Ticket resale is the act of reselling tickets for admission to events. Tickets are bought from licensed sellers and are then sold for a price determined by the individual or company in possession of the tickets. Tickets sold through secondary sources may be sold for less or more than their face value depending on demand, which itself tends to vary as the event date approaches. When the supply of tickets for a given event available through authorized ticket sellers is depleted, the event is considered "sold out", generally increasing the market value for any tickets on offer through secondary sellers.
Ticket resale is a form of arbitrage that arises when the amount demanded at the sale price exceeds the amount supplied (that is, when event organizers charge less than the equilibrium prices for the tickets).
In British English, one who resells tickets is often called a tout , while in American English, Canadian English, and Australian English, such a person is often called a scalper , and the practice is called scalping . However, these are colloquial terms used to refer to individuals selling tickets on the street or other nearby public places outside a venue or event. Established companies in the business of reselling tickets refer to themselves as ticket brokers . Registered businesses reselling tickets to popular events are bound by laws, such as local and state laws in the United States, and must operate within those laws to maintain their status as a legitimate business. Like the scalpers of old, however, there are no restrictions on how much ticket prices can be marked up.
Ticket resellers use several different means to secure premium and previously sold-out ticket inventories (often in large quantities) for events such as concerts or sporting events. Established resellers often operate within vast networks of ticket contacts, including season ticket holders, individual ticket resellers and ticket brokers. They make a business out of getting customers hard-to-find and previously sold-out tickets that are no longer available through the official box office; recently, obtaining tickets through special presales has become more common. These presales often use unique codes specific to an artists fan club or venue. The advent of presales has allowed more individuals to participate in reselling tickets outside of a brokers office.
Scalpers also may attempt to use automated software to get hundreds of tickets in the first moments of internet sales, getting an advantage on fans trying to buy the same tickets. Ticketmaster filed a lawsuit against a company that manufactured and sold software designed to get around Ticketmaster's security measures. At present, however, the larger venue- or team-affiliated sellers such as Ticketmaster and Tickets.com now use session-specific, human-eye-readable prompt strategies such as reCAPTCHA in an attempt to prevent such automated reservation of tickets.
Ticket scalpers work outside events, often showing up with unsold tickets from brokers' offices on a consignment basis or showing up with no tickets at all and buying extra tickets from fans at, or below face value with their own money on a speculative basis hoping to resell them at a profit. There are many full-time scalpers who are regulars at particular venues and even have a pool of loyal buyers. These full-time scalpers are often sought out by fans hoping for a last minute deal and are comfortable buying from a familiar face, expecting that they are less likely to be ripped off (i.e. with counterfeit or stolen tickets) than they would be by a stranger. However, there are plenty of scam artists that sometimes follow a concert tour from city to city selling fake tickets to unsuspecting buyers for whatever they can get. Another common practice is that scalpers would sell tickets that have already been scanned at the venue gate since entry is typically allowed only when a ticket is scanned for the first time. Since the tickets were authentic, buyers would have no way of telling if a ticket had been used or not.
Often, scalpers will wait for a specific time to begin selling the tickets, to maximize the profits associated with supply and demand. When scalpers wait until the final days before an event to resell tickets, it is sometimes called a scalp seeding .
Ticket brokers operate out of offices, and use the internet and phone call centers to conduct their business. They are different from scalpers in that they offer a consumer a storefront to return to if there is any problem with their transaction. The majority of transactions that occur are via credit card over the phone or internet. Some brokers host their own websites and interact directly with customers. These brokers are often able to offer additional services such as hotel accommodation and airfare to events. Other brokers partner with online providers that run independent e-commerce sites. These sites act as portals that allow users to purchase tickets from a large network of brokers. They also serve to validate the identity of individual brokers and provide additional service guarantees about the authenticity of tickets purchased through their networks.
A notable recent example of re-selling occurred at the 2004 Glastonbury Festival. Tickets, initially offered for sale online, were sold out within the first few hours of availability; however, afterwards, large numbers of tickets started appearing on eBay and other online marketplaces. Not only professional ticket resellers were involved; many ordinary concert-goers had, apparently, purchased twice the number of tickets they required then sold the unused tickets at double the original price, thus effectively getting their own tickets for free and further clouding the already fine line between ticket reseller and concert-goer.
Although it was a practice in use mostly in the 1980s most often for concerts more than other events, some ticket brokers offer tickets even before the tickets are officially available for sale. In such scenarios, those ticket resellers are actually selling forward contracts of those tickets. One example is a company called TicketReserve, which is making money by selling "options" on future sporting events. This is often possible if the reseller is a season ticket holder. Season ticket holders generally receive the same exact seat locations year after year thus they can enter a contract to deliver on tickets that they own the rights to, even if those tickets have not even been printed or sent to the original ticket holder. This presale practice has fallen out of favor as ticket buyers are now accustomed to viewing online available inventory on broker sites and receiving their purchases the next day via overnight delivery.
Another company, Yoonew, provides a market by which sports ticket derivatives can be traded between users.
Online ticket brokering is the resale of tickets through a web-based ticket brokering service. Prices on ticket brokering websites are determined by demand, availability, and the ticket reseller. Tickets sold through an online ticket brokering service may or may not be authorized by the official seller. Generally, the majority of trading on ticket brokering websites concerns itself with tickets to live entertainment events whereby the primary officially licensed seller's supply has been exhausted and the event has been declared "sold-out". This "sold-out" status increases the ticket's potential market value. Critics of the industry compare the resale of tickets online to ‘ticket touting’, ‘scalping’ or a variety of other terms for the unofficial sale of tickets directly outside the venue of an event.
The late 1990s and early 2000s saw the emergence of online ticket brokering as a lucrative business. Corporate ticket reselling firm Ticketmaster developed a strong online presence, dominating the online market. But by 2006, Ticketmaster's stranglehold on the industry loosened with the emergence of other online ticket brokering companies such as Vivid Seats and StubHub. In the same time period, online ticket brokers like Coast to Coast Tickets proved their legitimacy as a business by being noted in Inc. Magazine's Fastest-Growing Companies list 3 years in a row, and broker Ace Ticket was announced as the official ticket reseller of the Boston Red Sox by the MLB team itself.
Securities analyst Joe Bonner, who tracks Ticketmaster's parent company New York-based IAC/InterActiveCorp, told USA Today: "You have to look at the secondary market as something that is a real threat to Ticketmaster. They missed the boat. StubHub has been around a few years now already. They weren't as proactive as they probably should have been." Ticketmaster launched fan to fan secondary ticket reselling site TicketExchange in November 2005. Ticketmaster acquired former rivals GetMeIn and TicketsNow, whilst eBay bought StubHub.
Eric Baker, founder and CEO of Viagogo.com, a European ticket resale website, has described the loosening of Ticketmaster's grip on the market as "the equivalent in the ticketing industry of the fall of the Roman Empire".
By 2008, Internet ticket fraud had emerged as global problem, when fake ticket websites defrauded millions of dollars from sports fans by selling Beijing Olympics tickets which they had no intention of delivering.
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