How do scalpers actually get all the tickets faster than the average consumer?
In: 2406
Queue bots. The bots get in queue as soon as the line opens, therefore the scalpers have more chances to buy the tickets.
That’s if they don’t have bots that also do the payment but that’s one step further
There’s actually a surprisingly simple explanation for this. There was a news article a few years ago that showed that Ticketmaster actually owned a lot of ticket scalping companies, so of course they had dibs on the tickets, and Ticketmaster could crank their prices up even more, pretending that there were fewer tickets and more demand, and then making extra profits from whatever the scalping companies got paid for the tickets:
https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/ticketmaster-cheating-scalpers-726353/
Same way they do with consoles. They build bots that buy as much as possible. They buy hundreds before we can even buy one.
Part of the problem is Ticketmaster IS a lot of the scalpers. They literally sell their own tickets to themselves under a different name and then scalp them.
So, stupid question, why has no techy philanthropist embraced this technology to scoop up volumes of tickets to resell fairly to reduce the issue?
Lots of answers here about bots etc. But the other thing to remember is that sometimes it’s not necessarily that they’re getting there first, they are sometimes in the queue just like everyone else, but with the intention of selling for a profit afterwards.
[removed]
Scalping is big business, they have the budgets to develop software to automatically grab tickets.
The other half of it is good old fashioned collusion /conspiracy where ticketmaster holds back a portion of the tickets to be resold at high markups. Sometimes even on the behalf of the performers.
I am so glad the Justice Dept. just opened an antitrust investigation into live nation (who owns ticketmaster).
I find it even more damning that resell sites run by ticketmaster list higher than ticketmaster on Google ranking, so even when a show isn’t sold out you get resell tickets shown first.
Everyone should have to line up, camp out and suffer physically to see your favorite band. It’s a rite of passage.
Latest Answers