[satanic_pope]

Given how frequently they ran out of 65,000 tickets for <enter_any_big_ticket_event> within seconds (which would pop up under resale with > 200% markup minutes later), glad this is out in the open.

Also, Fenway Park is the worst. Had a terrible experience earlier this year while trying to book Pearl Jam tickets. Presale went live at 10:00 AM on February 10th (for shows in Sept) and they ran out of tickets at 10:01 AM, are you kidding me? Suddenly I see spike on StubHub an hour later with ridiculous markups.

Fortunately my Uber driver pointed out and suggested that I wait until day of the event (as fenway park puts up unsold scalper tickets back online at market price). I followed his advice and snagged couple of tickets on day of the event at market price as he suggested.

The whole experience was mind numbing.Can't wait for Amazon tickets to disrupt this space and drive 'em out.

Edit : When I said 65,000 tickets - I'm counting Pre-sale tickets as well including Verified Fan scheme they had going this year.

[nullify88]

> Can't wait for Amazon tickets to disrupt this space and drive 'em out.

I think you'll be waiting a while. TicketMaster shotdown Amazon Tickets in both the UK and US because they didn't want to do business with them.

[dragonwriter]

Good thing no one was abusing monopoly power to the detriment of consumers, otherwise antitrust regulators might have to get involved.

[heywire]

I've noticed sometimes during the rush, the Ticketmaster app will report no seats available, but the website (sometimes after a few refreshes) will have seats, and vice versa. I had to refresh for probably 30 minutes the last time I bought Dave Matthews Band tickets, and ended up with pretty good seats.

[kbenson]

> Given how frequently they ran out of 65,000 tickets for <enter_any_big_ticket_event> within seconds (which would pop up under resale with > 200% markup minutes later), glad this is out in the open.

Well, a lot of that is because more and more tickets are sold during presales (passworded or not, such as Amex presales). Sometimes there's less than 10% of inventory available on the regular sale. Sometimes there's more, but they hold back a few thousand to drop on the market to sell later.

The majority of stuff you see on Stubhub within minutes might have been listed on Stubhub for a day or two, or been primed to be pushed to stubhub at that moment for a day or two, since they were bought previously.

It's not hard to get access to most presales. If you have an Amex, you're already qualified for one of the earliest presales they have on most events. Same for Citi for some venues. Other than that, you can sign up for fan clubs to get passwords, or just search around.

> Presale went live at 10:00 AM on February 10th (for shows in Sept) and they ran out of tickets at 10:01 AM, are you kidding me?

Alternatively to what I said above, sometimes very little is released in a presale. It's a crap shoot, and depends on the tour strategy.

Yes, brokers will buy. Sometimes they over-buy too, and you can get tickets cheaper (this can be fairly common, actually). I'll tell you this, regardless of what this article says, Ticketmaster is always rolling out new mechanisms to make it easier for fans and harder for brokers. Recently they started using new queue systems for some sales, and a new ticket buying interface, as well as much more complicated bot detection heuristics.

Ticketmaster has multiple divisions. The secondary market division (TM+, their new Point of Sale offering) might not necessarily want brokers excluded, but the rest of the company must put a lot of engineering effort into it, given what I've seen. That they don't go seeking out accounts makes sense to me, because there are legitimate reasons to buy a lot of tickets (corporate bonus gifts, a concierge service, etc), and inaccurately targeting one of those will cause a lot of trouble, and maybe even a court case (if I was a concierge service with a few hundred tickets in their system, and they cancelled them all, I would consider a lawsuit because they've had my money for months and been able to capitalize on it, and if the alternative is a crippled business...)

> The whole experience was mind numbing.Can't wait for Amazon tickets to disrupt this space and drive 'em out.

It's a market, with supply and demand. If you think a new entrant will change anything, I'm sorry, but I think it's unlikely. There's already multiple ticketing companies, Ticketmaster is just the largest. AXS ticketing does some large venues as well.