The article makes it sound like the information about Andro is new but it has been known for years. An SEC filing[0] from March of last year mentions it and I was able to find a post on Wall Street Oasis[1] talking about Andro three years ago. Awful, predatory behavior for sure. Is it just the issues with the World Cup ticket sales that have made people care about this?
IANAL, but the exact language from the complaint was:
>WHEREFORE, Plaintiff, individually and on behalf of the Class, respectfully requests that this Court:
>...
>Award compensatory, statutory, and/or restitutionary damages, as applicable, in an amount to be determined at trial and that the aggregate amount in controversy across the whole class exceeds $5,000,000;
it doesn't say that the damages are capped at 5M, only that they're asking for at least 5M.
Except Live Nation owns most of the venues that aren’t stadiums. The mom and pop’s couldn’t compete with their monopoly and went under or sold to them.
The fact that "the name on the ticket must match your photo ID, but you can resell at any time before the event" would instantly solve scalping problems and yet nobody does it is your clue that nobody actually wants scalping problems to be solved. Scalpers are the sin eaters for Ticketmaster and the events themselves, taking the hate so the performers don't have to.
Do they? Not necessarily making an argument for or against the original point, but to me airports epitomize "slow and tedious". My hunch is that they also don't handle nearly the volume of people/time that major stadiums do during event entry.
That's the security check, of which id check is only one part. The bottleneck is everyone needing to take out their laptops and then repack their bags. Same with boarding. The bottleneck there is people putting their luggage into the overhead compartments.
Maybe a bit of a dystopian situation but ... I think this was 10 year ago now I went to an Utada Hikaru concert where I had to upload a picture of myself on a dedicated website and when the tickets were scanned I think they had access to that picture
Here’s a wild idea, tie tickets to a drivers license/photo id number, and scan the id.
Edit guess that doesn’t work for kids. Start the tickets at 10k and drop them by a percentage a day. Automatic price discovery. Rich people can just buy them whenever they want.
The price tickets sell for will be higher if scalping exists. Demand increases for 2 reasons:
1 - I’m more likely to buy a ticket or pay a higher price if there’s a chance of turning a profit if I can’t go.
2 - Speculators are more likely to buy unused inventory if they can turn a profit. This increases total tickets sold. (Scalpers get paid for taking risk)
I’m not defending this. I’ve given up on concerts for my favorite larger bands due to sticker shock.
All of your points apply to performers who may not sell out, so scalpers take risk, you may buy more, speculators may soak up what would go unused.
But consider Ms. Swift. All of her shows sell out, period. Face value tickets are maybe $400 max, and resell for $2000+. I don’t think she sees any benefit from scalpers. Ditto any performer that is in very high demand and certain to sell out and have unmet demand.
Illegal usually means there's a law forbidding it.
Tickets are usually governed by the Terms and Conditions (Contract) between original purchase.
It's already possible for the terms to forbid resale.
So as it stands it's possible to sell untransferable tickets. And those who sell such tickets are in breach of contract, but are not breaking a law.
What would 'making reselling tickets illegal' entail, a law that makes selling transferable tickets illegal? That would be a very weak position. A law that upgrades the resale of untransferable tickets to a crime? Again a very weak position.
I contend that people that suggest and write laws should learn about actual law.
I don’t really understand the outrage over scalpers. Isn’t this just normal market behavior? Is a retailer that buys things and sells them with a markup a scalper?
People seem to be willing to pay crazy prices for events.
There is a reason this doesn't work in general though.
If you bought up all the food, farmers would raise prices until either you couldn't afford to do that anymore or eventually there is a splurge of new farmers taking advantage of all your free money until you run out of money. It could maybe work in times of famine where the government introduces price controls or rationing; it does not work in normal times.
For black markets (which is essentially what scalping is) to work, there has to be some shortage of a good that is priced artificially low. It works with concerts because singers can only sing so much but they also don't want to make the concert so unaffordable that only millionaires can go. There are very few situations like that. In most industries you would just increase prices until supply equals demand.
