Well this explains a lot.<p>I recently bought NBA tickets to Game 3 of the Western Conference Finals (Oklahoma City Thunder vs. Golden State Warriors), and I was absolutely pissed off at the whole process.<p>I went on a small Twitter rampage to vent about it, with a picture that shows NO TICKETS available LITERALLY THE SECOND they went "on sale" (10AM Thursday May 19, 2016), and then beside it another screenshot of ALMOST 1,300 TICKETS FOR RESALE at the exact same time.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/vlucas/status/733315798068953089" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/vlucas/status/733315798068953089</a><p>I learned the system was rigged against me the hard way, and it totally sucked. It was painfully obvious that all the tickets were sold out well before the game, and that a whole lot of scalpers were making lots of money on reselling tickets that were not fans, and never had any intention of going to the game in the first place. The kicker is that the system actually seemed <i>designed intentionally for this to happen</i>, screwing the actual fans in the process.
What's wrong with blindly auctioning off all of the tickets?<p>That way more tickets will be sold, the artist can't be accused of being greedy, there won't be much profit in the resale market, and everyone who attends the show will have paid an amount they thought was reasonable during the bidding process.
It feels like the ticketing process in general is broken. There's too much demand for events, making the entire market dysfunctional.<p>Why don't we 1) make tickets non-transferrable (but refundable), 2) start pricing half the tickets as what the person will pay via auction and the other half as a fixed-price lottery? I'm not aware of many other ways to make things fair when demand outstrips supply so much.
A few years ago Louis CK started selling tickets for his shows exclusively from his website. His post announcing the process is worth a read. I bought tickets for that show from him and the process was as simple as he describes it.<p><a href="https://louisck.net/news/im-going-on-the-road" rel="nofollow">https://louisck.net/news/im-going-on-the-road</a>
Good analysis that makes me slightly less upset about the difficulty of gaining entrance into the Western States 100. The WSER event organizers implement this article's primary recommendations: transparency and non-transferability despite the huge supply and demand disparity and market forces driving their automatic entry vs. lottery process: <a href="http://www.wser.org/entry-process/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wser.org/entry-process/</a>
I think this is like asking for 'Right to redressal for hurt feelings'. Simple economic logic dictates that those who pay highest for music/sporting events get privilege to watch that live.<p>These fans seems to be asking for Right to watch live. What if less popular artists/sports teams ask for Right to Audience? I think government should start looking into that also after all there must be lots of mediocre artists/sports persons/chefs etc looking for patrons.
Nontransferable tickets seem terrible, mostly because they screw regular people as much as "devious resellers." Would no longer be possible to gift tickets or recover costs in the case of an unexpected cancellation.<p>I'm more curious why they have to be sold on a FCFS basis rather than an auction or via random selection.