The Future of The Event Ticket Secondary Market - Freedom or Tyranny?
While I sit at my desk buying and selling tickets to major sporting events the world over I often muse about the future of our business. President Bush in his inaugural address earlier this year pointed out that the last four decades have been defined, "by the swiftest advance of freedom ever seen." In Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, and Afghanistan Freedom is on the march and as Condoleeza Rice pointed out yesterday it is only a matter of time before it is on the march in Iran also. In the more civilized west, freedom moves on as the Socialist Democrat party in Germany was just handed a crushing defeat last weekend in their most populous state North Rhine-Westphalia, the people of France may be about to hand Jacques Chirac a humiliating defeat by rejecting the European Union's constitution by popular vote, and President Bush, Prime Minister Blair, and Prime Minister Howard were all re-elected.
How does this relate to tickets and why is this confusing me and making me sit and wonder inconclusively?
In the United States of America, from a free market and legal viewpoint, it seems that freedom is also on the march in the ticket business. The Empire State of New York long one of the most brutal on ticket brokers is reviewing their position and considering regulating the business. The city of Seattle has come around and decided to create a bullpen for ticket sellers where they can buy and sell tickets legally keeping the sellers from having to do it in the shadows and protecting the buyers because they will know where to find their seller for recourse if the tickets are bad. The city of Pittsburgh has also decided to create a bullpen for ticket sellers at Pirates and Steelers games. Many more progressive states started licensing brokers’ years ago giving the states the ability to regulate, take in sales tax revenue and allowing for more consumer protection.
The trend here clearly seems to be towards more freedom, more consumer protection, and more sales tax revenues for the states, and lower prices. Lower prices? Yes, that is what I said. Does it not make sense that the more people are encouraged to take up the activity of ticket brokering, the more ticket brokers there will be, and with more ticket brokers there will be more competition and therefore lower prices? Last year the PGA decided to test my theory and forced eBay to not allow ticket brokers to sell Ryder Cup tickets on their web site. The PGA was successful in forcing eBay to not allow sales of Ryder Cup tickets for a period of several months while the tickets had not yet been printed because as they pointed out to eBay anyone selling them at that time was in violation of the eBay fraud policy, stating that tickets must be delivered within thirty days of the auction end. eBay had become the market for event tickets and there was a pretty brisk market for the Ryder Cup tickets until this happened and at that moment the market for Ryder Cup tickets on eBay evaporated. The result of this was a lack of supply, and brokers from coast to coast reacted by raising prices by 30-40% across the board. Prices for Ryder Cup tickets remained stable at much higher prices for months, and then when the tickets were finally printed and eBay no longer had to succumb to the tyranny of the PGA the market for Ryder Cup tickets on eBay was back and the result was that prices started a slow and steady decline all the way to the week of the event when a lot of the tickets were going for face value and below.
Bruce Springsteen has shown his own form of Tyranny lately by severely restricting the purchase of up close seats at his recent tour. If you buy any of the seats up front you can only pick the tickets up at will call, you have to show photo ID and the credit card you used to make the purchase, then they give you a wristband to wear and walk you to your seats. Sarah Pharr from our office is the biggest Bruce Springsteen fan on the planet so she purchased a seat on the third row for the show in Fairfax, VA. She reported to me that Bruce went as far as to have a list of rules handed to all of the people as they entered the show. When Bruce put out his CD, "The Rising," I was touched by all of the stories about his inspiration for the music and all of the connections to the 9/11 tragedy. I bought the cd, I loved the cd, I went to see him on his tour and thought it was great and I had a lot of respect for the guy. I started worrying about Bruce when he got involved with the Vote for Change tour last year as he was becoming increasingly more vocal against the President and was showing his support for John Kerry. This was my first clue that Bruce had become just another entertainer who had made all of his money and really did not want me to make any money and therefore had decided to join the forces against freedom. Now that he has decided he is so powerful that he can restrict who sees his concerts, when you go to the bathroom, how much you have to drink at his show, and what sort of responses to his songs are appropriate I have lost all respect for him and his form of tyranny.
The FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), http://www.fifa.com/, has decided to crack down on hooliganism at the World Cup in 2006 and also to permanently end the black market for tickets to their event. Now the fact that Europeans are against a free market ideal like ticket scalping is not all that surprising but it is how they are going to do it which I find sinister. The World Cup is putting an RFID Chip from Philips in each of their tickets at a cost of ten eurocents per ticket. These RFID chips will have the passport number of the person who purchased the tickets embedded in them and they will randomly be checking passports at the gates to match them against your ticket. If your passport does not match the one embedded in the ticket you will be refused entrance. The FIFA says that they will allow you to transfer the ownership or change the passport number associated with the ticket but only through their office. In reality I think this is crazy and there is no way they will be checking passports at the gates, nor do I think the FIFA is going to like having to deal with piles of transfer requests, but if you are going to short sell these tickets these are risks you need to consider. The PGA Europe sent out Ryder Cup 2006 applications this week and they ask for a passport number on the application. Could it be the PGA will try this also? I hear that the Winter Olympics in 2006, also in Europe, will possibly use the RFID technology as well. Europeans have never really appreciated freedom because they have never really had it in an American sense of the word, so I guess it is not all that surprising that they would reject the freedom of being able to buy and sell tickets at prices above or below face value.
