PreferredSeat.com Blog

Live Nation is introducing a new way to price concert tickets called “dynamic pricing” and it’s already in place in some venues. The idea is to raise or lower the price of tickets depending on the demand for tickets for the event. Live Nation and Ticketmaster say it is a way to take the money from the secondary market to the promoters and artists but it is really a way to maximise profits by jacking up the price of tickets for hot selling concerts.

Sure, Live Nation may drop the price of the slow selling shows, but that’s only to compete with ticket brokers who routinely sell tickets below face value for already overpriced concerts. They also plan to raise the prices of tickets if fans are buying them up too quickly.

What this really means is there will be no real face value for tickets. Some fans will pay more for the same seats and they may be buying them only minutes apart. It also gives the promoters incentive to pull seats to see how the market is going, then release them later at a higher price.

In the long run the fans will be paying much more for a good seat and in some cases less for a lousy seat. It changes the dynamics of going to a concert completely. Those with money will be sitting up front, those without a lot of money will sit in the back. But at least the artist and the promoter will get their fair share.

Paperless tickets are being pushed by Ticketmaster at the same time states such as New York and Minnesota are looking into banning them. The question is who has the rights to the tickets after they are sold. Ticketmaster wants to retain all rights to the tickets by using paperless tickets which require a credit card to purchase and to get into the venue on the night of the show.

Most ticket brokers such as Preferred Seating and ticket resell sites are against the paperless tickets because they cannot be resold, the buyer has no choice but to pay with a credit card, and they have no right to sell, give away or even not show up for the show if they want to get anyone else in with the tickets they bought on their card.

If Ticketmaster succeeds then they will also have a complete monopoly on tickets in both the primary and secondary ticket markets. They could do whatever they want with ticket prices because nobody could ever undercut them.

And to force everyone to have a credit card to buy a concert ticket is wrong too. It’s bad enough it’s hard too find an outlet close by to buy tickets from with cash but with paperless tickets you would never have the choice to use cash.  Fans should not be required to have a credit card to attend a concert, plain and simple.

The ticket bots that gobble up most of the best seats at Ticketmaster and Live Nation are thriving even after the hyped arrest several years ago of a ticket bot software ring. There is hardly a day that goes by that the bot software sellers are not sending out mass emails advertising their wares and they are even going as far as to put out press releases advertising the software.

Fans can tell when the ticket bots are dominating the ticket sales at 10:00 by the lack of tickets available right away. After the best tickets are bought up the remaining tickets drop back in the pool and this is why often you see better seats long after the on sale.

Ticketmaster has said they are trying to stop the ticket bots but they never do enough to even slow them down and the threat of the feds coming after you is obviously not slowing some people down.

All they have to do is limit the initial ticket sales to area codes closest to the stadium rather than allowing the best seats to be sold out of state time and time again. But this may limit the number of tickets sold for an event and they are pushing for paperless tickets to increase their profits so limiting the sale of tickets does not fit into their plan.