If you’ve ever screamed at the computer trying to get tickets to a sold-out concert while a Ticketmaster captcha calls you a “hipster assboal,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman just confirmed that your rage is rational. “Ticketing is a fixed game,” Schneiderman said in a statement accompanying his infuriating report on Big Ticket.
First, those captchas are largely futile: resellers employ captcha-dodging robots, or "bots," that buy thousands of tickets in minutes—one purchased 1,012 tickets to U2’s MSG show last July in 60 seconds. Ticketmaster has revealed that bots can account for 90% of their web traffic, but they only enforce ticket-purchasing limits at the request of the artist, which seldom happens because that would entail canceling thousands of purchases.
“A single broker used 149 different American Express cards to make more than 38,000 purchases totaling over $12 million just from 2013-2015, while other brokers racked up similarly shocking volumes of purchases, sometimes using just a handful of credit cards,” the report states. The report describes bots' stranglehold on ticket sales as "an epidemic."
And if resellers aren’t gouging you, the ticket sellers themselves are. State law allows sellers to only charge fees associated with “special services,” and stipulates that the fees must be “reasonable.”
Yet the AG’s office “found an average surcharge of 21% of the face value of a ticket, which amounts to almost $8 in fees on average.”
This only matters if you’re lucky enough to get a ticket in the first place: many shows hold huge percentages of their tickets for presales to corporate vendors or rich people with fancy credit cards—artists like Kanye West and Fleetwood Mac have held as much as 29% of their tickets for these privileged buyers, while Steely Dan and Coldplay withheld as much as 70%.
"I’ve worked with artists to make ticket prices affordable, only to see those same tickets on sale on the secondary market for much more than face value,” David Taylor, an independent promoter with Empire State Concerts, said in a statement released with the report. “It’s what happens when bots are involved, and consumers are left with the choice of not attending events or paying a lot to see their favorite artists."
Despite the seemingly endless fodder for legal action, the AG’s office only announced two enforcement actions with today’s report: $80,000 and $65,000 settlements with unlicensed ticket resellers.
The report urges the state legislature to draft stricter laws (ha), most specifically in ending a state ban on non-transferrable paperless tickets. From the report:
A solution that most industry participants agree is effective at reducing broker activity is the use of non-transferrable “paperless tickets.” Unlike paper tickets and electronic tickets that are freely transferrable from the buyer to another person, non-transferrable paperless tickets require an event attendee to present the credit card that was used to purchase the ticket. As a result, the initial purchaser typically must be present to use the ticket. State law creates a de facto ban on these paperless tickets, but this rule makes New York an outlier - ours is the only state that bans the practice - and this ban should be repealed.
In his comments, Schneiderman also says, “This investigation is just the beginning of our efforts to create a level playing field in the ticket industry.”
