Is This Why We Can’t Have Nice Concerts?

A brief internal monologue followed by some irritated (and probably irritating) thoughts on the resale ticket market.

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Ben receives an email. Subject: “Personalized concert recommendations near you: Muse, Pavement and more.”

"Oh! I like Muse! I just listened to one of their songs. When is the show? October 4. Hmmm. That's a Tuesday. Could be tricky. Where is it? The Wiltern? I don't think I've been there recently. Well, let's just have a look . . ."

He clicks the button. Up pops the ubiquitous health warning.

"Yeah, yeah . . ."

He clicks "OK." Up pops the seating chart with pricing.

He blinks. He stares. He blinks again.

“. . .”

He closes the browser tab.

“Well . . . so much for that.”

I love live entertainment, especially now as the hour grows late. But as much as I like Muse, I don’t like the band that much.

For good or for ill, the main reason I decided to get two Moderna shots last year was that I wanted to go to concerts again. That’s the long and the short of it and, anyway, who wants to live forever? It was a joyous occasion in 2021, seeing X with Los Lobos and the Blasters.

I have no regrets whatsoever. It was a great show.

As it turned out, my worries after that concert were largely unfounded. I’ve been to several shows since then, with several more to come this year. More than a year after getting the vaccine, I’m still alive, more or less well, and still dodging the bug (again, as far as I know).

With a few exceptions, little by little, things have returned to something approximating normal.

“Normal” includes exhorbitant ticket prices, largely in the weird and wonderfully frustrating world of the resale market.

Once upon a time, ticket scalping was illegal but ubiquitous. (I had the odd experience roughly 25 years ago of being approached by a ticket scalper at a Long Beach Symphony Orchestra performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances. Why? I mean . . . why?)

Then, to over-generalize grossly, ticket sellers decided to make peace with the scalpers and design a profitable alliance. Sophisticated scalpers are now “verified resellers” and the ticket merchants get a nice cut. It’s a win-win!

For everyone except the regular concert-goer, anyway.

(Turns out, my complaint is not the least bit new.)

I suppose somebody out there will lay down $2,000 or $4,000 or even vastly more than that for tickets to see Muse at the Wiltern in October. Los Angeles is a great big town full of people with more money than sense. It’s just business. That’s fine. Sort of.

So how does the business work, anyway?

With difficulty, obviously.

Several sites try to pretend to be transparent about how they do business. Seatgeek, for example:

The secondary ticket market is made up exclusively of tickets hoping to be resold after their original purchase from a venue's box office, which is also known as the primary ticket market. Aside from being the primary ticketing platform for a number of leagues and venues, SeatGeek is a marketplace that people can use to sell their tickets on the secondary market. 

Secondary market ticket prices fluctuate far more than primary market ticket prices. Tickets often fall below face value, but if primary market tickets are underpriced or hard to get, secondary market tickets prices can cost more than face value.

The upside is you can almost always use the secondary market to make it to an event long after tickets from the box office have sold out! 

See, they’re doing you a favor. Show sells out? No problem, bruh. Seatgeek (and others) have you covered. Are you going to pay a premium? Obviously. Look, man. That’s the market.

Is it true? To an extent, sure. Of course it is. The law of supply and demand is one law that can never be repealed. Does it suck that people are selling tickets for a Muse show for thousands of dollars? To be sure. But people can pay or decline. It’s a choice, after all.

Mark J. Perry at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute argues that the secondary market exists only because the musicians themselves have fostered a restrictive market.

“As I have written many times before,” Perry writes,

economic logic tells us there are only two conditions that can create a secondary market for concert tickets selling above their list price: 1) the number of concert tickets being offered for sale is too low relative to the number of fans who want to attend the concerts of popular musicians, and/or 2) concert tickets must be under-priced relative to their true market price. And I would suggest that both of those conditions are completely under the control of the artists, and their managers and promoters, in which case we are led ineluctably to this conclusion: musicians and their representatives who are 100% responsible for the conditions that guarantee a secondary market where concert tickets to Adele to Beyonce concert are sold above their face value.

Emphasis in the original. Duh.

Perry contends that this is entirely a function of the market. I’m not so sure about that. I suspect the market is rigged. And by “rigged,” I mean clever people have figured out how to make a lot of money for doing not very much, and it’s 100 percent above board. It is not required to make a lick of sense. But here we are.

By the way, the concerts themselves are fine. Performers are working like crazy. We can have better than nice concerts. It’s just that the ticket business sucks.

P.S. I have a great story for you that I thought was easy but turns out to be really hard. The really hard stories are the best stories. If anything exemplifies why we can’t have nice things, this story is absolutely it. So . . . next week. I hope. Because it is a doozy. And between then and now?

A drink, a book, and a song.

Without question.