As long as there are fans, you can’t curb scalpers
Wanting to buy tickets to a concert but finding it’s sold out and the only way you can go is by paying a scalper a lot of money stinks. Yasir Naqvi, the Ottawa Centre MPP, attorney general of Ontario and minister for affordable concert tickets, is on it.
Ontario will ban “bots” (software programs that buy in bulk faster than any human can) from buying online tickets, forbid markups of more than 50 per cent and toughen enforcement measures, Naqvi said Monday. Re-sellers also will have to disclose more information about the tickets, probably the original face value, so buyers know how much extra they’re paying.
“Making ticket buying fairer is part of our plan to create jobs, grow our economy and help people in their everyday lives,” the written version of the announcement said.
Scalping was illegal in Ontario until less than two years ago, when the government amended the Ticket Speculation Act to allow it, in the interests of combating outright counterfeit tickets. People would buy scalped tickets and discover they were worthless when they showed up at a venue. But of course the fact this kind of fraud was possible at all indicates how freewheeling the black market was.
“We know that there is a huge market for resold tickets online and that isn’t changing any time soon. We want to make sure Ontario consumers are protected,” said Madeleine Meilleur, Naqvi’s predecessor as attorney general, at the time.
That was also part of the Liberals’ “economic plan to build Ontario up” by protecting Ontarians from being annoyed.
The basic problem is the big gap between the price promoters and acts want to charge for their tickets and what some people are willing to pay for them. As long as that gap exists, someone’s going to try to make a percentage exploiting it. This is capitalism doing what capitalism does: arranging to transfer scarce goods from sellers to buyers at market-clearing prices, abetted by technology.
Promoters have tried ways of helping only the truest fans get the choice tickets, but these are just annoyances to the serious scalper. When this is your business, you’ll join the fan clubs for artists you don’t care about and sign up for special credit cards for the perks of advance sales, hire programmers to keep your bots smarter than the sellers’ counterbots, and buy bulk tickets on spec (taking a chance on losing money) and set up websites to collect buyers’ credit card information in advance (so you can scalp to order).
Ticketmaster, the granddaddy of ticket agencies, even runs its own scalping markets. Other services promise to out-compete the scalpers on your behalf.
We had scalpers before you could buy and sell blocks of tickets online, but now that you don’t have to send people to stand in lines or exchange physical tickets, the practice is turbocharged. A pro can broker tickets throughout North America while living in London, hiring botmakers in Macedonia and route the Internet traffic through India. Ontario forbids bot buying? Yes, the scalpers are terrified.
Ultimately, if a show’s sold out, the seats get filled with people who want to see the act. No matter what, every single one of them paid more than he or she would have liked to have paid, because everyone’s preferred price for anything is free. A lot of them paid more than the promoter was willing to accept. Not one of them paid more than he or she was actually willing to.
The only problem here is a violation of some people’s vague sense of fairness which our government now will try to address by half-regulating a mostly unregulatable global grey market of eager sellers and willing, if grudging, buyers. Again.