Ticketmaster: a word that can evoke fight or flight for most people. Most, if not everyone has experienced some sort of ticketed event, whether a sports game, a festival or a concert. If you are an avid ticket buyer, you know how bad these ticket battles can be, especially on Ticketmaster.
I remember waiting on Ticketmaster for about three hours for Gracie Abrams’ tickets, being one of the first people to get in the queue, and having already got them bought by the resellers. They were going for insane prices, some as high as $2,000, when the face value was about $49-159 dollars. No one should not have to get on the website three hours early for a decent spot in line to buy tickets that are not great seats.
In 2023, tickets for some of the hottest events were resold up to 2000% of their original price, according to Expressvpn. On SeatGeek, the average price has climbed from resale and normal sale from $125 in 2019 to $252 2023, according to Business Insider. For the big name artist tickets can go for even more insane prices.
Obviously they need to make a profit, but over $300 is an outrageous amount of money. Some people do not even make that in a few days. We need a better way of selling tickets because these prices are getting outrageous. Also, people should not have to wait ridiculous amounts of time in the queues to be able to get one ticket.
One thing that I have been thinking about is once you buy a ticket, there should be a limit of how much you can sell it for, and when you can resell it. You should have to wait at least two weeks to resell because that causes the bots to not be able automatically resell the tickets for ridiculous prices. I also think that whatever you bought your ticket for, you should only be able to sell it for the amount it’s worth plus no more than 25% cost increase.
I think people should be able to profit off of tickets, but not make a ton of profit. I think that a ticket for a face value of $40 should not be able to be sold for $500. If you sold it for $51 (which is about 25% more than face value), you are still making money, maybe not a lot, but still an amount more than you paid. I believe that this way is probably a change we would make.
Something else that could happen is making tickets not re-sellable. When you buy the ticket, you have to keep it. However this can become a problem for some people because some people buy tickets in advance, and then have something come up on that day and they have to miss the concert. If you cannot resell tickets, then you wasted your money. But at the same time, your tickets may not even get bought if you resell them.
Another issue is presale codes. They used to just do “luck of the draw” and send it out to a select number of people, for the presale code, causing less traffic. Now, they send out too many presale codes, so it does not even feel like a “presale.” If we were to reduce the amount of codes given, this would make less traffic on the website. Also you should not be able to resell a presale ticket. This will eliminate bots so the people who actually want them get them.
These ideals will be very effective in the future of ticket selling. If we had these rules, we would be able to have an easier time giving regularly priced tickets to regular people.
