(CBS News) The Price Of Admission: The Battle Over Concert Tickets

https://youtu.be/1dRcD6DPhdE?si=8NchZouUPogLwh8B

 

This is a fantastic and in depth 24 minute episode. Usually anything having to do with ticketing I just say "WRONG, WRONG, WRONG" but this is pretty accurate.

Interviewing a band showing the actual contract and knowing the band splits $10 on that $70 you spent 5 ways, well not really a surprise. That's kinda how running any business works. The margins are usually in the single digits. Except for the glory days of ticket resale, that is.

The most interesting thing to me is to see what the actual brokers are doing because these are closely guarded secrets. I wish I was able to put a team together like that. Instead I had a loose partnership with one and sometimes 2 people as their day jobs allowed. Just commissions on handling their sales would have been an improvement on the McJob when it was steady.

It was all me, all the time, 8-18 hour days 360 or so days a year for years straight, getting up at 6am even when I was going out almost every night. Often still working on bus or venue Wi-Fi with 3 phones. Always with the feeling I never really knew what I was doing or there has to be another way to increase my edge. Eventually I flamed out pretty badly and swore to never go back. Yet if the most impressive number anyone stated was $34,000 in profits in a single month at least I know I still didn't do half bad.

Of course any broker on television is now an industry pariah. That's a big no-no.

Yep, bots are greatly exaggerated. And the main advantage to multi-source browsing isn't breaking limits and getting more tickets to a single show but getting any tickets to multiple shows. If you hit the same show multiple times off the same computer you are asking for trouble. Just finding good rotating residential proxies was a challenge and often at the cost of slowing down internet speed. I rarely used them. Sometimes Ticketmaster would really turn up the heat but then more "real fans" (whatever that means) would get shut out too. That's when I had to use proxies. I don't think I ever paid for more than a few months total from 2015 to 2020.

Which brings me back to what to what I have been telling people for years. The real money in ticket resale is in third party services. As things were really ramping up, a former ticket broker was telling me to watch out for those, it can bankrupt you.

Flame away if you wish, IDGAF, just know my facts are truly more relevant than your feelings or whatever else your bleeding vagina wants to barf out. No laws are required. As with any purchases of consumer goods and services there is always an advantage to being an educated consumer while exercising discipline and restraint. If more consumers thought like me, marked up resale and prices rising higher than inflation would have never been possible.

This was never meant to be a career. I just wanted to go to more concerts. And the dentist. Now I can pretend my silly hobby is a real job and indulge myself around the clock if I wish without the interference of any pesky gainful employment. Not bad for a functional illiterate with a 10th grade education still making $9 an hour at age 40.