Ticketmaster, Tay Tay and chasing phantoms

on2legs

YourDirtisMyfood said:

Sarava said:

My wife has a presale code for Garth Brooks in Vegas for tomorrow. She has a timeslot of 4pm-5pm. I dont remember them doing time slots the last time I did a verified sale. So I think there's progress in them trying to break up the globs of people coming all at once.

And lets be honest. Taylor Swift is about as popular as any artist in the world. The issues with her fans probably wouldn't be an issue for just about any other artist.

Nah, the truth is TS is in a completely different league then probably anyone else right now.  This isn't like getting tickets to Aerosmith or Green Day.  Taylor is a pop-culture experience, not much different then seeing Michael Jackson in the 80s.  Not saying TS is more or less popular at either peaks with Michael, but she truly is a pop-culture icon that transcends all music genres.

I think that was his point.  

Sarava said:

My wife has a presale code for Garth Brooks in Vegas for tomorrow. She has a timeslot of 4pm-5pm. I dont remember them doing time slots the last time I did a verified sale. So I think there's progress in them trying to break up the globs of people coming all at once.

And lets be honest. Taylor Swift is about as popular as any artist in the world. The issues with her fans probably wouldn't be an issue for just about any other artist.

Get_Right

I think the problem is the deception. A 16 year old trying for tickets has no clue that there are only a small amount of shitty tickets available at "face value" and the rest will be sold using TM's algorithm to identify a market price. Taylor Swift tickets go onsale Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Tickets are $200, $300 and $500. Except there are a ridiculously low number of tickets available at those prices. Presales are another deception that they use to sell the less desirable seats. Verified resale/premium pricing. That is another deception. I suspect it is TM and not real people.  TM is basically acting like a cartel at this point.

Not sure what the solution is. The deception is the problem and maybe that amounts to false advertising. Perhaps there are enough Taylor Swift fans to actually force a change. Sadly, I am not hopeful as our country has bigger problems than concert tickets.

hihobibo

YourDirtisMyfood said:

Sarava said:

My wife has a presale code for Garth Brooks in Vegas for tomorrow. She has a timeslot of 4pm-5pm. I dont remember them doing time slots the last time I did a verified sale. So I think there's progress in them trying to break up the globs of people coming all at once.

And lets be honest. Taylor Swift is about as popular as any artist in the world. The issues with her fans probably wouldn't be an issue for just about any other artist.

Nah, the truth is TS is in a completely different league then probably anyone else right now.  This isn't like getting tickets to Aerosmith or Green Day.  Taylor is a pop-culture experience, not much different then seeing Michael Jackson in the 80s.  Not saying TS is more or less popular at either peaks with Michael, but she truly is a pop-culture icon that transcends all music genres.

And age ranges. Full families will attend. The 6 ticket max. was likely hit by a majority of the buyers. 

JeBurkhardt

There are rumors of a Beyonce tour next year. Watch the frenzy that occurs over that tour as well.

mace1229

Lerxst1992 said:

what’s the alternative? AOC says break up Ticketmaster, so we have five different vendors selling tickets to a show? That sound like it’s more expensive to put on a tour. Biden says the fees are excessive, but a big part of the fees go to venues and promoter, and sometimes back to the artist, so just charge us one price, the full cost of the ticket? Does a supermarket break out their margin from the cost of a steak?

Maybe the artists should front the full cost of the shows and bear the risk of cost overruns?

I used to save a lot of fees by buying tickets at the box office. That was a long time ago, maybe 10 years since I last did that. But at least them, it was just pure TM fees, otherwise they wouldn't go away by buying then in person.

Get_Right

It is the deception. If a supermarket announces we have filet mignon at $8.99/lb but they are all out every time you go. But they say we have ribeye at $19.99/lb. You buy it because you want a steak. That is deception and false advertising. That is my beef .  Same thing happening with TM, it is the classic bait and switch while using technology to determine a market price given the time before the performance. Does not matter if they shape it as fees or prices. It is a consumer squeeze and it gets harder and harder for artists to say no when the dollars are so large. Technology quantifies that spread, and it is big money.

mace1229

Get_Right said:

It is the deception. If a supermarket announces we have filet mignon at $8.99/lb but they are all out every time you go. But they say we have ribeye at $19.99/lb. You buy it because you want a steak. That is deception and false advertising. That is my beef .  Same thing happening with TM, it is the classic bait and switch while using technology to determine a market price given the time before the performance. Does not matter if they shape it as fees or prices. It is a consumer squeeze and it gets harder and harder for artists to say no when the dollars are so large. Technology quantifies that spread, and it is big money.

