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 As you know the sub-category of ticketing is also one of my favorite topics when it comes to concerts. The Business Of Fun podcast is always on rotation and this is an excellent episode with Eric Fuller, who you might remember from the congressional hearings a few years back.  They really go into some of the absurdities on price caps. Also this was being pushed by the IMP group for the District Of Columbia and prior to this episode being recorded, Fuller counts all the shows into next June and only 16% are sold out. 3 of those are a 4 night run by comedian John Mulaney so many of those demand is fully satiated. One constant lie is "Bots are getting all the tickets" and then marking them up for resale. As someone who almost only buys resale tickets this couldn't be further from the truth. From around the 20 minute mark. Says the one thing Democrats and Republicans agree upon is "changing the rules around ticketing because it resounds well with the public. The problem...

The Foo Fighters are my girlfriend 's favorite band and also how we met after I sending her a semi-trolling reply on a dating app where she is looking for other fans telling her I saw them in 1995.    After blowing off The Cult due to the venue change we are looking for the Foo Fighters 9pm Amazon Music livestream at 8:10 on my TV when a friend texts and says "What's this about the Foo Fighters playing a studio in Glendale?" HUH? Look it up, 2 different locations that I can find. One a mile away and the next another mile. I say "Let's just go" and we go. First location kinda dead. 2nd location what looks like entrance on one side, the smaller mostly residential street and see people going in. That's it! But looking for parking realize that's VIP and GA is the other side.    A few people just trickling in and only 6 or so ticketless. I saw 1 get waved in and that really perks my ears up. A security guard is telling us about the different setups at...

A few hours after reading and contemplating an emotional plea by a jam band tour that had a show canceled due to poor tickets to buy in advance whenever possible ... The Cult at the seated Shrine Auditorium got moved to the smaller Shrine Expo Hall. No word on what happens to the people who overpaid for front row. The ticket seller, AXS, a subsidiary of the promoter AEG/Goldenvoice is denying any recourse and responsibility and blaming the promoter.    I am told it's supposed to be a special day for me and this is what I decided to do. My girlfriend agreed to make a rare appearance since she told me she loves The Cult. She doesn't do standing, at least not for 4 sets. I might still go alone. Might pay full price at the window, now a lot more than the cheapest (discounted) tickets would have been if I bought them already.   Whatever the deal is with the promoter booking a way too big venue for a band that's coming thru constantly, they shouldn't shaft the loyal fans s...

  https://www.vulture.com/article/rush-reunion-tour-ticket-sales.html   They are low key encouraging their "fans" to buy "extras." They have a lot more tickets to sell than probably any Rush tour in history now. Don't fall for it.    Secondary and possibly primary prices were already falling even before the dozens of added shows.     And if you bought a $3000 travel package for LA only to find out Omaha got added, you didn't get swindled. You are still getting the show, trinkets and perks you paid for.     Remember, this is a for profit business regardless of any emotional or nostalgic attachment to the product being sold. It always has been even if it took awhile for the acts to catch on and the fans are still in denial.    #tickets 

The Who 2025 round up https://pixeldrain.com/l/pa6SQ88X I am just assuming I will be unable to attend the private show Oct 3rd but if you can ease the way anyhow, let me know. So chasing the possible last show ended up being a futile exercise after all. This is all pretty much a blur now but I will do my best. I am way too tired to proof read this. Lots of grueling travel. Might add more tomorrow  ** Night 1 For Joe Perry Project I stayed near my original seat way up high. There are already 2 other sources for this. I so wanted to see a headline show. Not really all that excited at the thought of more Aerosmith shows especially with Yungblud.  The Who - moved into E section around row 8, might be a little overloaded.  I might some day tell the excruciating saga of my extra ticket. Had 2 but my girlfriend couldn't go. She was already taking time off for Nine Inch Nails.m  For the 2nd night I bought a ticket for $34.50 at the box office after asking around for a few mi...

I know I said last year don't panic, it will be an easy ticket. Then I walked it back a bit hoping to get in for $100 before blowing the doors of all hopes and expectations coming out with a net gain.  The face value fan exchange is a good idea in practice but you were only guaranteed a sale on the lowest tier tickets or GA floor. Anything else had a good chance of sitting there and there was no option to lower the prices. This is the inherent flaw in the system and is really only a courtesy on behalf of the act / TM as they are under no obligation to help you sell your ticket for any price.  For the Foo Fighters shows face value fan exchange $300 red dots were surrounded by $125 discounted blue dots.  But in order to use Ticketmaster to sell your tickets you need a US bank account and a high proportion of tickets were originally sold overseas. There was a lot of confusion over whether tickets would be transferable with transfer only opening up a week before the show. The...