This makes sense, but I'd contend it's all the more reason for outrage: not only are scalpers doing what they're doing anyways, but they're destroying the (totally legitimate and sympathetic!) reason for "artificially" lowering the price to begin with.
I should note that outrage doesn't seem to land on the people who buy from scalpers, which is...probably correct? Seems easier to say "don't break the contract" to scalpers instead of fans who are just able to pay more.
This is the reason that businesses don't try to monopolize the food industry. It's not competition as we just saw from the egg industry. The government gets pushed back from the masses pretty quickly on food related issues.
>This is the reason that businesses don't try to monopolize the food industry. It's not competition as we just saw from the egg industry. The government gets pushed back from the masses pretty quickly on food related issues.
But you provided your own counterexample with eggs?
It's not a simple buy/sell marketplace. There's no recourse for fans who purchase a confirmed ticket, only to find that the seller "doesn't have them" and see the same ticket relisted for higher if the price jumps. Stubhub prioritize these scalper relationships and doesn't meaningfully protect its buyers from getting screwed over.
If reselling is allowed a market is created, pushing up prices. But that extra money doesn't go towards anyone involved in the creation of the product! It goes towards scalpers. Though there's a bit of price discovery value....
Without reselling scalpers have no reason to scoop up the tickets.
So if you prevent reselling... then concertgoers just have to do a lottery or something for the scarce resource and people who aren't interested in the concert have no reason to buy the tickets! Just a better experience for everyone except for the scalpers and I guess Taylor Swift cuz she won't know the price ceiling for tickets.
The ultimate customers would certainly pay more than the face price which is what the scalpers pay, yet the scalpers get all the tickets. This is abnormal market behaviour.
An auction would be the obvious solution, and I guess you could argue it effectively is an auction, just with initial sales that pretend to be a race and are actually sold to speculators who then run the auction.
You are describing rent-seeking behavior: middle men who add no economic value yet inject themselves into transactions.
Yes, this is “normal” in the sense that it is common. It is “normal” in the same way that cancer is “normal”.
No, this is not “normal” in the sense of being behavior the government should just tolerate. It is in the same category of market failures as monopolies and externalities.
I think that if you poke at the term "rent-seeking" with the definition of "middle men who add no economic value yet inject themselves into transactions", you'll just end up arguing about what "adding economic value" means.
That said...if you can do that, you'll probably find that some additions of economic value are far more defensible than others, so it shouldn't all be flattened in the manner you're suggesting.
I mean, scalpers add economic value, right?! They allow (wealthier) people who didn't stand in line at the right time to have a chance to purchase a ticket!
Yeah. “Rent-seeking” is just a fancy rhetorical term for “people doing things I don’t like with money”.
Subscriptions are rent-seeking. Loans are rent-seeking. Spending millions in capital to buy a building and renting apartments for thousands? Rent-seeking. Copyright and patents, for sure, unless an AI company is involved in which case copyright is noble and must last a thousand years, because AI companies are rent-seeking.
The outrage is over the apparent collusion between a platform that argues it only facilitates a fan-to-fan marketplace, and a hedge fund run by the platform's CEO that sells a massive volume of resale tickets. This is definitely not on the spirit of competition regardless of it's illegal or not
Yes it's rational market behavior. But it bothers people for such a blatantly worthless middleman to capture all consumer surplus for themselves while providing zero value.
We've known for years that ticketmaster scams their tickets on StubHub. Concerts selling out instantly, to only see tons of tickets on stub...
I'm sure if they get shut down, they'll just do it again under a different name, but they can't pretend it's a small handful of scalpers when they're the ones doing it themselves.
For StubHub to have insider dealing isn't so surprising, but I am shocked at how brazenly and openly it's occurring. Nothing covert or concealed, just the CEO of a marketplace openly admitting that they run a hedge fund that resells scalped goods on that marketplace while keeping other scalpers off the platform.
no, it gets more layers.. a quick search says "Through its affiliate Colloquy Capital, StubHub helps bankroll other mass ticket scalpers by providing short-term financing based on expected future sales, further inflating the volume of professional resellers on the platform." (I have no direct knowledge of these participants)
Ticketmaster sure but back in the day I could get tickets for a song on stubhub. That seems to be a relic of the past and the resale ticket marketplace is barely less than face value.
