an arena in DC that probably meant Travis tickets werenāt all going to sell for way over face value in places like Tulsa.
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Arkansas is going through PodiumGate right now. What is PodiumGate? Does it involve an actual podium? People donāt know. If I had to guess itās Sanders covering for all expense trips for donors around the world in the government dime.
It all starts back in June when Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas takes a trade delegation to Paris, France to drum up business for Arkansas. She was visiting an aerospace trade show and aerospace and defense actually make up a significant amount of the stateās exports. (And yes, Iām withholding some details about what went down in Paris to build up dramatic tension. You have to keep reading.)
Thereās a guy in Arkansas named Matt Campbell, a lawyer/blogger who seems to have mad FOIA skills. He publishes a blog called the Blue Hog Report. And save that link since this story almost entirely goes back to his on-going sleuthing. Campbell files a Freedom of Information Act request for the expense records for the trip. But what he gets back is very limited due to a law that allows the governorās office to make exemptions to the state FOIA law. Campbell points out that these exemptions are only for security issues and itās not at all clear why expense reports from a trade trip to Paris need to be withheld for the governorās security. So now Campbell sues to get the records. Two days after Campbell sues Sanders calls a special session of the state legislature for, among other things, a dramatic revision of the stateās FOIA law
Hmmm.
Arkansas is a pretty Republican state at this point. But the FOIA changes are too big a pill for even state Republicans to swallow. A more limited reform is eventually passed. But at this point Sanders has made a pretty big story about what seems like a gadfly blogger just trying to go through some expense reports.
Eventually Campbell gets the documents. But thereās something weird. The governorās office paid almost $20,000 for a podium it purchased from a company called Beckett Events, LLC. No one has seen the new podium and there seem to be all sorts of irregularities tied to how the thing was expensed.Then it gets more fun. The state GOP steps in and says, āhey since everyoneās getting so bent out of shape about this, weāll cover the cost of the podium. So everyone can just go back to what they were doing before this became an issue.ā
Needless to say the state party stepping in to pay for the podium didnāt settle the matter.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/lets-talk-about-podiumgate
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Imparting important grammar information to passersby on the National Mall.
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Stab in the dark - Noah Kahan? I was blown away that he gets to play Fenway. I didnāt realize he was that big.