It seems to me that while Freedom is on the march all across the globe, and the fighters for freedom are winning most of the battles, there are still a small elite few who are fighting harder than ever to crush freedom wherever it may be. President Bush noted in his inaugural that, "it's an odd time," to be betting against freedoms advance. Let's hope that he is right and that those who are against us will fail miserably in their quest to defeat us.
Until tomorrow - Adios!
How does this relate to tickets and why is this confusing me and making me sit and wonder inconclusively?
In the United States of America, from a free market and legal viewpoint, it seems that freedom is also on the march in the ticket business. The Empire State of New York long one of the most brutal on ticket brokers is reviewing their position and considering regulating the business. The city of Seattle has come around and decided to create a bullpen for ticket sellers where they can buy and sell tickets legally keeping the sellers from having to do it in the shadows and protecting the buyers because they will know where to find their seller for recourse if the tickets are bad. The city of Pittsburgh has also decided to create a bullpen for ticket sellers at Pirates and Steelers games. Many more progressive states started licensing brokers’ years ago giving the states the ability to regulate, take in sales tax revenue and allowing for more consumer protection.
The trend here clearly seems to be towards more freedom, more consumer protection, and more sales tax revenues for the states, and lower prices. Lower prices? Yes, that is what I said. Does it not make sense that the more people are encouraged to take up the activity of ticket brokering, the more ticket brokers there will be, and with more ticket brokers there will be more competition and therefore lower prices? Last year the PGA decided to test my theory and forced eBay to not allow ticket brokers to sell Ryder Cup tickets on their web site. The PGA was successful in forcing eBay to not allow sales of Ryder Cup tickets for a period of several months while the tickets had not yet been printed because as they pointed out to eBay anyone selling them at that time was in violation of the eBay fraud policy, stating that tickets must be delivered within thirty days of the auction end. eBay had become the market for event tickets and there was a pretty brisk market for the Ryder Cup tickets until this happened and at that moment the market for Ryder Cup tickets on eBay evaporated. The result of this was a lack of supply, and brokers from coast to coast reacted by raising prices by 30-40% across the board. Prices for Ryder Cup tickets remained stable at much higher prices for months, and then when the tickets were finally printed and eBay no longer had to succumb to the tyranny of the PGA the market for Ryder Cup tickets on eBay was back and the result was that prices started a slow and steady decline all the way to the week of the event when a lot of the tickets were going for face value and below.
Bruce Springsteen has shown his own form of Tyranny lately by severely restricting the purchase of up close seats at his recent tour. If you buy any of the seats up front you can only pick the tickets up at will call, you have to show photo ID and the credit card you used to make the purchase, then they give you a wristband to wear and walk you to your seats. Sarah Pharr from our office is the biggest Bruce Springsteen fan on the planet so she purchased a seat on the third row for the show in Fairfax, VA. She reported to me that Bruce went as far as to have a list of rules handed to all of the people as they entered the show. When Bruce put out his CD, "The Rising," I was touched by all of the stories about his inspiration for the music and all of the connections to the 9/11 tragedy. I bought the cd, I loved the cd, I went to see him on his tour and thought it was great and I had a lot of respect for the guy. I started worrying about Bruce when he got involved with the Vote for Change tour last year as he was becoming increasingly more vocal against the President and was showing his support for John Kerry. This was my first clue that Bruce had become just another entertainer who had made all of his money and really did not want me to make any money and therefore had decided to join the forces against freedom. Now that he has decided he is so powerful that he can restrict who sees his concerts, when you go to the bathroom, how much you have to drink at his show, and what sort of responses to his songs are appropriate I have lost all respect for him and his form of tyranny.
The FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), http://www.fifa.com/, has decided to crack down on hooliganism at the World Cup in 2006 and also to permanently end the black market for tickets to their event. Now the fact that Europeans are against a free market ideal like ticket scalping is not all that surprising but it is how they are going to do it which I find sinister. The World Cup is putting an RFID Chip from Philips in each of their tickets at a cost of ten eurocents per ticket. These RFID chips will have the passport number of the person who purchased the tickets embedded in them and they will randomly be checking passports at the gates to match them against your ticket. If your passport does not match the one embedded in the ticket you will be refused entrance. The FIFA says that they will allow you to transfer the ownership or change the passport number associated with the ticket but only through their office. In reality I think this is crazy and there is no way they will be checking passports at the gates, nor do I think the FIFA is going to like having to deal with piles of transfer requests, but if you are going to short sell these tickets these are risks you need to consider. The PGA Europe sent out Ryder Cup 2006 applications this week and they ask for a passport number on the application. Could it be the PGA will try this also? I hear that the Winter Olympics in 2006, also in Europe, will possibly use the RFID technology as well. Europeans have never really appreciated freedom because they have never really had it in an American sense of the word, so I guess it is not all that surprising that they would reject the freedom of being able to buy and sell tickets at prices above or below face value.
It seems to me that while Freedom is on the march all across the globe, and the fighters for freedom are winning most of the battles, there are still a small elite few who are fighting harder than ever to crush freedom wherever it may be. President Bush noted in his inaugural that, "it's an odd time," to be betting against freedoms advance. Let's hope that he is right and that those who are against us will fail miserably in their quest to defeat us.
Until tomorrow - Adios!
posted by www.alphatickets.com at 9:09 AM
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