You're not entirely wrong, but the root issue is artists not charging the market clearing price for tickets. If you're selling something worth $1000 for $200, you shouldn't be surprised arbitrageurs pop up to take advantage.
That's also easy to solve. Allocate discounted tickets by lottery and bind to a name (think airline tickets). If for whatever reason they can't make it, the ticket goes back into the lottery pool. Or maybe if they want the tickets to be transferable, you can put in some nominee ticket holders (eg. max 3 people you can transfer it to).
I understand the arguments against charging the market clearing price, but I do just think it would be very funny for Taylor Swift to sell out a concert charging $10k+ a ticket.
The article makes it sound like the information about Andro is new but it has been known for years. An SEC filing[0] from March of last year mentions it and I was able to find a post on Wall Street Oasis[1] talking about Andro three years ago. Awful, predatory behavior for sure. Is it just the issues with the World Cup ticket sales that have made people care about this?
[0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1337634/000119312525...
[1] https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forum/private-equity/andro-c...
Those with ties to the industry have known for decades.
> StubHub and its CEO, Eric Baker, have been hit with a proposed $5-million class-action lawsuit
This should be much higher. A class action lawsuit shouldn’t be worth less than what these people can make scalping a single Taylor Swift concert.
This just opens an opportunity for them to settle, admit no wrongdoing and then include a clause in the settlement that prevents further lawsuits.
IANAL, but the exact language from the complaint was:
>WHEREFORE, Plaintiff, individually and on behalf of the Class, respectfully requests that this Court:
>...
>Award compensatory, statutory, and/or restitutionary damages, as applicable, in an amount to be determined at trial and that the aggregate amount in controversy across the whole class exceeds $5,000,000;
it doesn't say that the damages are capped at 5M, only that they're asking for at least 5M.
End it.
Make reselling tickets illegal again overall.
Allow resale within 5 days of the show only (for those that genuinely can't make it), and for face value+original fees only.
The UK is passing a law which makes it illegal to resell event tickets for greater than the face value.
Live Nation needs to get the guillotine. The monopoly will find other ways of extracting value if you try to fix one problem created by it at a time.
Except Live Nation owns most of the venues that aren’t stadiums. The mom and pop’s couldn’t compete with their monopoly and went under or sold to them.
The fact that "the name on the ticket must match your photo ID, but you can resell at any time before the event" would instantly solve scalping problems and yet nobody does it is your clue that nobody actually wants scalping problems to be solved. Scalpers are the sin eaters for Ticketmaster and the events themselves, taking the hate so the performers don't have to.
Adding ID checks would make venue entry a slower and more tedious process.
In practice a lot of venues are already 21+ so they are already checking IDs.
In the vast majority of venues, ID checks are happening anyway to verify eligibility for drinking.
Yup, I'm in 30s and have been ID'd for every show I've gone to in the last few years.
>Adding ID checks would make venue entry a slower and more tedious process.
Airports seem to handle them just fine?
Do they? Not necessarily making an argument for or against the original point, but to me airports epitomize "slow and tedious". My hunch is that they also don't handle nearly the volume of people/time that major stadiums do during event entry.
>but to me airports epitomize "slow and tedious".
That's the security check, of which id check is only one part. The bottleneck is everyone needing to take out their laptops and then repack their bags. Same with boarding. The bottleneck there is people putting their luggage into the overhead compartments.
Maybe a bit of a dystopian situation but ... I think this was 10 year ago now I went to an Utada Hikaru concert where I had to upload a picture of myself on a dedicated website and when the tickets were scanned I think they had access to that picture
Here’s a wild idea, tie tickets to a drivers license/photo id number, and scan the id.
Edit guess that doesn’t work for kids. Start the tickets at 10k and drop them by a percentage a day. Automatic price discovery. Rich people can just buy them whenever they want.
How do performers benefit from scalping?
The price tickets sell for will be higher if scalping exists. Demand increases for 2 reasons:
1 - I’m more likely to buy a ticket or pay a higher price if there’s a chance of turning a profit if I can’t go.