That's why they put something like "while supplies last" then its not false advertising.
I started a fun documentary on Netflix called "Pepsi, where's my Jet?" Only 1 episode in, but he sued Pepsi for a fighter Jet because it was listed as one of the possible contest prizes in a commercial. Not sure how it turned out yet.

Get_Right

But they are not selling the full supply, that is the deception. And that is why there are a ton of pissed off Taylor Swift fans even though I know demand far exceeds supply. They are controlling the market price for as many tickets as they can.

Douglas12373

I was talking with some friends about this recently and I can't think of any other artist in history quite like Taylor. The entire top Billboard top 10? In the streaming era! Multiple football stadium sellouts in every market in the country? The closest I could come up with is Garth, but I think she dwarfs even his popularity. I mean, there's the Beatles, but that was a whole other phenomena. I'm not a fan (thank God, I have enough trouble getting tickets already) but damn, good for her. Its amazing

droptheleash9

Douglas12373 said:

I was talking with some friends about this recently and I can't think of any other artist in history quite like Taylor. The entire top Billboard top 10? In the streaming era! Multiple football stadium sellouts in every market in the country? The closest I could come up with is Garth, but I think she dwarfs even his popularity. I mean, there's the Beatles, but that was a whole other phenomena. I'm not a fan (thank God, I have enough trouble getting tickets already) but damn, good for her. Its amazing

It is truly crazy. I've never seen an artist with a buzz quite like her. It's just insane to me that there are that many people willing to shell out thousands of dollars PER TICKET for 2 hours worth of songs that will be exactly the same as the ones played the next night.

And as good and talented of an artist and songwriter as she is, she's a 10x better business-worman. Everything she does is calculated and all about the benjamins. Take for example her beef with Apple Music and Spotify, which she started under the guise of fighting for the small artists to get higher fees per stream when it was really her flexing her muscle and trying to get a bigger piece of the pie. She gets to say "see I'm fighting for the little man" when it's really about padding her wallet; a financial boost and unbelievable PR. She's also had programs to incentivize fans buying merchandise by promising them a higher likelihood of getting tickets via "boosts." Her merch is timed and limited edition. She's got an army of swifties who will violently attack anyone on social media who dares to say anything that could even remotely be construed as criticism. It's honestly cult-like. She's also more or less infallible in the public eye, though I must admit she's generally a great role model for her younger listeners. 

I'm not sure there's ever been an artist like her in terms of capitalizing on her popularity and I'm not sure there ever will be another one. I don't mean any of this to come across as critical or as being a hater (see the part where I said she's an insanely talented songwriter and businesswoman), it's just hard for me to wrap my head around it sometimes.

 

Douglas12373

Yeah, agreed, not a fan but a huge admirer. Re-recording all of your back catalog when some scumbag buys the rights? That's a baller move right there

YourDirtisMyfood

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/22/taylor-swift-tour-promoter-had-to-work-with-ticketmaster.html

PJNB

Taylor Swift should have followed in Pearl Jams footsteps. Do fan to fan for face value and keep your platinum tickets to a minimum. Why are other artists not doing this? Pearl Jam can't be the only ones that have this kind of power of TM. 

pjhawks

PJNB said:

Taylor Swift should have followed in Pearl Jams footsteps. Do fan to fan for face value and keep your platinum tickets to a minimum. Why are other artists not doing this? Pearl Jam can't be the only ones that have this kind of power of TM. 

Money.  I’m guessing PJ takes a lot less money than they could command 

Go Animal

I'll find a way into one of the Tampa shows on day of show (just like we do for the boys), but nothing beats free, lol.

Taylor Swift, 2003 - Florida Music Festival, Wall St., Orlando, FL 

Go Animal

She's like 12 or 13 here, pervs lol. But noteworthy because this is also where Tabitha's Secret came from, which evolved into Matchbox 20.

