[deamanto]

I'd also like to highlight another bad practice by Ticketmaster.

When you purchase a ticket from them and resell it on their marketplace, once someone purchases it, they(Ticketmaster) hold your funds and only give you the money ~7-14 business days after the event is over. They say this is to verify the validity of the ticket.

On the buyer side, you purchase the ticket from the marketplace and it gets added to your account immediately. (I think) You get the barcode some time ~1 week before the actual event begins.

The confusion for me? Ticketmaster owned the ticket and all logic relating to the validity of it. The logic to validate this shouldn't be complex at all. They OWN the ticket. They KNOW it's legitimate because it never left their database. Yet they double dip and hold both buyer and seller funds. Events can be close to a year in the future but the seller won't see that until after that event ends.

[bonestamp2]

There's another good point in here. Why do they hold the ticket until just before the event? I bought tickets to a concert for my wife's favorite band. Then, my wife's work scheduled an event for that same week and she had to leave town. So, what I really wanted was a refund so someone else could buy the tickets. They don't do that of course. So, then I wanted to sell the tickets for face value... but ticketmaster didn't "deliver" the tickets to my account until the day before the event!

I watched for a month leading up to the event as the ticket prices plummeted while the scalpers were desperate to get at least something for their tickets before my ticket was even delivered to me.

As soon as they take my money, they should update the database to show that the ticket is mine. If I want to sell it, I should be able to do that immediately too.

But, from what I've read, that instant resale ability only belongs to their "partners" who resell a lot of tickets, and you need access to their "TradeDesk" tool to do it: https://tradedesk.ticketmaster.com

[Ocha]

Just vote with your pocket and don’t buy tickets from them. I do that - yes I don’t get to go to major concerts but there are still so much more that is not on ticket master. I found a lot of new entertainment and was happy to pay $4 fee instead of whatever TM charges nowadays.

[mike503]

This began a lot more on third party sites like stubhub due to Covid and the massive amount of cancellations; before most places paid out after the sale, and if the buyer wound up having an issue (due to the seller mistake, selling it multiple times, whatever) they would charge the seller and usually assess a penalty.

But when everything in the world was being cancelled I assume they didn't have all the money just sitting around to reverse and it was a ton of thrash to deal with. As someone who had bought tons of tickets and sold some, it was a mess. I had a ton of credit card refunds back, the third party sites had to reverse payments, etc.

Waiting until after the event is just less overhead. Guarantees the transaction happened without a hitch.

There are some POS and broker sites that still pay on transfer, but none of the "primary" secondary market does.

[EGreg]

I’ve never dealt much with TicketMaster, despite them being a monopoly. So my questions here may just be out of naiveté:

1) Why would TicketMaster pay event organizers ahead of time, if the event might be shit and attendees may demand their money back? Rather than having to deal with a lot of chargebacks and making it their own problem with the banks, they might prefer to make sure the event goes off without a hitch and refund people while they still can. Rather than subsidizing the refunds they make the event organizer have to get (and pay for) financing instead, backed by their payout. They might also offer such financing.

2) I get that they hold event organizers hostage by making contracts with the venues for years, that might be an antitrust issue but it’s separate from 1.

3) Why would TicketMaster make scalping easy? Middlemen would just buy up all the tickets and then pump and dump the price, much like early crypto investors in a meme token or altcoin do. So they don’t “deliver” the ticket to you until just before the event, exactly for that reason.

With ChatGPT it’s now easier than ever to impersonate thousands of people at scale, with credit cards and everything. But I will admit, showing up to an event at least once confirms there is a human behind the account. But a first-timer buyer? Shouldn’t be able to resell, no.

[amarant]

Tbf, this does sound like a fairly efficient anti-scalper strategy, so I guess there's at least some upside to this mess.

[cypherpunks01]

It's simply 0% financing for their business. No more complex than that.

[tesrx]

Excellent point. I wonder if Ticketmaster profits by making interest off of holding those funds?

[mixmastamyk]

Wonder no more—yes.

[krger]

>When you purchase a ticket from them and resell it on their marketplace, once someone purchases it, they(Ticketmaster) hold your funds and only give you the money ~7-14 business days after the event is over. They say this is to verify the validity of the ticket.

I imagine it's more about discouraging scalping, regardless of what they may say about it.

[patates]

Maybe to stop people selling the ticket and still going to the event with a pre-printed one? Solving that would also be easy if they have a central verification system (just invalidate the ticket and issue a new one) but not if it is all p2p.

(disclaimer: I'm a complete outsider, last time I bought anything from Ticketmaster was a really long time ago).

[Phemist]

They would need to solve that anyway in case 2 or more friends attempt to get in on the same ticket.

Not at all difficult - simply share screen a third device and display the rotating QR-code through e.g. zoom on individual phones. For additional trickery, try to split the group into joining multiple ticket scanning lines and timing the scan of the ticket to be as close as possible to eachother.

[garaetjjte]

Possibly it's fraud prevention, in case payment for the original ticket was fraudulent and chargeback occurs after the ticket is resold on marketplace?

[LorenPechtel]

That does sound like a very reasonable thing to do. Otherwise you have a threat vector of steal card, buy ticket, sell ticket, pocket the cash, card owner disputes, now Ticketmaster has paid a stolen identity who took the money and ran.

Anything that can be used to monetize stolen cards will tend to be used for the purpose even if it's inefficient.

[babypuncher]

I really, really, really hope Ticketmaster gets broken up. Their shittiness seemingly knows no bounds.

[elcomet]

Because you could just print the ticket, then sell it, and still enter the show with it ?

[mmmlinux]

This is literally what the rolling codes prevent.