2 - Speculators are more likely to buy unused inventory if they can turn a profit. This increases total tickets sold. (Scalpers get paid for taking risk)
I’m not defending this. I’ve given up on concerts for my favorite larger bands due to sticker shock.
All of your points apply to performers who may not sell out, so scalpers take risk, you may buy more, speculators may soak up what would go unused.
But consider Ms. Swift. All of her shows sell out, period. Face value tickets are maybe $400 max, and resell for $2000+. I don’t think she sees any benefit from scalpers. Ditto any performer that is in very high demand and certain to sell out and have unmet demand.
Not a lawyer but here's how it works:
Illegal usually means there's a law forbidding it.
Tickets are usually governed by the Terms and Conditions (Contract) between original purchase.
It's already possible for the terms to forbid resale.
So as it stands it's possible to sell untransferable tickets. And those who sell such tickets are in breach of contract, but are not breaking a law.
What would 'making reselling tickets illegal' entail, a law that makes selling transferable tickets illegal? That would be a very weak position. A law that upgrades the resale of untransferable tickets to a crime? Again a very weak position.
I contend that people that suggest and write laws should learn about actual law.
I don’t really understand the outrage over scalpers. Isn’t this just normal market behavior? Is a retailer that buys things and sells them with a markup a scalper?
People seem to be willing to pay crazy prices for events.
>Is a retailer that buys things and sells them with a markup a scalper?
If you bought all of the food then offered the food at 10x the prices, we'd be outraged with you, yes.
Stakes are lower because it's a luxury good, not food, but it's the same idea.
There is a reason this doesn't work in general though.
If you bought up all the food, farmers would raise prices until either you couldn't afford to do that anymore or eventually there is a splurge of new farmers taking advantage of all your free money until you run out of money. It could maybe work in times of famine where the government introduces price controls or rationing; it does not work in normal times.
For black markets (which is essentially what scalping is) to work, there has to be some shortage of a good that is priced artificially low. It works with concerts because singers can only sing so much but they also don't want to make the concert so unaffordable that only millionaires can go. There are very few situations like that. In most industries you would just increase prices until supply equals demand.
I really doubt you can’t buy the whole harvest of a farmer if you pay for the whole thing. You can probably buy it for less than normal
This makes sense, but I'd contend it's all the more reason for outrage: not only are scalpers doing what they're doing anyways, but they're destroying the (totally legitimate and sympathetic!) reason for "artificially" lowering the price to begin with.
I should note that outrage doesn't seem to land on the people who buy from scalpers, which is...probably correct? Seems easier to say "don't break the contract" to scalpers instead of fans who are just able to pay more.
Onion futures act.
This is the reason that businesses don't try to monopolize the food industry. It's not competition as we just saw from the egg industry. The government gets pushed back from the masses pretty quickly on food related issues.
>This is the reason that businesses don't try to monopolize the food industry. It's not competition as we just saw from the egg industry. The government gets pushed back from the masses pretty quickly on food related issues.
But you provided your own counterexample with eggs?
It's not a simple buy/sell marketplace. There's no recourse for fans who purchase a confirmed ticket, only to find that the seller "doesn't have them" and see the same ticket relisted for higher if the price jumps. Stubhub prioritize these scalper relationships and doesn't meaningfully protect its buyers from getting screwed over.
If reselling is allowed a market is created, pushing up prices. But that extra money doesn't go towards anyone involved in the creation of the product! It goes towards scalpers. Though there's a bit of price discovery value....
Without reselling scalpers have no reason to scoop up the tickets.
So if you prevent reselling... then concertgoers just have to do a lottery or something for the scarce resource and people who aren't interested in the concert have no reason to buy the tickets! Just a better experience for everyone except for the scalpers and I guess Taylor Swift cuz she won't know the price ceiling for tickets.
A lottery is the only fair option. Market pricing is exactly as fair as capitalism in general.
The ultimate customers would certainly pay more than the face price which is what the scalpers pay, yet the scalpers get all the tickets. This is abnormal market behaviour.
What’s normal?
