Nor is OP if you take their 20% discount into account.
Scalping tickets designed to be heavily discounted for fans, then re-selling them to anyone for profit is scummy even if the price still comes under the non-fan price.
At best you're just denying other fans the chance to get discounts for your own profit.
OP bought one set of season tickets to their favorite baseball team, went to the games they wanted to see, and sold tickets to the games they didn’t want to attend to other fans for less than face value and (presumably) without the outrageous fees that you’d pay at Ticketmaster, et al.
Every casual season ticket holder does this, but most of us don’t systematize it - we just send messages to our group chats, and if nobody wants the tickets for that game then the seats stay empty. There’s absolutely nothing scummy or untoward about OP’s approach.
Perhaps I'm mis-reading the plural here, but how many season tickets do you consider a "set"?
Given OP bragged about seeing "6-7 games for FREE", it implies a lot of profit was made on the rest of the re-sold tickets.
There's a big difference between being a season ticket holder and buying multiple season tickets for the purpose of reselling and subsidising your own ticket.
I see your point. I'm not sure you're objectively wrong. But it feels wrong. :)
Where there is sufficient demand for things to sell out to people who want the product, but are unable to get it because someone has used a bot to scoop them up at superhuman speeds... that doesn't feel exactly like the moral equivalent of other forms of arbitrage.
_Especially_ when the sellers themselves would prefer that not happen. The bands want the tickets to go to the fans at no higher than the price the venue sets. Sony wants more gamers to have PS5s at the price they set.
It feels like the marketplace would function perfectly fine, and the true seller and the final buyer want it to work one way, but third party interlopers are taking advantage of other aspects of the scale and technological basis of our marketplace.
Market makers provide value; scalpers rent seek. I think that's a valid moral distinction.
I can see where you're coming from, but I have pretty bad news, which is that the last line just doesn't match reality, at least not in the United States. It might make sense in theory, but it just isn't true:
> Market makers provide value; scalpers rent seek.
In the United States, event tickets are functionally a monopoly. In practice, Ticketmaster/Live Nation is a rent-seeking market maker which crushes small events and blocks value from being created.
Here's a deep dive on that, just under 20 minutes:
This doesn't mean that scalpers can't also be rent-seekers, but given that scalpers are highly competitive and Ticketmaster is a monopoly, I think the scalpers aren't in a position to seek rent.
This part has a similar flaw:
> someone has used a bot to scoop them up at superhuman speeds... that doesn't feel exactly like the moral equivalent of other forms of arbitrage.
High-speed trading is all about bots and arbitrage. This isn't the first time those two things have been combined. There are corners of New York where they're practically synonymous.
This one has factual issues also:
> The bands want the tickets to go to the fans at no higher than the price the venue sets.
It's only true of _some_ bands. There's evidence (in that deep dive video) that Justin Bieber has probably scalped tickets to his own shows, at scale.
I'm not saying that if Justin Bieber does it, it automatically can't be scummy. That seems like a very very hard argument to make. I'm a musician and I would not want to have that kind of relationship with my fans (if I had any, beyond a few repeat listeners on Spotify).
I'm just saying, there's a lot in this comment which makes intuitive sense but doesn't actually line up with the reality of the situation.
They sell if for the market price, and often times they get burned and sell below face value. If you see concert tickets available through the official venue, you should look at resale prices and you could often get cheaper prices as scalpers misjudged the demand or supply
Scalping is necessary for a lot of events. For instance, a few years back concert sales used to sell a year ahead of time. Who decides they want to go to a concert a year from now? So after a few days they're all sold out to scalpers. Maybe without scalpers they would get sold out by maybe 6 months. But who plans to go to a concert 6 months from now? It's unreasonable. So the alternative is to never get to go to concerts unless you're a fastidious planner.
The other side is even if you want to go to a concert and buy tickets a year ahead of time. What happens if something comes up? You can't resell them. Having the ability to resell your tickets is a huge value to people intending to go to the concert.
You can argue that there should be a better distribution mechanism and I agree, but scalpers are not the problem
>>[Scalpers] are effectively rent seeking parasites that distort the market and make things worst for regular people.>>
I'm trying to understand this sentiment from a totally unsentimental, mechanical view of economics. I've always had a problem with the negative sentiment towards what people refer to as "price gouging" and it strikes me that scalping is similar.
>>if you buy up bulk tickets to flip them for profit that is scummy behavior.>>
For me to relate to this, the "buy up bulk" part would have to be qualified. Does that mean buying so many that the market is cornered - hence forming a monopoly? If that's the case yes - I can ethically map monopolies and anti-competitive behavior to "scummy behavior".