Wow this aged well! But face value fan exchange resale just opened yesterday for the Rose Bowl.  First off they lied about not using dynamic pricing as I am seeing GA Floor at both $252 and 692. At first the $692 sold a few times but now that $252 tix are sporadically popping up they are just sitting there.   (Okay one more edit, looks like the $692 were a VIP package and those elements are either not resellable or all you really get with it is that Very Important feeling that washes over you when you pay $450 more for a ticket) Almost snapped some of the $252 ones up as they are currently trading on the secondary at about $425. But they are non-transferable. And back in the day I was very risk averse to buying tickets that were already expensive. $50 front row for Village People and selling for $100 is where it's at.  And the market might be very well be flooded by Brits who can't make the trip. Except you need an American bank account for TM resale... If they do op...

For those of you irritated I am not doing reposts ... Since Stubhub's IPO is back in the cards, I will post this again    Hiya kids, I don't really have anything to offer today so I will once again muse on my favorite subject, concert tickets and specifically the secondary market. I don't know much about investing but I do know the other subject at hand quite intimately. A lot of people think they know but almost every internet comment I have ever seen on ticket resale has been completely wrong. So if you are considering buying into the Stubhub Initial Public Offering, read on. I really had no idea how such a garbage company was able to claw itself out of the doldrums where Vivid was ruling the post-Covid roost and SeatGeek was rapidly ascendant back to around 40% secondary market share. Turns out, as Dave Wakeman from the excellent Talking Tickets newsletter and The Business Of Fun podcast pointed out, they spent in the neighborhood of $750 million on advertising last year...

  Internet / Reddit / Social media crybabies so amusing, at least until their bleating influences policy. But when you actually know ... But be ready for the downvotes because if you don't validate their feelings you are the bad guy whether you are right or not.  So Paul McCartney's tour recently went on sale and once again broke all previous barriers on ticket prices with nosebleeds even going up into high hundreds with some snapped up only to be relisted even higher. "Why isn't Paul doing anything about this?" the frustrated and entitled hordes howled in unison.  Paul has been using brokers as insurance since at least 1989 when he was selling them $30 tickets to be resold for half that. Now that he wants up to $500 or more for the worst seats, why would he stop anyone from buying them for any reason?  His propensity for bankrupting brokers was well known even before I started flipping tickets on the regular. When I was active I rarely touched McCartney tickets e...

  And this is it for new releases for the week. Will have today's listens up later. Right before I head out to tonight's walking distance event. Still recording a few shows a week. But since I re-opened the anniversary files, when I wake up in the morning and the choice is The Who or Shinedown ... Well I enjoyed the pyro but it doesn't quite have the same effect listening to an audio recording.  I was on my way to Punk Rock BBQ at Harvelle's when I scored free tickets for Shinedown, Bush and Morgan Wade at the Forum off a random person. The secret is kinda easy but I am not going to put it on blast for obvious reasons. So now the choice was leave after Mike Watt and miss Backbiter with Dez Cadena so I can see Morgan Wade who I only previously had seen pictures or stick it out to the end, find something other than free hot dogs to eat and not even worry about Bush who I either walked in or out on 2 previous occasions.   I was already a little irate over missing most o...

  I got thru enough this weekend and only went to a fraction of planned events that I can say there should be a bit more new music Friday. And as a reminder, in most cases this is the first and last time anything is ever posted and I claim no rights so feel free to share on torrent sites, blogs, Facebook etc. If you need share ratio assistance or cred this is a free gift to you. I do sometimes post on Sharemania.us but it's very popcentric. But it's really a reflection of it's user base. We are going to lose electricity for a bit of the day as they are replacing power lines so I might have to go out and get some exercise or something. Working on Episode 12 during the anniversary of the pivotal week of June 19-25 1999 and not sure how much I wanna actually talk about that. That was the week the Ramainz played in LA but I will say at least something. Otherwise not sure why I am plowing forward. The station has less than 10 listeners and I only caught an episode playing like 3...