Rob Thomas used to sit around with us other street rats, eating Cold Cut Trios & Baked Lays from the Wall St. Subway😂

demetrios

If Ticketmaster is a greedy capitalist, so is Taylor Swift https://www.economist.com/business/2022/12/01/if-ticketmaster-is-a-greedy-capitalist-so-is-taylor-swift

tylermoore

pjhawks said:

Hagrid7575 said:

I know there are lot of strong emotions here regarding ticketing ops and evil rakshasas (TM), but after the last two days of trying to lock down our daughter's Christmas gift, I have a new-found appreciation for how PJ does things. It's not perfect (By law, anything even remotely attached to TM can't be), but I've lived the alternative, and I'd rather eat a dead and decaying fish that's been baking in sunshine for days and covered with flies then relive this ordeal again. 

Anywho, carry on you crazy kids. 
 

The Swift ticket mess makes me really appreciate how great it was PJ and the 10 Club getting so many tickets into the Club Members for these past US shows.  I imagine the guys gave up a lot to secure so many of those tickets for us. 

Although I still wish there were tickets available on Stub Hub for shows.

Late to this thread but I LOVED not dealing with stubhub honestly. Enforces the face value. I scored amazing tickets to the Oakland shows, and if thebresale market was forced to stubhub I would’ve paid double, at least. Stubhub is a just as bad of a racket as Ticketmaster. If not worse 

demetrios

https://instagram.com/p/Cl39ZmGpX97/embed/

BF25394

Douglas12373 said:

I was talking with some friends about this recently and I can't think of any other artist in history quite like Taylor. The entire top Billboard top 10? In the streaming era! Multiple football stadium sellouts in every market in the country? The closest I could come up with is Garth, but I think she dwarfs even his popularity. I mean, there's the Beatles, but that was a whole other phenomena. I'm not a fan (thank God, I have enough trouble getting tickets already) but damn, good for her. Its amazing

Taylor Swift is a hugely popular and extremely talented artist, but having the whole top 10 is not quite the historical achievement it seems to be because the chart rules did not allow for such a thing to happen until relatively recently.  Until 1998, a song had to be physically available as a single to be eligible to chart (which is why the Beatles having the entire top five in April 1964, on four different record labels, is an achievement that stands above all else).  And streaming wasn't fully accounted for until 2013.  If Thriller had existed in the music consumption world of today, the only thing that would have kept it from holding down the entire top ten is the fact that it only had nine songs on it!

Having said that, Taylor's top ten actually understates just how much her music was consumed that week because she also sold over 500,000 physical albums. Those sales count for nothing on the Hot 100, even though the people who bought those CDs and LPs are obviously listening to them, because there is no way to track someone's private consumption of physical media. (This phenomenon usually tends to hurt rock and country acts on the Hot 100 because artists in those genres sell relatively more physical media compared to most pop and hip-hop artists-- with pop megastars like Swift and Adele as exceptions who sell gigantic numbers of physical product.)  If you could somehow track people's listening to physical media, Swift would have had the entire top 13 on the Hot 100 (instead of the "measly" 13 of the top 15 that she actually tallied).

The reality is that there really should be two different sets of chart records, one from the pre-streaming era and one from the streaming era (almost like baseball had the dead-ball era and the live-ball era).  When Billboard tells you that Drake has broken Madonna's record for most top 10 songs on the Hot 100, you should take that with a huge grain of salt because many of those Drake songs are not "hits" in the traditional sense.  They're just tracks that get huge first-week streaming numbers by people sampling the album that then drop like a rock in subsequent weeks.  By comparison, nearly every one of Madonna's 38 top tens was a true "hit"-- a song that people listened to in large numbers for three or four months.

Unfortunately, Billboard still hasn't figured out a way to deal with streaming accurately.  Singles consumption has skewed the album chart (because, for example, when people stream the crap out of a smash single, Billboard converts that into an "equivalent" number of album sales and counts it toward the Billboard 200 even though that's not really album consumption).*  And album consumption has skewed the singles chart because of things like the Taylor Top Ten takeover or Drake's previous "record" of having nine of the top ten.

* One of the other bizarre things about this is that, when someone streams, say, "Bohemian Rhapsody," Billboard arbitrarily decides which of the several albums it appears on to credit for the streams.