But if, for whatever reason, I have some statistically non-significant amount of tickets - say 10 or 15 for a 50k-100k stadium event - and standing on the sidewalk outside, there is plenty of demand for those tickets at say double the original price, it's not clear to me how that is ethically problematic any more than the buying any other asset that you expect to appreciate.
But maybe what I'm describing does not fit the definition of "scalping"?
You didn't address any of my points as to why they exist. You're just using charged language to describe people working in a system that is kind of shitty for event goers. They're providing a service for people like me that may not want to buy tickets a year ahead of time, but rather keep that optionality to go open closer to the date of the event even if it means a higher price
The system would work fine if there weren’t rent-seeking parasites who offer no service other than taking tickets off of the market that would go to regular people.
I told you the service that they offer, you're just choosing to ignore it. They buy and hold the tickets a year ahead of time and allow me to buy tickets to a concert or show up to the day the date of the show. If they misprice the tickets or get unlucky, they're stuck losing 100% of the amount they paid for it.
I wish artists sold tickets in batches starting a month or two out, but they don't. So this is the system we're stuck with.
Most tickets are "scalped" these days, either by credit card companies, the artist themselves, the venue, etc... A minority of tickets are sold through the normal retail channel these days.
IMO "scalping" is OK and is just selling for what the market will bear. There is demand for something with limited supply (aka scarcity) so prices will go up. I also don't buy that it is unfair to the artist because if their tickets are being "scalped" they could just as easily add more dates to each venue to provide more supply to the market. Some artists do this but many just want to breeze through town in one show.
If tickets were sold for "market price" then the vast majority of people would be priced out of many events because the wealthy are so much wealthier than the average person that they'd simply monopolise a whole lot of entertainment.
Not entirely unlike what has happened to the housing market in cities like London or Vancouver.
If you're okay with huge swathes of the population going without whole sectors of entertainment because "it's a free market" then you're entitled to that opinion. That isn't a society I value.
> If you're okay with huge swathes of the population going without whole sectors of entertainment because "it's a free market" then you're entitled to that opinion. That isn't a society I value.
What I don't think you realize is that rules against scalping help create a mono-culture. Sure huge swathes may be barred from a Bieber concert or whatever is popular today but if that happened the dearth of access to that content will lead to its decline in popularity.
If we let that happen it would open up room in the market for smaller artists and artists at every other level to thrive and build audiences that would otherwise be glued to whatever the corporate record companies are hocking.
A similar way to think about it is that most people would love to have their own yacht but scarcity makes that very difficult. Does everyone deserve a yacht? Instead, with a market, a few super rich get to have a yacht (woopty doo) and the rest of us who want a boat own something smaller and more reasonable.
Yachts aren't inherently scarce, they're just expensive to build and maintain. With more money, more yachts can be built.
With more money, you can't build more Biebers.
And given that music is especially easy to copy with the internet, it doesn't follow that their popularity will decline, it simply means that fans will be limited to only watching via TV or the internet rather than being able to attend concerts.
Yachts aren't scarce? I've never seen one just lying around! Sorry I am missing your point there.
Money is the means to prioritize needs in a world of scarcity. If everyone just had more money it would instantly become worth less (not worthless).
You are conflating the live entertainment market and the recorded entertainment market. People will still want to see live music even if it is not some blockbuster name.
Besides, when the rubber meets the road every big name concert I've been to at a stadium size venue is essentially the same as watching a recording because you just watch the big screen anyways.
If you really want the best live experience you just book the artist for your birthday gala. Do you think we should all be able to do that too?
No, yachts aren't scarce. If there was greater demand for yachts then people could build more yachts and increase supply.
They are expensive, but that is different to scarce.
They especially aren't inherently scarce, which is what I actually said. You missed out the most important word.
There is a natural scarcity to top sports teams or top music artists. Artists can't be cloned and there can only be one champions league final each year.
The scenario you're outlining seems to favor the consumers of art over the creators. Am I understanding you correctly?
It's my opinion that tickets should be sold for as much as the market will handle assuming the additional proceeds go directly to the artist. Any other approach is charity at cost to the artist.
I think that's a very naive perspective, it encourages a romantic view of entertainment where an artist is selling their own trade themselves.
That isn't the reality of the world.
Maximising the profit of the entertainment "artist" is in reality maximising the profits of the rights holder which in many cases is itself a large corporation such as the NFL.
Do I value the consumers of football over the NFL? Heck yes I do!
It's why for instance Germany has their 50%+1 rule, to help make sure that fans rather than corporate owners benefit from the sport.
Even in the case of things like solo artists, I don't want to live in a world where only the super rich can see an artist live, and everyone else has to suck it up because it maximises the money for the artist.
That's nothing something to be proud of.
You say your friends detest resale sites but it sounds like you just became one yourself unless I'm misunderstanding what was happening here.