Even if posts suggest it's my mind that is falling behind. Last night I took a 3:45 hour bus ride to Anaheim. I could have taken Metrolink but $1.75 > $10-15 or whatever. Meanwhile I am watching a price war on Tickpick between an 8 pack and a 4 pack all the way down to $23. Waiting to see how low it can go. Then it resets to $69 and maybe one more price drop before the brokers holding the tickets go to sleep and just let it ride and light 12 tickets on fire. Get there a bit after doors, which is always way too late and still gotta hunt down an espresso shot somewhere in the Riverwalk complex. I hit up people trickling in for about 90 minutes but catch up with a few friends on the way in. No bites but a few said they had extra tickets to the Whisky, which sold out immediately. A few minutes before showtime I see the unmistakable sight of Michael Monroe and his band walking up. Do I ask for photo? Do I tell him Sep 23 2022 was the greatest night of my life? No, I ask "any ext...

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 goi...

    From Kid Rock's sold out hometown show in Detroit opening a brand new arena. So even if he may have popularity and notoriety when you hear people say dismissively "No one is scalping Kid Rock tickets," they really mean no one who knows what they are doing is scalping Kid Rock tickets. I will admit I never knew what I was doing. If I did I would might some day be a billionaire too. And there were so many more to sell. Of course in the end there were 6 shows. Sometimes that's a problem and sometimes it isn't. Not long after I consoled myself for my serious miscalculations with this article and wondered if the author bought any of my tickets. "To understand Kid Rock’s politics, we attempted to go to all six of his shows at Little Caesars Arena " https://www.metrotimes.com/music/to-understand-kid-rocks-politics-we-attempted-to-go-to-all-six-of-his-shows-at-little-caesars-arena-5853633 #tickets

  Of course the CTF and National Association Of Ticket Brokers is going to take a conciliatory approach. Of course they are against BOTS, which are ALREADY ILLEGAL (thanks Obama!) or anything that is also unfair to people with tickets to sell whether professionals or fans who made other plans in the intervening years between date of sale and showtime. I never used bots when I was doing serious volume and I felt they are unfair competition for me and my business. I also feel the same way about penny slicing auto-pricers and still bristle at the hefty extortion payment I paid to Broker Genius to protect my inventory. Thankfully the 2nd year of my contract ran thru most of 2020 (it was a percentage of sales). And any crackdowns on the secondary market will only further solidify LiveNation/Ticketmaster dominance. And course there will never be any industry transparency for primary ticketing. I was always reluctant to use the term monopoly as long as I could get the same tickets from a...

I have been wanting to write about my experiences in ticket resale forever but it will probably be done piecemeal. I have a draft somewhere about my origin moment but maybe I can just go backwards. For awhile at least I was thinking of selling my expertise and all past sales records for $10,000 or so but I am sure that information would be of marginal utility now. Flame away but keep in mind this blog and probably the entire collection, certainly mystery drive, might not exist if otherwise. I always considered the archive my real job with the ticket business as a means of funding it. Q: Is this still a lucrative side hustle or is it getting harder and more saturated? A:  I am no longer really involved but it got a lot harder toward the end. Some people are insisting they are having their best years ever. I did xxxxxxxxxxxx (not really relevant) . Not just "too hard" but all the other associated hassles I got sick of. Still love following the biz and the odd same day flip ...

  This is a rant I typed out after the night 1 of Foo Fighters in LA after looking at not too full pit but only tidying up and posting now. Even since I had an email for assistance in selling an extra tickets locked in at above the current market value. * * * How about instead of playing games with the pit tickets and pricing, just sell the tickets at the same price, get a full pit and happy fans?   There were major ticket scams and games at play with the Foo Fighters shows. To "fight scalping" they made the tickets non-transferable, if you can't go, the only way to get rid of the ticket is to put it back on the face value fan exchange via Ticketmaster. At first for this "sold out" show resale tickets would slowly trickle back out, with the tickets often being platinum priced in the $400 range for anything even slightly decent.  It seemed the cheapest tickets were $125 with a smattering in the furthest reaches priced at $102 and those would also trickle out, usu...

"It's like we are penalized for being fans." That's why I prefer to be a discriminating consumer. A fan is a sucker to be taken advantage of. Loved waching the video and especially reading the comments but she is simply learning the lessons event patrons have been learning for decades, you don't buy any tickets you aren't using yourself unless you are prepared to light them on fire. Or the lessons of anyone who bought anything ever, prices can change. The constant delusion of fans that they should be immune from market forces that govern any other good or service varies from amusing to dangerous. Well, possibly financially disadvantageous to people like me who took the time to learn how the system works and use it my advantage even at risk of missing the show, an education that wasn't free. Such as this person in the comments "I feel like dynamic pricing should be illegal. I really want to sue because it's not fair to pay more." Gawd forbid ...