Let me guess what companies you guys are invested in.

The secondary market has always been a big issue for events, especially since musicians, stadium owners, promoters, etc have never felt that they should take all the risk while other people make the $$s.

In the Condo market brokers will sell pieces of the project off in tranches to control the selling price – including “pre-sale” sales only open to a small group of investors types. Generally a condo project will never really be “sold out” – they keep a bunch of units to flip at the maximum possible market price once the project is finished and people are moving in. Thus maximizing profits. The Ticket industry would love to do the same but it is much harder for them to hide who owns and who is selling the blocks of tickets.

I would cheer for StubHub to change this, but I’m sure their fees will grow as their market share grows.

i buy tickets on places like ticketmaster the moment they go on sale. and then i still get charged like $15-20 per ticket in fees for that on top of the actual ticket price. what i’m saying is that the arenas/teams/artists/etc would be able to make more money per ticket, and the consumer could be charged less per ticket, by cutting out the stupid middle man! or at least replacing him with a less-greedy middle man. same goes for the secondary markets. it’s a scam i tell ya!

and techdumpster @14 they should write it in erlang

Also bought some Police tickets recently, they were going for silly prices on some sites, but still available on ticketmaster, I only found this out when I saw a site http://www.tickex.com/ which listed all tickets from both resellers and ticketmaster. It is nice to see someone do something about price comparison. As Mike says the market will police itself.

Yes, it’s true that secondary market auctions will effectively police themselves in terms of cost, but the problem we have with viagogo here in the UK is that the ONLY official way to sell/buy secondhand tickets for the signed-up clubs is through their service.

Some background: the UK football ticket system for the major clubs is very locked down. You need to be a member of the official supporters’ club and you are given a very strict allocation on tickets. Say I have a season ticket and can’t make a match due to holiday or whatever; I’m not allowed to simply hand my ticket to a friend to attend in my place, because they’ll fail the photo ID entry at the stadium. My ONLY option is to try and sell the ticket on viagogo, so I lose out on seller fees and the buyer loses out on buyer fees – viagogo wins because of their monopoly position.

This is what we’re totally against – it’s a lose/lose situation for the fans.

From a different point-of-view, I wonder why viagogo need $50M to set this up? They’re only a dozen or so programmers in a crappy office in west London and have the StubHub code to start from. My cynical side tells me it’s payment to the clubs to allow this monopoly – I’d be interested to know if this isn’t the case!

Secondary ticket marketplaces like StubHub and Viagogo are actually the way teams, musicians etc. should sell tickets. Both use an auction/bartering system that finds the true value.

Sports teams and bands usually play in venues that don’t fit all of their fans. So, somebody is always going to have to pay more than face value to get in. Maybe teams should build bigger stadiums.

If teams, bands and venues sold their ticket directly to fans using an auction/bartering system, like StubHub and Viagogo, it would weed out most secondary price inflation (but never all of it).

It’s true that Stubhub and Viagogo take enormous charges for such a simple marketplace platform. The reason is because mainstream ticket buyers don’t trust barebones marketplaces like Craiglist. The direct buyer-to-seller communication is amateur and creeps them out.

Both StubHub and Viagogo are secondary ticket marketplaces. Secondary tickets are the only tickets they have.

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