Louis C.K. sees ticket scalping drop over 96% by selling tickets himself

This is of course interesting and will lead to inevitable comments about disruption being needed in event ticketing.<p>Let me save you the trouble as this has been rehashed many times already: the problem here is Ticketmaster's exclusives on venues and the entertainment's willingness to let Ticketmaster be the "sacrificial anode" and focus of ire from both audiences and performers.<p>There was a deal done some years ago--I forget the name--whereby performers would get 90% of ticket sales.<p>The way around that is not to increase ticket prices but to add "fees". Online transaction fees, mail fees, processing fees, booking fees, you name it. The fees in some cases are approaching the ticket price. Ticketmaster does this, splitting the proceeds with promoters and venues while the artists get a 90% cut of an ever smaller part of the pie.<p>Ticketmaster has multi-year exclusive deals with venues such that none can really afford the attractive cuts they get to "go it alone".<p>IMHO this situation has reached the point of requiring government action as this is now an antritrust issue (the ticketing market basically cannot function now).<p>Until that happens any ticketing disruption is doomed.

<i>For his shows, C.K. saw scalping rates as high as 25%, driving up the price of his shows for people who wanted to attend, by those who didn’t.</i><p>The only people driving up the price of the shows are people who want to attend. How could it be otherwise? People who <i>don't</i> want to go to the show certainly don't raise prices. If scalpers can profit, it means you aren't charging market price. Policies like the one described in the OP simply shoot the messenger.<p>If the market price is too high for some fans, have a lottery with an aftermarket. Once they see the market price, low-income lottery winners can decide whether they'd rather attend the show or sell the tickets to pay the rent.<p>It's not like these issues haven't been studied before. Do a few web searches, or consult an economist. If you don't accept that your naive economic intuition is wrong, you're going to make stupid decisions that often exacerbate the very problems you're trying to solve. (I'm looking at you, Burning Man.)

It seems as though the important part here wasn't so much that he sold them himself as it was that he added the following clause:<p><i>"You’ll see that if you try to sell the ticket anywhere for anything above the original price, we have the right to cancel your ticket (and refund your money). This is something I intend to enforce."</i><p>This is something that any middleman could do, too... but the incentives simply aren't there for them to prevent scalping. Especially as Ticketmaster has its own resale site, TicketExchange.

Scalping always seemed like a mismatch between the ticket price incentives and the venues incentives. Venues like to sell out to increase concession sales / parking etc, but 'talent' is better off picking a price that fills, most but not all seats and maximizes their take. I suspect they also increase their cut by selling tickets early and sitting on a few weeks/months worth of interest.

Seems like a fair way to do it (while still extracting lots value), would be to a sort of dutch type auction. E.g. theater seats 1000, so you take bids for the max people are willing to pay.<p>Then, once that closes out, you take enough people to fill, say, the first 5 rows off the top of the list, and charge them whatever the <i>lowest</i> winning bid is of the people in that group. Repeat for each tier going back until the venue is sold out.<p>This actually tackles the inefficiencies at both ends - people willing to splurge on great seats get them, but if a show is not high in demand, you might still get people who kind of want to go to pay, say, $5 for the nosebleeds.

What happens if someone does sell one of these tickets for over face? Will it get cancelled, the scalper refunded (in addition to the sale value), then the person who bought it gets screwed?

I love that he's shaking things up. However, he needs to find a better partner to work with on the technology side of things. I tried to purchase tickets for one of the shows listed as available, and it then told me it was actually sold out. Another show let me get further, but then told me my session had already expired (less than 1 min later). Finally, I was able to select ticket options and no 2 adjacent seats were available. It was a lot of effort to discover what they could have told me on the show listing page, and I don't want to spend all the time it would take to check all the other shows.

Isn't a ban on scalping a violation of the First Sale Doctrine?

Sounds to me like:<p>1) Louis CK isn't big enough for scalpers to care about going through a non-traditional method of obtaining tickets.<p>2) People that would turn to scalping to recoup their expense when they can't go are just going back to Louis CK for a refund.<p>Personally, it sounds like offering a full refund also comes with the possibility that scalpers will purchase the tickets because they can easily flip them back for a refund (an $0 loss sans time spent) if they can't sell them for a profit. I admit that I know nothing about the 'event ticket scene' so I may be missing something.

"You’ll see that if you try to sell the ticket anywhere for anything above the original price, we have the right to cancel your ticket (and refund your money). This is something I intend to enforce."<p>How? He doesn't claim that he will check id's for all sold tickets (he says he might) and he may not be on strong legal footing to take a chance and deny entrance to someone who shows up with a ticket that they purchased.<p>Using stubhub as an example I'm wondering what the connection is legally between a representative from louisck seeing a particular seat is for sale on stubhub and then cancelling the ticket making the assumption of course that the person buying the ticket posted it there (and it's not a typo or other error or even some kind of "denial of seat" attack against the true purchaser).<p>"Tickets may not be resold for any amount above face value."<p>How is that going to be enforced? What is the cross check between a particular seat and proof that a ticket was sold for a higher amount?<p>Edit: Also what happens if you want to buy a ticket as a gift for someone? How can it be proven that a ticket was not a gift and that it was resold at a price higher than face value?

I've read this entire thread with great enthusiasm, and I am about to make a comment that will probably be scoffed at by the majority of you. However, where does ethics and morality factor into the good/bad of ticket scalping? If it was NEVER the artist's intention to have their tickets resold, and the scalper does it anyway, then regardless of who benefits or who doesn't, is it still ethical? And if not, should it be practiced?

Why not just sell the tickets via Dutch multi-item auction with bidding. If auction ends sufficiently close to the event scalpers can't get much profit from rich fans because they don't have much time to find buyers and price at what they bought tickets is closer to the market value. Also scalpers coul only sell for profit only to people who didn't attend the auction or decided to pay more then they declared during auction.

The entertainment industry an ticket scalpers have a very healthy symbiotic relationship. Industry gets to sell tickets at fan-friendly prices and rich people get to go to the shows they want to. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. And I have no problem with this experiment.

Couldn't someone start an alternative ticketing method using this as a model? Proactively squash scalping, select alternative venues, and only sign artists who have big email/twitter/facebook fan bases.<p>This way, you can avoid the big chicken/egg initial distribution problem.

This all makes me wonder: why don't we have scalpers for popular plane flights?

Did anyone else find the whole "left and right arrow keys to browse articles" on this site really annoying? I accidentally hit them when pressing up and down to read the article itself.

Ticketmaster IS the scalper. Ticketmaster is the party listing the tickets on Stubhub.<p>The whole system is indeed a mess. Legislation may be the only way to get things unstuck.

Louis must have spent an absolute mint on Paypal fees...

How are they planning to police scalping?

Sounds like ticketing is ripe for re-invention, how about electronic tickets via smart phone?