An auction would be the obvious solution, and I guess you could argue it effectively is an auction, just with initial sales that pretend to be a race and are actually sold to speculators who then run the auction.
You are describing rent-seeking behavior: middle men who add no economic value yet inject themselves into transactions.
Yes, this is “normal” in the sense that it is common. It is “normal” in the same way that cancer is “normal”.
No, this is not “normal” in the sense of being behavior the government should just tolerate. It is in the same category of market failures as monopolies and externalities.
So is all demand-based pricing rent-seeking? Like selling gold or a house or any other scarce good for more than you paid?
I think that if you poke at the term "rent-seeking" with the definition of "middle men who add no economic value yet inject themselves into transactions", you'll just end up arguing about what "adding economic value" means.
That said...if you can do that, you'll probably find that some additions of economic value are far more defensible than others, so it shouldn't all be flattened in the manner you're suggesting.
I mean, scalpers add economic value, right?! They allow (wealthier) people who didn't stand in line at the right time to have a chance to purchase a ticket!
Yeah. “Rent-seeking” is just a fancy rhetorical term for “people doing things I don’t like with money”.
Subscriptions are rent-seeking. Loans are rent-seeking. Spending millions in capital to buy a building and renting apartments for thousands? Rent-seeking. Copyright and patents, for sure, unless an AI company is involved in which case copyright is noble and must last a thousand years, because AI companies are rent-seeking.
The outrage is over the apparent collusion between a platform that argues it only facilitates a fan-to-fan marketplace, and a hedge fund run by the platform's CEO that sells a massive volume of resale tickets. This is definitely not on the spirit of competition regardless of it's illegal or not
Yes it's rational market behavior. But it bothers people for such a blatantly worthless middleman to capture all consumer surplus for themselves while providing zero value.
Which is to say, “perfectly efficient market” is not an end-goal in-and-of itself for most people
i see this less as a pricing or free market issue and more of a governance concern. trading against your own consumer base isn't free market.
We've known for years that ticketmaster scams their tickets on StubHub. Concerts selling out instantly, to only see tons of tickets on stub...
I'm sure if they get shut down, they'll just do it again under a different name, but they can't pretend it's a small handful of scalpers when they're the ones doing it themselves.
For StubHub to have insider dealing isn't so surprising, but I am shocked at how brazenly and openly it's occurring. Nothing covert or concealed, just the CEO of a marketplace openly admitting that they run a hedge fund that resells scalped goods on that marketplace while keeping other scalpers off the platform.
no, it gets more layers.. a quick search says "Through its affiliate Colloquy Capital, StubHub helps bankroll other mass ticket scalpers by providing short-term financing based on expected future sales, further inflating the volume of professional resellers on the platform." (I have no direct knowledge of these participants)
welcome to america 2026. where it's not only encouraged but expected that you're lying, cheating, and stealing your way to the top.
2026? As if stubhub/ticketmaster only materialized after trump2?
Ticketmaster sure but back in the day I could get tickets for a song on stubhub. That seems to be a relic of the past and the resale ticket marketplace is barely less than face value.
Scummy behavior, but customers are also tacitly endorsing high prices when they pay $1500 for a Taylor Swift (or name your artist) ticket.
You're not entirely wrong, but the root issue is artists not charging the market clearing price for tickets. If you're selling something worth $1000 for $200, you shouldn't be surprised arbitrageurs pop up to take advantage.
> You're not entirely wrong, but the root issue is artists not charging the market clearing price for tickets.
Because there is value for the artist in maintaining the perception of accessibility.
That's also easy to solve. Allocate discounted tickets by lottery and bind to a name (think airline tickets). If for whatever reason they can't make it, the ticket goes back into the lottery pool. Or maybe if they want the tickets to be transferable, you can put in some nominee ticket holders (eg. max 3 people you can transfer it to).
Those arbitrageurs who extract payment without adding value should not be surprised when people are upset and demand changes.
I understand the arguments against charging the market clearing price, but I do just think it would be very funny for Taylor Swift to sell out a concert charging $10k+ a ticket.
This argument has been made a lot on this site, mainly by people who don’t understand live music.
What is it that they don't understand about live music?