Here’s why you didn’t get tickets to your favorite Red Rocks show this year
Chance the Rapper, Carlos Santana, Jethro Tull. Tricia Cleppe watched them all slip through her fingers.
She wasn’t about to let Dave Chappelle do the same.
Since Cleppe moved to Denver last August fromwashington, D.C., she’s been determined to see a show at Red Rocks Amphitheatre without surrendering to the second-hand ticket market’s ransom-like price gouging. But so far, she’d been stonewalled every time she’s tried to buy a ticket from AXS, the venue’s AEG Presents-owned ticketing service, which can sell out within a minute of tickets going on sale to the general public.
Taking no chances, Cleppe signed in to AXS’S customerwaiting room a full hour before Chappelle’s ticketswere set to go on sale at 10 a.m. By 10:01 a.m., the time shewas allowed to select her seats, the showhad sold out.
“It sucks because it’s such a beautiful place,” said Cleppe, 24. “But it feels like you have to pay double to see one of its bigger events.”
The story will sound familiar to anyone who’s ever tried to buy a ticket to one of the massive concerts that come through Red Rocks every summer.
What gives? Why does buying a ticket to Red Rocks feel like
winning the lottery? Like any rabbit hole in the world of ticketbuying, the answer is complicated and frustrating.
Themost obvious factor is demand. While that hour in traffic seems like a slog, fans travel hundreds of miles to catch a show at Red Rocks. That’s understandable: The venue is a certifiably unique place to catch a show, matching breathtaking surroundings with high-caliber artists in a relatively small venue. This summer alone will see the first show Paul Simon has played there in 26 years, venue debuts from Gorillaz and Lauryn Hill, and a one-off show from a Tribe Called Quest, inwhat could be its final Colorado concert ever.
With a capacity of less than 10,000 people, there isn’t a lot of supply for the demand these concerts attract. That’s doubly true when you take into account that fans are often buying two or more tickets at a time. (After all, who goes to a concert alone?) The maximum number of tickets one customer can buy at Red Rocks is typically between four and eight, so that means those 10,000 tickets will sell in many fewer transactions.
Of course, scalpers add to the pinch. Despite an arsenal of technology designed to ferret out automated ticket-buying programs (affectionately called “bots”) and scofflaws who would circumvent ticket-purchase limits, scalping is a persistent problem. Log on to secondary ticket marketplace Stubhub, for example, and you’ll see hundreds of tickets on sale from a show that just sold out minutes prior— and for a hefty price increase.
A Stubhub page for the Gorillaz concert at Red Rocks, for example, listed more than 900 tickets for the show just hours after they went on sale. A pair of frontrow tickets sold for $950 a pop.
Many of these listings are actually just speculation; scalpers don’t own the tickets, but are betting they could get them for less than what they’re offering should a buyer bite. But it’s still frustrating, and particularly so given AXS’S partnership with Stubhub. (It’s also hardly unusual: Live Nation allows fans to resell tickets to one another on Ticketmaster and owns secondary market Ticketsnow.)
The deal, which was inked in 2014, assures AXS that its fans have a safe place to buy and sell tickets on the secondary market. To that end, the company validates the tickets sold on StubHub, which collects a percentage of every ticket sold on the site. For its part, Stubhub pays the city of Denver $250,000 per year, according to online music publication Amplify, and the distinction of AXS’S preferred ticket reseller.
Needless to say, a venue like Red Rocks means big business for resell markets like Stubhub.
“Red Rocks is such an iconic venue. There’s so much scalping activity from all over the world on that place,” said David Brooks, senior correspondent for touring and live entertainment at Billboard and founding editor of Amplify. “It’s gotta be a top-five building ... for scalping activity.”
Don Strasburg, vice president and senior talent buyer at AEG Presents Rockymountains, said the secondhand market is a boon for consumers who need to resell their tickets for legitimate reasons, but concedes scalping is still an obvious prob- lem, albeit only as long as consumers pay them.
“It’s a complicated situation,” he said. “We haven’t quite figured out a betterway to sell tickets.”
Scalpers aside, if you’re buying tickets right when they go on sale to the general public, odds are that many— if not most— of those original 10,000 tickets were bought long before you entered the waiting room. In the age of the presale, which allows select customers to buy tickets before the general public gets a chance, waiting until the GA on-sale date is the equivalent of waiting until the last minute.
Just how many tickets are held for presale depends on the artist, promoter and tour sponsor. Strasburg said he aims to ensure that the amount of tickets available in presales for a given show account for less than half the house total. For Gorillaz’s highly anticipated Sept. 26 Red Rocks show, which sold out within minutes of its GA on-sale time, Strasburg said “under 50 percent” of the tickets were set aside for presale.
But that figure doesn’t always hold true. If a show is particularly popular, a confluence of artist, promoter, sponsor and radio promotions could push a show to the brink of selling out before the general public gets a chance to buy a single ticket.
“Broadly speaking, up to 90 percent of tickets can be sold in these various presales,” said Josh Baron, author of “Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and how the Public Got Scalped” and current head of business development at independent ticket merchant Songkick.
In one such infamously egregious case, 88 percent of the tickets to a 2009 Taylor Swift concert in Nashville, Tenn., were spoken for by the time the GA sale had come around.
“Presales have become part of the modern culture of selling tickets,” Strassburg said. “Generally, with a little effort, most people can get a presale code.”
That last part is important. While they seem sinister, presales are there to help if fans know about them (like scalpers certainly do). While they’ve been co-opted by corporations like Citibank (which launched one for Chris Stapleton’s two-night Red Rocks stand next week) and AT&T (the sponsor for Incubus’ latest tour), presales have traditionally been used by artists to give their dedicated fans an edge in buying a spot at a concert.
For bands like Denver’s Lumineers, whose members are vocal proponents of ticketing reformation, presales are just one of many ways to empower fans and discourage scalpers.
The band has used paperless ticketing to some success, which requires fans to present their IDS and the credit cards they used to purchase tickets to enter a given concert, an approach they first employed at a new year’s Eve show at the Ogden Theatre in 2012. On their recent arena tour, the Lumineers took their heroics a step further, plucking 40 fans from the nosebleeds to put in the pit the day of the show. They then gave those fans’ nosebleed tickets away outside the venue, leaving would-be street scalpers out in the cold.
“For us, it’s about caring about that fan’s experience,” said Lumineers frontman wesley Schultz, who sold out two backto-back Red Rocks shows in 2016. “We’re artists; we’re not an airline. Artists get to make decisions that aren’t always motivated by money.”
“Now isn’t the time where we’re like, ‘Now, we’re really cashing in,’ ” he added. “We’re making music for a living. We already hit the lottery.”