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Stubhub Revisted

Looks like the stubhub scam is still in force, much to people’s ongoing frustration. This is complemented by a weirdly apologist article that I saw in the Victoria Times Colonist today - Internet Lets Ticket Buyers Jump the Gun.

Typically, the article misses most of the salient points about the questionable dynamics of internet ticket sales, but it does bring to light one interesting development - TickMaster’s response to StubHub has been not to find a way to defeat ticket scalpers and fairly sell tickets at stated prices, but to build their own “secondary market” StubHub clone - TicketsNow. Is it Tickets Now? Or Ticket Snow? Because consumers are getting snowed by the secondary ticket market, and are being sold a story that somehow this is value-added to them:

“It’s totally accepted,” Blasko said of sanctioned scalping, the majority of which exists on Internet sites. “There are a lot of [fans] out there that depend on it and don’t mind paying those premiums.”

In order to meet demand, official sellers are either forced to work with scalpers or run their own secondary websites, at which they legally sell tickets at inflated prices.

Ticketmaster, the world’s largest ticket seller, has re-routed fans wanting AC/DC tickets in Vancouver to the home page for TicketsNow, a secondary market site that Ticketmaster also owns. Tickets there are priced well above the original $99.50 face value. [from VTC]

I don’t get it. If the market will really bear inflated ticket prices, why aren’t tickets just sold at that price to begin with, kneecapping the whole secondary/scalper industry? Or sold in an auction format right from the get go? Re-read the original stubhub post, and then think twice when next you purchase tickets to something.

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